Adding Chats to Moodle Course

The chat module creates a chat room where students can have real-time online chats. Similar to other activities in a course, the chat activity is available to students enrolled in the course. Chat sessions can be logged and made available to students who may join the course later.

Online chat has some unique advantages over an in-person classroom discussion. Students do not need to deal with the fear of public speaking, transcripts can be edited and used as course material, and conversations can proceed at a leisurely pace, which gives participants time to think.

The key to using these advantages is preparation. Prepare your students and ensure that they know the chat room etiquette and how to use the software. Prepare yourself by having the discussion material ready to copy and paste in the chat. Also, everyone should be prepared to focus on the goals and subject of the chat. More than any other online activity, chat requires that the teacher take a leadership role and guide students to a successful learning experience.

When you add a chat room to a course, by default, any student in the course can enter this chat room at any time. The chat room can become a meeting place for students in the course, where they can come to collaborate on work and exchange information.

When you schedule a chat session, the scheduled time appears on course Calendar and is also displayed in the Upcoming events block.

When you enter a chat, it launches a popup window. Make sure that your students don't have popups blocked.

Settings For Chat

The name of this chat room

This is the name that students will see on the course's home page.

Description

When a student selects a chat, he or she will see the introduction text before clicking on the chat room. Also, you can display the description on the course's home page.

The next chat time and repeat/publish sessions

As long as a chat is visible to the student, the student can enter that chat room at any time. Therefore, the settings for Next chat time and Repeat sessions don't open and close the chat. Instead, these settings put a time and date for the chat on the class calendar.

Save past sessions and everyone can view past sessions

Past chats are automatically saved. The Save past sessions setting enables you to choose how long the system saves the chats. The setting for Everyone can view past sessions determines whether students can view past chats (Yes) or only teachers can view past chats (No).

Preventing students from seeing other's chats

The only security for a chat room is turning the group mode on so that only students in a selected group can see each other in this chat room.