Oncourse Chat Room: Overview
What it does
You can use the Chat Room tool for real-time, unstructured conversations among site participants who are logged into the site at the same time.
Instructors can easily create an "Online Office Hours" chat room for student questions and answers. Dispersed collaboration groups can use Chat as a space to have conversations across distances or catch up with conversations that they may have missed.
Key concepts
Multiple rooms: Site leaders can use
Options to add rooms to accommodate more than one
discussion. Participants can click Change Room to access
other discussions.
Default room: Site leaders can use
Options to specify which room is visible by default to
participants accessing the tool.
Display: Changes you make in Options also
apply to how the Chat Room features appear to site participants.
Clear history: Permanently delete all messages from a chat room.
Things to consider
- The Chat Room tool alerts users to other participants who have
entered the same chat room. This way, users know who is available to
talk.
- Site leaders can specify how many chat messages are archived and
for how long, or they can allow participants to configure their own
archive settings.
- The Chat Room tool does not provide a way to chat privately. By default, all messages are visible to all participants. However, you can remove read access for a particular role, and thereby for all participants with that role, by modifying the Chat Room permissions.
Help documentation
For help documentation about the Chat Room tool, see Chat Room.
Last modified on December 28, 2010.
