Responsible Digital Technology: Our Commitment to the Right to Disconnect

At Édifice, we believe that well-designed digital technology should make everyday life easier for teachers, students, and families without encroaching on their personal well-being. For more than ten years, we have been developing tools that are useful, intuitive, and respectful of everyone’s time. As part of this ongoing commitment, we are enhancing our digital platforms to better support the right to disconnect.

Several new features will be rolled out in September to protect students, teachers, and school staff from unnecessary interruptions outside appropriate hours. The goal is also to reduce compulsive checking of grades, assignments, and messages, while encouraging digital practices that deliver genuine educational value.

Quiet Hours from 8:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

Notifications from Édifice’s digital learning platforms are now suspended every day between 8:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., as well as throughout the weekend.

In the future, whenever a resource is created or updated, a message is sent, or a news item is published during this quiet period, the corresponding notifications will be delivered only after 7:00 a.m. the following morning, in the form of an email. A summary mobile notification sent at the end of the quiet period is also being considered for a future release.

As a teacher, you cannot enable or disable this feature individually. If you wish to use it, you should contact your school administrator. Local administrators can choose whether to activate quiet hours across their institution, although they cannot modify the time slot itself. A regional education project may also decide to enable the quiet period for all schools within its scope.

We remain attentive to user feedback. If a need for greater flexibility emerges, we will consider—subject to approval by school administrators—allowing certain user profiles to continue receiving notifications during these periods if they wish.

Promoting Responsible Digital Practices

These new features are accompanied by a strong awareness campaign, because respecting the right to disconnect also depends on adopting healthy digital habits.

From their very first login, users are informed about the existence of quiet hours and the principle of delayed notifications.

Educational prompts are also integrated into specific workflows. For example, if a teacher assigns homework late in the evening for the following day, a reminder may appear encouraging them to reconsider such a short deadline, without preventing them from proceeding. Likewise, the morning summary emails explain the responsible digital approach promoted by Édifice.

Additional initiatives are currently being explored. One example is displaying awareness messages whenever a news post is published during quiet hours, encouraging users to schedule communications for a later time.

Scheduled Messaging Coming This Winter

Following the introduction of scheduled publishing in the News and Timetable services, scheduled messaging will be available in the Mailbox application by the end of 2026.

Teachers and administrative staff will be able to prepare messages in advance and schedule them to be sent at the most appropriate time. This practical feature helps reduce mental workload while supporting a healthier balance between working time and communication.

Scheduled sending is already available for Flash Messages published by platform administrators.

Towards Greater Digital Sustainability

Responsible digital technology also means giving users greater control over notifications.

Today, every user can already customize their notification preferences in the My Account section, including email frequency, immediate, daily or weekly notifications, or disabling notifications altogether—service by service and feature by feature. Mobile notifications in the ONE Pocket and NEO Pocket apps can also be configured independently.

We continue to explore new ways of promoting digital sustainability. One option under consideration is preventing the same notification from being sent simultaneously as both a push notification and an email. This would be a practical, environmentally responsible solution that aligns with our vision of a more sustainable digital ecosystem.

Through these new features and ongoing developments, Édifice reaffirms one core belief: educational technology should respect every user’s attention, time, and work-life balance.