Students and teachers were greeted with Google Classroom at the start of the school year as the school district transitioned away from previous learning platform Schoology.
The San Ramon Valley Unified School District only commits to three year contracts with Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Schoology. Once the district’s contract with Schoology ended after last school year, the district decided to switch back to Google Classroom, Principal Demetrius Ball said during a press conference with The Californian.
“When it came time to talk about the contract, they [Schoology] were not offering the services that we needed, so we had to look for another learning management system,” Ball said.
In an email sent to students and families on April 30, district officials indicated that Google Classroom is “intuitive” and “user-friendly” while being cheaper and more directly integrated with the systems schools use than Schoology.
Google Classroom is included with the Google Suite access the district already pays for, making it much cheaper than Schoology, Ball said. An email sent to families on Sept. 6 indicated the district needed to cut at least $16.5 million from the 2025-26 budget.
With such large budget cuts imminent, cost played a large role in the switch to Google Classroom. Though the decision seems to makes financial sense, students and teachers are mostly unhappy with the change.
In a survey emailed to all Cal High students, 167 of the 240 who responded, or 69.6%, indicated they preferred Schoology compared to Google Classroom. Most who responded (227 of 240 – 94.6%) said they liked Schoology because it was easier to check grades.
Some students surveyed indicated that they can’t find their grades on Google Classroom at all. This is not surprising as grades for each class are labeled under “View your Work” instead of a clearer label such as “Grades.”
“Where can you even see the grades on Google Classroom?” senior Ved Joshi said. “I don’t even know. I can’t see the percentages and everything. It’s not usable at all.”
A majority of students (158 of 240 – 65.8%) surveyed also indicated they liked having everything on one platform instead of what’s happening now, where some teachers are using Google Classroom and Infinite Campus, a platform mostly used in the past for teachers to take attendance and post progress report, quarter and final grades.
But now, some teachers are taking different approaches to using Google Classroom and Infinite Campus, leaving students to navigate between the two platforms.
“There isn’t a set standard so obviously [you’re] jumping between both those platforms,” junior Sushrut Pola said. “I’ve seen people not submit stuff on time, just because they didn’t realize that it’s on Infinite Campus but not Google Classroom and vice versa.”
Some of the students don’t like either Schoology or Google Classroom, but still prefer Schoology.
“[Schoology is the] lesser of the two evils,” Joshi said. “Schoology is like the bare minimum. I thought that was the low. I didn’t know we could go lower, but here we are.”
In a similar survey The Californian emailed to teachers, 21 of the 33 who responded, or 63.6%, said they prefer Schoology over Google Classroom. A majority (17 of 33 respondents, or 51.5%) indicated they liked Schoology for its “better organization.”
“In Schoology the categories were separated, and you could see easily, this is this, and this is this” computer science teacher Rae Anne Crandall said. “That’s not really happening [in Google Classroom].”
Interestingly, 38 of 240 (16.7%) students and 13 of 33 (39.4%) of teachers surveyed liked nothing about Google Classroom compared to the 7 of 240 (2.9%) of students and 5 of 33 (15.7%) of teachers who liked nothing about Schoology. In fact, the most common response to the features teachers liked about Google Classroom was “None.”
Some still do find Google Classroom beneficial for their classes. Economics teacher Stephen Farwell said its integration with Google Docs has streamlined his grading process.
“I think that Google Classroom is intuitive,” Farwell said. “I’m not in love with Google Classroom, but it has some things that made my life easier.”
Other teachers indicated on the survey that they like its appealing aesthetics compared to Schoology, which “looked like Facebook from 2006,” statistics teacher Bob Allen said.
Before this year, Google Classroom was previously used by students and teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The district switched to Google Classroom for the 2020-21 school year after its contract with School Loop ended.
Though it was chosen by the district this year, Google Classroom wasn’t even considered back then as anything more than a temporary fix because of its lack of functionality, Allen said.
“It was really easy to literally flip a switch and turn on Google Classroom,” Allen said.
Since then, Google Classroom’s public change logs indicate that a variety of essential features have been added that make it a viable solution now. These range from grading rubrics and grading scales to connectivity between posts in multiple classes.
These changes were essential reasons why Google Classroom was considered this year as a replacement to Schoology.
Despite these additions, some teachers feel that Google Classroom is still not refined enough to be a LMS.
“Everything in Google Classroom is just stripped down to the barest of bones,” Crandall said.
She also mentioned that there are many features Google Classroom doesn’t have and every counterargument is that there’s a workaround that is usually labor intensive.
The process to choose Google Classroom this year wasn’t orthodox either. In past years, the district would organize a group of teachers and district officials to test and analyze different LMS to find the one that worked best for all K-12 teachers in the district.
Allen was part of the committee four years ago that ultimately selected Schoology. He said that the committee worked for more than a year testing early accesses given by systems such as Canvas, Schoology, and others to make a decision by majority vote. But the same process didn’t happen this year.
“There were surveys asked of teachers, but there wasn’t a committee like we had when we made the initial selection for Schoology,” Allen said.
The staff survey Allen mentioned was sent lat spring and had more than 800 responses, according to the district email sent on April 30.
“The results were telling: 76.8% of staff rated Google Classroom as effective for deep learning and innovation, compared to 50.2% for Schoology,” Kelly Hilton, director of technology at the district, wrote in an email.
Crandall believes the staff survey didn’t produce accurate results. She said that teachers were asked to review the effectiveness of products they had never used.
“It was going to produce bad data,” Crandall said. “I feel like this decision didn’t have much to do with people not liking Schoology, but had a lot to do with saving money.”
In two emails to Hilton, it was asked how much money the district saved by switching to Google Classroom. The Californian did not receive a response to that question in either email.
The district has yet to see how everyone will adapt to this new system, but Google Classroom will be used through at least this year.
