GoingOn Unveils Next-Gen Social Platform for Academic Life

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 18, 2011) - GoingOn Networks, Inc. today unveiled a new release of its Academic Engagement Network, an innovative social platform designed to transform the way that students and faculty connect with the people, resources and activities that can help them succeed and enhance their academic life experience. GoingOn's new release introduces the GO Virtual Commons, advanced Facebook-like SmartStream technology, as well as enhanced academic identity and portfolio features. With these enhancements, colleges and universities now have the tools they need to implement a highly flexible, private academic social network that integrates seamlessly with their LMS and SIS systems.

"To engage today's students and faculty, schools need to provide more effective tools for them to connect and share resources outside the confines of their courses -- share ideas, ask questions, create study groups and discover all the resources that their school has to offer," said Jon Corshen, CEO of GoingOn Networks. "It is clear that legacy portals and course-centric LMSs alone are not sufficient to meet this goal. After years of focusing on bringing courses online, colleges and universities need to invest an equal amount of energy in understanding how to bring the broader academic life experience online."

Launched in 2009 as a social classroom platform at the University of Pennsylvania, and currently serving more than twenty-five institutions, GoingOn has evolved to become the social platform for academic life. The platform, GoingOn's Academic Engagement Network, provides a single view into all that is "going on" across campus for students and faculty to connect and collaborate through an integrated network that provides:

• GO Online Communities, where users can easily create and participate in dynamic online communities, such as social classrooms, student study groups and faculty committees.
• GO Campus Channel, a fast, easy way to publish any type of content to individuals, groups and communities on the network, and to aggregate feeds from back-end portal, LMS and SIS systems.
• GO Virtual Commons, where users can access relevant activity and content streams via their Personal User Commons.
• GO Identity & Network, where students can cultivate their academic profiles, including their portfolios, connections and networks separate from their personal social networks.

With the addition of SmartStream Architecture, institutions can now extend or replace the legacy portals and microsites that are becoming increasingly ineffective at managing the distribution of information and resources across a highly disparate campus environment. Instead, GoingOn simplifies communication and surfaces resources, knowledge and content that would otherwise be trapped in silos. With GoingOn's new CampusChannel any qualified user can easily publish any type of content into the network and route it to specific communities of users or to individuals, based on their profile, interests or area of study.

Advancements in the Virtual Commons now provide users with a personalized view of everything going on across their communities, connections and activity streams. Users can subscribe to people, communities or specific channels. As users participate in the network, it gets smarter, allowing it to recommend people, activities and communities that a student or faculty member might benefit from -- whether it is a study group, an upcoming guest lecture or a new organization being formed on campus.

"The Academic Engagement Network, particularly with these enhancements, supports a richer, more complete student experience, promoting greater participation in academic life. In turn, we are finding GoingOn promotes better learning outcomes, increased retention and an overall greater school affinity," continued Corshen.

GoingOn's platform is designed with an open integration framework, allowing colleges and universities to extend the capabilities of their existing learning management systems, student information systems and portals, in one secure, on-demand and privately branded single sign-on solution. Additionally, the new release delivers a rich new suite of adapters based on the latest open standards, making it simple for schools to provide a unified view into everything going on across their virtual campus. Deployment is flexible and can be customized from a single course to an entire campus.

"At the core of our new SmartStream architecture is the ability to generate intelligent data streams from any type of content or activity," adds Taneli Otala, GoingOn's Chief Technology Officer. "We have brought together twelve of today's most modern open source technologies to provide a platform that is scalable, secure and intelligent. Moving forward our focus will be on mining the data in the stream in order to make smarter recommendations, monitor engagement and create a true knowledge network."

To learn more about GoingOn or its Academic Engagement Network, visit www.GoingOn.com.

About GoingOn Networks, Inc.
GoingOn is an innovative academic social networking platform that enables students, faculty and administrators to more effectively connect, collaborate and learn. GoingOn offers the first fully integrated platform for higher education that enables institutions to build an internal academic network where students and faculty can more easily share resources, create online communities and curate their academic connections, while keeping them separate from their personal social networks. The GoingOn platform combines a powerful community-building environment with integrated academic networking features and a modern stream-based architecture that allows any type of information, activity or event to be easily published to communities, user groups or to a user's personalized Virtual Commons. Delivered as an on-demand solution leveraging open source foundations and incorporating leading-edge social web technologies, the GoingOn platform can easily be integrated into existing LMS and SISs and deployed as a single community or an institution-wide network. For more information, please visit www.GoingOn.com.