Schoology. Comparison Paper

Transcription

1 Comparison Paper 1

2 Table of contents Introduction... 3 User interface... 4 Ease of use... 5 Features... 6 Cost... 7 Summary

3 Introduction NEO is a simple, powerful, cloud-hosted LMS for use by individual teachers, schools, districts, and universities. It is a freemium product, with a rich set of features in its free plan and additional power features in its low-cost premium plans. is a cloud-hosted LMS. It provides a free Basic version for individual teachers, and a for-fee Enterprise version for schools and districts. NEO School portal 3

4 User interface The NEO interface is a modern, responsive design that looks sharp and automatically adjusts based on the type of device. It provides attractive tile-based dashboards for students, teachers and administrators, a graphical class catalog, as well as simple pop-out navigation. Many features can be enabled or disabled to suit young children through to college students. It provides rich content authoring as well as a visually attractive way to create and organize lesson material. The interface is nice, just not quite as graphical as the NEO interface. For example, there are no tile-based dashboards, no graphical class catalog, and no customizable portal. The UI is not responsive, so you have to download their mobile app to use their site from a mobile device, and their mobile apps only provide a subset of their site s functionality. NEO Student dashboard 4

5 Ease of use NEO is very intuitive and easy to use. In addition, it includes an online help center, with videos, getting started guides, and searchable help content. NEO also has a rapid response support forum where staff members typically respond to questions within minutes during business hours. is fairly easy to use and understand, and includes online help and technical support. NEO Help center 5

6 Features NEO provides the range of functionality you d expect in a modern LMS, such as support for classes (instructor led, blended, and self-paced), eleven kinds of assignments, full-featured gradebook, question banks, class templates, rubrics, content authoring, beautiful lesson layouts, gamification, rules engine, curricula and proficiencies (including US common core and Next Generation Science standards), chat rooms, blogs, wikis, a customizable portal, e-portfolios, and more. NEO also supports many important industry standards such as SCORM, Common Cartridge Format, LTI, QTI and LDAP. We also integrate with many systems such as Google Apps, Google Docs, Google Drive, and TurnItIn. And for those that wish to sell classes, NEO includes integrated e-commerce functionality. A complete list of the features in the free and premium NEO plans is here: provides a similar feature set, with the main difference being that the features are not as visually attractive, and are a little harder to configure and use. In addition, here is a list of the features that NEO provides that does not: beautiful customizable portal graphical dashboards for students, teachers, admins, and parents graphical class catalog with categories, cross-listings, and more curriculum coverage analysis powerful content synchronization e-commerce integration if you wish to sell classes chat rooms and click-to-chat instant messaging comprehensive set of built-in reports 6

7 support for self-paced classes completion certificates and prerequisite certificates e-portfolios customizable welcome pages built-in student help desk optional integration with your own server ability to import RSS feeds into news feeds support for 20+ languages automatic language translation for messages and forums gamification rules engine drip content GoToMeeting integration learning paths NEO Class catalog 7

8 Cost NEO has a free plan and costs about $5 per student per year for its Small school plan and $6 per student per year for its Enterprise plan. There are no setup fees, cancellation fees, storage fees, bandwidth fees, support fees, or other hidden costs. has a free plan for individual teachers, and a for-fee Enterprise plan for schools and districts. There is no free version that includes administration features that are generally required when using an LMS for your entire school. We have heard anecdotally that the Enterprise plan costs about $10 per student per year, with a $1000+ setup fee and a required minimum of 500 student accounts. NEO Class page 8

9 Summary NEO is a more attractive, easier-to-use LMS than Schoolgy, at a lower cost for both small and large schools/universities. Schools that don t need LMS power features can choose the NEO free plan, which is beautiful, easy-to-use, and includes the core functionality of a modern LMS. Note that does not provide a free plan for entire schools. Schools that want LMS power features can upgrade from the NEO free plan to a NEO premium plan at any time, which includes a similar set of features to at a significantly lower price point. This paper presented a comparison of the most important features of NEO and. If you require additional information on NEO, please visit our website at or contact us at sales@neolms.com. 9