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Welcome our newest social features

Welcome back to WeSchool’s Product Update corner, where we share the ins and out’s of our platform advancements. As of the 15th of June, WeSchool users can add emojis, react to posts using emotions and mention peers!

We conducted some in-house research and found out that consuming content passively (like reading without interacting or responding to information) leads to lower course completion rates and engagement. On the other side, social interactions and collaboration increase participation, and as a result, have a knock-on effect on completion rates and actual knowledge transfer.

Priding ourselves on up to 81% completion rates as a result of our gamification approach to creating learning experiences, it was a no-brainer to push for incorporating more interactive features into our platform. What better way to encourage social interaction than embedding emotional reactions to every communication touchpoint?

Read on to see our new social features in action and dive deep into the value they bring to learning retention.

Introducing emojis and reactions

Users can now natively add emojis to their messages across all communication touchpoints, including others’ posts, content pieces and closed chat conversations. They can also react to posts with different emotions.

The reactions we now support are laughter, surprise, awe, love, anger, sadness and thumbs up. These new features will encourage people to take part in discussions with a few clicks. Making it easier for people to participate boosts their chances of participating, which in turn helps instructors and administrators identify the most popular posts and gather data about what type of content performs best among different groups.

Get the attention you deserve with mentions

Not only is it easier to convey your mood with emojis and reactions, this release makes sure messages don’t get lost in a sea of notifications…

With Mentions, you know your messages reach the right person every time. Simply type “@” followed by the name of the person you want to get in touch with, and they’ll receive a notification that you’ve mentioned them.

The nerdy side of adding emotions and mentions to a learning platform

So why emojis and reactions? Emojis add a missing element in text communication. They are the “non-verbal communication cues” of online communication. Sometimes we don’t have anything to say, yet we feel a certain way about something. That’s when reacting with a simple click bridges online communication.

But we also know that emotions play a crucial role in many cognitive processes, such as decision-making, memory, and… learning. Positive emotions, for instance, can improve learning by helping learners focus their attention, increase motivation, respond effectively to critical feedback and failure and improve retention and memory.

With the impact emotions have on how we learn, retain information and collaborate, it was a simple decision for WeSchool’s product team:

“To continue building the most effective learning platform, we have to develop the features that will support users’ desire to learn, participate and take part in the learning process”.

Wojtek Strzalkowski, Head of Product

Some other exciting updates…

That’s a wrap on WeSchools new social features! But it’s not a wrap on our newest improvements. We’ve also enabled Single Sign-On (SSO) for seamless access to your learning spaces.

Say goodbye to remembering countless passwords and hello to instant access to all your learning resources. You can now log in to WeSchool using your existing credentials from other platforms for an even smoother login process that makes keeping in touch effortless.

Keep your eyes peeled for further improvements on the learning platform, including a renewed mobile App to make learning anytime, anywhere, even more appealing. To make sure you don’t miss a beat, subscribe to our newsletter to receive information on updates and what they can bring to you. In the meantime, enjoy our newest social features!

Not yet a WeSchool user and would like to try our newest social features? Get started by requesting a free demo or register for free for a 14-day trial period (p.s. Our new onboarding process is super slick).