Students can access campus life, events, clubs and more a lot easier, thanks to a new mobile app version of Ooks Life. NAITSA soft-launched the brand new app late in September after learning about it at a conference. Brayden Shopland, NAITSA VP Internal, routinely heard from students that they wanted an app to engage in campus life. And while Ooks Life is available on phones via internet browsers, the user experience isn’t ideal—it often loads slow and doesn’t allow users to browse events easily like NAITSA wanted.
“The user experience is not amazing,” said Shopland. “When you click into an event, go to RSVP, you click the back button and it spits you back out at the top of the page. It doesn’t put you back where you were. Let’s say you were three pages deep, it doesn’t bring you back to that third page.”
The app, however, is designed to be used on smartphones—something that 97.1 per cent of people aged 25-44 have, according to a 2021 study by Statistics Canada. Shopland believes the app will allow for more convenient browsing of upcoming events, allowing students to connect with campus life more easily. “Now with the app it takes 10 seconds. Like once I unlock my phone, there’s the Ooks Life app, click on events, and it literally shows you the upcoming events for today.”
The app acts like any other social media platform, including a discovery page where students can make connections and see feed posts from other students and staff. There are also community chats, where students can discuss interests, sell textbooks, ask questions or connect with students in similar situations. There’s a chat for mature students, one for students with kids and even one highlighting networking opportunities in the city.
But like any social media platform, NAITSA has already begun thinking about safety. Anyone on the app is required to log in with their NAIT credentials, and when making a new account, users are required to agree to follow the student code of conduct. NAITSA has also flagged certain words to help moderate the site.
“You can have the social media aspect to your life and be involved, and know what’s happening on campus, without having to have Instagram or Facebook or whatnot. You can just use this one app and it’s a safe environment,” Shopland explained.
“We have flagged words and we track those, we monitor those to make sure that people aren’t hating on people here … at the end of the day, Ooks Life is not for any of that. It’s to create community here on campus, to share culture, to share events, to find something that you might enjoy doing.”
While the app was not initially a line item for the 2024/25 year, Shopland believes the value is worth the cost. Not only is the app built by a company partnering with NavEngage, the company that already runs the Ooks Life website, but the servers that host the data is in Canada, which Shopland said was important to NAITSA.
NAITSA also had the chance to help shape the app for their purposes; while the app has been used in U.S. post-secondary schools, Ooks Life is the first Canadian usage. “Our staff here, especially in Campus Life, they are having a huge hand in the way that this app is being built. So that way it can fit the needs of our students,” said Shopland.
“We make sure that when we spend money on software, it is for the right reasons, that it will benefit the students … so we went in and there’s always some budget to be moved around.”
The app is currently in a soft-launch phase, though NAITSA is encouraging students and staff to join and start using the app. There are currently over 140 users on the app, with more joining each day. And because the app is still in soft launch, students have the opportunity to suggest new features or report bugs. “If they see something in the app that doesn’t look right, doesn’t feel right, doesn’t work right, they can let us know and then we can go to the developers and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t working and we need it to change.’”
While students slowly start joining, Shopland and the Campus Life team are busy educating NAIT departments on how to effectively use the app and creating buy-in for various departments. “We don’t want to spam students on the community page, so a lot of educational pieces there about how to use the app … that’s going to be the big thing from Campus Life going forward, is just maintaining things for now before we grow too out of control.”
Students can find the Ooks Life app available on both the App Store and the Play Store. For help or troubleshooting, email ookslifesupport@nait.ca.
Cover photo: Mental health extravaganza event hosted in CAT. Photo by Roiel Carlos
