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Adding a Chat to Your Course
The chat activity module enables participants to have text-based, real-time synchronous discussions. The chat may be a one-time activity, or it may be repeated at the same time each day or each week. Chat sessions are saved and can be made available for everyone to view or restricted to users with the capability to view chat session logs.
Chats are especially useful when the group chatting is not able to meet face-to-face, such as
- Regular meetings of students participating in online courses to enable them to share experiences with others in the same course but in a different location
- A student temporarily unable to attend in person chatting with their teacher to catch up with work
- Students out on work experience getting together to discuss their experiences with each other and their teacher
- Younger children using chat at home in the evenings as a controlled (monitored) introduction to the world of social networking
- A question and answer session with an invited speaker in a different location
- Sessions to help students prepare for tests where the teacher, or other students, would pose sample questions
This page explains the settings involved when first creating a chat activity. To add a chat to your course page:
With the editing turned on at the course main page, locate the section you wish to add your lesson then click the Add an activity or resource link and choose Chat. All settings may be expanded by clicking the Expand all link at the top right corner.
Configure the following chat settings:
General
- Name of this chat room
- Whatever you type here will form the link that students click on to enter the chat. It is helpful to give it a name that suggests its purpose – for example “Student council discussion” or “Field trip planning meeting”.
- Description
- Type the description of the chat here. Include precise instructions for students regarding the subject of the chat. Click the icon on the left to expand the toolbar and drag the bottom right of the text box out to expand it.
- Display description on course page
- If this box is ticked, the description will appear on the course page just below the name of the Chat.
Chat Sessions
- Next chat time
- The day and hour of the next chat session. This will appear in the calendar, so students know the schedule, but it does not stop them accessing the chatroom at any other time.
- If you don’t want them in the chatroom at other times, then hide it (with the eye icon) or use Conditional activities to restrict access.
- If you do not wish to schedule chat times, then ignore this and choose from the next settings.
- Note: For courses involving users across different time zones, it is useful to know that the time you set here will be adjusted to match the time zone of the user viewing it.
- Repeat/publish sessions
- There are four options for scheduling future chat sessions:
- Don’t publish any chat times – there are no set times and students are welcome to chat at any time.
- No repeats – publish the specified time only – only the Next chat time will be published. This could be used to schedule special events or meetings or simply to help learners identify a common time in which they can expect to find other learners in the chat room.
- At the same time every day – Daily chats are useful for scheduling daily office hours or work sessions with learners.
- At the same time every week – This setting will schedule a chat for the same day and time every week, which could be useful for instance for meeting and reviewing key ideas and questions related to the week’s content/assessment.
- Save past chat sessions
- Choose from the dropdown how many days to save – or save everything by selecting Never delete messages
- If you have any concerns about discussions that might take place in your chat room, you may want to keep transcripts to check the suitability of what is discussed. If your learners are using the chatroom to collaborate on a group project you will not want to delete the messages until the project is complete.
- Everyone can view past sessions
- Decide here whether you will allow everyone to view past chat sessions. (You can always view past sessions)
Other settings
Choose the ‘Common module’, ‘Restrict access’, ‘Activity Completion’, and ‘Tags’ settings as you would when you set up any resource or activity. These general settings are further discussed in Activities and Resources: General Settings.
