Introducing Topics — a new way to collaborate in Classes

Effective communication between students and educators is beneficial to everyone involved. It allows educators to create enabling environment and increase students’ overall success. Students, on the other hand, engage with the learning process deeper when it’s supported by vivid communication. But with the increasing number of topics, assignments and issues being discussed within a course, communication becomes chaotic and starts to consume more time and effort. Updates become hard to follow, discussions deviate from their original purposes, students start to lose track and interest. So to keep everyone engaged, educators spend enormous amounts of time guiding and managing conversations.

Seeing the above as a major problem, we designed a system that is both: well-organized and easy to manage.

Introducing our first major update of Classes Beta: Topics.

Topics allow you to create conversations around specific subjects and let others participate with replies. You can then guide, follow and manage multiple focused topics, and let anyone join one conversation without breaking the flow of another one.

The closest relatives to Classes are groups chats, but Topics lay the foundation of their core difference. Chats present each conversation as an endless flow of messages without clear context or purpose. And all conversations in Classes are divided into topics, each with its subject and a set of replies.

But why is it a good news? Well, here are just a few great things about Topics:

• Topics bring a clear structure to messaging, so navigating between different discussions and reviewing their full context becomes a breeze.
• Topics make it possible to have multiple conversations simultaneously within a single conversation.
• Topics allow to revive older discussions for those who missed them, have some updates or want to bring group’s attention back to the topic.
• Topics set direction for each conversation so you’ll spend less time reminding everyone where the discussion must be heading.

These are just a few great features you get from using topic-based interface. And here’s a glance of another big step away from chats that Classes has taken with this update:

Recent 2.0

Now you’re able to keep track of all new and unread topics together with the number of replies each one has. This means you don’t need to open every chat and scroll through all unread messages just to find out none of that relates to you and none actually required your attention. Now every time you receive a new message, you immediately see either it’s a new topic, or yet another reply to a discussion you don’t care that much about at the moment.

All of the above is just the beginning of what we believe can be a single truly productive environment for students and educators. Many more features are being built upon Topics right now, so subscribe for our blog here to follow the news!

Not on Classes yet? Start here: http://classes.chat. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, feel free to drop us a line or tweet. We’d love to hear from you!