BuddyPress vs PeepSo, which is the best companion for your LearnDash site? Keep on reading to find out!
As an educator, you are probably already aware of the importance of communication and social interactions when it comes to the learning process. While physical classroom settings naturally provide opportunities for student collaboration and discussion, online educators can struggle to incorporate social features in their courses.
WordPress community plugins can be used to merge your LearnDash courses with social network features. As a result, your students can better communicate, exchange information, and succeed in their e-learning experience.
Looking to build an active community of learners around your online courses? Let our LMS experts help you implement community plugins and social features to your e-learning site.
To help you learn more about some out-of-the-box solutions for building a community around your online courses, we’ve put together this post comparing two of the most popular options: BuddyPress vs PeepSo.
Looking to enrich your online courses with social features? Find out which WordPress community plugin, BuddyPress vs PeepSo, will best suit your e-learning site in this post. Share on XUsing PeepSo With LearnDash And Other LMS Options
What is PeepSo?
PeepSo is a lightweight WordPress community plugin, designed to help users build communities around their niche, interests, businesses, and more. In itself, PeepSo is available for free and provides a wide array of features including user profiles, activity streams, and user reactions. It also has hashtag functionalities, community member blog posts, widgets, and live on-site notifications. Premium add-ons can be purchased to enhance and add functions to your social network. Additionally, PeepSo offers the advantage of having a highly efficient support system and a team of developers. Through a one-on-one ticketing system, PeepSo users can get answers and solutions to any problems they run into.
PeepSo For E-learning Sites
Social learning and collaboration is key in education, be it in-person or online. For instructors looking to replicate the social aspects of a classroom setting in their e-learning site, PeepSo is a good solution to consider. PeepSo offers several add-ons, with LMS specific options available. LearnDash and LifterLMS integrations for this social network plugin are offered as premium products.
LMS PeepSo integrations give you access to features including:
- Enrollment streams: Enrollment streams allow you to showcase enrollment posts to let your students see which courses are getting popular in your site.
- Completion streams: With completion streams, you can put your students’ success on display, by sharing each time a student completes a course.
- Student Profiles: Students will be able to create unique profiles, showcasing courses they’ve enrolled in, their avatar, posts, and more!
- Chat: The PeepSo integration will allow students to access a chat feature to instantly connect with fellow students and instructors.
- Course Groups: PeepSo gives users the ability to easily join and interact in a group setting. When a student enrolls in a course you can use this plugin to automatically include the user in the class group. You can also create groups related to specific courses.
Your students can also take advantage of the basic features of this plugin such as customizable profiles with avatars and cover images, notifications, likes, activity posts, comments, and more!
Additionally, the PeepSo and BadgeOS Integration can also be used to incorporate the student awards used elsewhere in your course in your site’s social network. This will help you increase engagement and participation in your community of students.
See it in Action!
Take a look at how other successful websites have used PeepSo:
Case study #1: Unfound
Unfound is a global community created to bring cyclists together. This PeepSo powered site allows cycling lovers to easily connect and share their riding experiences by providing them with a niche-specific social network. Additionally, Unfound’s social network can be linked with Strava, a popular tool used to track rides, to easily allow users to share their latest accomplishments and experiences.
Case study #2: Next Door
Another great example of how PeepSo can be put to action is Next Door. With next door, users can create totally private social networks for their neighborhood. In this case small private networks are used successfully to connect neighbors in a safe way, allowing them to keep an eye on neighbourhood activities and events, increase security through communication and even share recommendations on local goods and services.
Case study #3: Notabli
Another creative use example of PeepSo you should look at is Notabli, a website that allows users to use a private social network to share their children’s photos and achievements with close friends and other family members. What makes Notabli attractive is that it keeps families connected while also serving as a tool for organizing all relevant moments in your children’s life.
Using BuddyPress For Social Learning With LearnDash And Other LMS Options
What is BuddyPress?
BuddyPress is an extremely popular free plugin designed to help WordPress users create any type of community. With over 200,000 active downloads, this plugin has been widely successful at helping people incorporate social networking in different kinds of sites. Known for being the most user-friendly social network plugin out there, BuddyPress is a great option for all skill sets.
Known for being the most user-friendly social network plugin out there, BuddyPress is a great option for all skill sets. You can easily get started with BuddyPress on your own or work with our BuddyPress developers to implement and customize its look and function on your e-learning site.
Some of the features BuddyPress provides are member profiles, activity streams, user groups, and messaging. These social network features are valuable in an e-learning system where communication and collaboration between students and instructors are vital. The main benefit of this plugin is its great popularity, resulting in a great amount of information and support forums. Additionally, there is an extensive amount of add-ons available and BuddyPress works well with almost all WordPress themes.The platform is also developer friendly, making BuddyPress a good platform if you are planning for customization for your LMS
BuddyPress for E-learning Sites
BuddyPress can work with many different types of sites and can provide great benefits when used with an LMS plugin. Buddypress has several integrations available with the most popular plugins like LifterLMS, LearnDash, LearnPress, and Sensei.
The LearnDash integration allows you to add online profiles, user groups, and use private messages to build up your online community. At the same time, the LifterLMS integration includes several user profile features enabling users to display their courses, memberships, achievements, and certificates. With the LearnPress integration course creators can display data like completed, current and future courses on BuddyPress user profiles.
Some BuddyPress features of special value for any LMS include:
- Members: Your students can be classified into different member types, set their own avatars, and cover images.
- Groups: With BuddyPress you can create many different types of groups for your students to interact in and individualize their settings.
- Forums With BBpress: Class forums have become a staple in online learning sites. These spaces are ideal to host class discussions, ask questions, and even post small assignments. With the BBpress plugin, you’ll have a dependable and easy to use forum system to enrich your online classes. Since both of these plugins integrate well together, your course forums will work with your site’s BuddyPress groups, profiles, and notifications.
- Notifications: A good notification system will help your students remember upcoming lessons, assignments, and quizzes.
- Internal Messaging: With BuddyPress your students can have their own inbox and receive private and public messages. This tool is very beneficial to allow students to contact their instructors with questions or other issues or talk to each other to exchange tips and work on group assignments.
If you are looking for a specific functionality, even more features can be added to this platform through customization with the help of our BuddyPress developers.
Additionally, you can improve your course engagement, even more, using the BadgeOS Community add-on. This add-on integrates BadgeOS features into BuddyPress and bbPress, allowing online students to complete achievements and earn badges by participating in your online learning community.If you are interested in adding gamification to your online community or courses and need help getting started, you can work with our WordPress experts to design and implement a gamification system on your site.
See it in Action!
Take a look at how other successful websites have used BuddyPress:
Case study #1: IDRAK Virtual Academy
Our team helped IDRAK Virtual Academy build an online academy designed for young learners looking to build and strengthen mathematical and science concepts with the aid of expert educators.
Students have an array of opportunities to learn: pre-recorded courses, open live sessions, private sessions with educators, and an e-library with course materials.To best engage students and promote social interaction and community building IVA was built with BuddyPress and the BuddyBoss theme. Students have access to features such as personalized profiles, study groups, and discussion forums allowing them to socialize with peers and educators.
Looking to achieve similar results? Our BuddyPress developers can help you seamlessly implement BuddyPress on your LMS and tailor its features to your needs.
Case study #2: Powers Resource Center
