Free the Ning. Or discount if for educators.

Yesterday I was excited to hear the new Ning report on what their new pay structure would look like. Now that I write this, it seemed like a lot of people were excited to find out, I bet they got a lot of traffic yesterday. Anyway, I was pleased to read that some version of Ning would be provided for free to educators. My initial reaction was positive.

Ning Planning to Remain Free for Teachers - http://nyti.ms/cPiI7Yless than a minute ago via TimesPeople

Jason Symes
jmsymes

You can see from this tweet, that I was initially excited. Just look at my face for proof. After the fact though, I was a little more skeptical.

The Ning that seems like it will be offered for free is the bare bones minimal option, which is not the same as what many of us have become accustomed to since whenever you started using Ning. Problems for me with the free version are the 150 members, no grouping, no interaction with social media. That is the direction I wanted to go with Ning, and why I and my students liked it so much. You can see the side by side comparison here. As I looked at the different levels I can see that the version I would be interested in and would best meed my needs is going to cost me $20/month, or $200/year. That's not cheap. I would really need to have my act together to go in that direction. It also seems like for education the cost is going to be significant enough to discourage many from trying it out. That's too bad.

My only hope is that when we see the effect on educators the $200 dollar option can be brought down to something that is closer to my budget ability. I'm hopeful, but not holding my breath.