Certificate in Online Education

Moodle has a built in instant messaging facilities for both ad-hoc one to one chats and more pre-arranged multi-user chat sessions.

If you want to send a quick message to another user, there are a couple of ways to access the chat window. Either from the 'send message' button on the users profile page:



Or from the envelope icon you'll see in a number of places when the user is online, for example in the online users block:


Clicking on either of these will bring up the messaging window:


When you send a message, if the other user is online a popup window will appear with the chat conversation on the next page they visit. If the user is offline, then they'll receive an email with your message instead.

You can search the messages you have received, add, remove and block contacts by going to the messaging manager, which you can access by clicking on the 'messages' button at the bottom of you profile page:

The messaging facility is designed for ad-hoc one to one chat communications, much like the chat facility in facebook or other social networking sites. But sometimes you may want to have a more organised multi-user chat session, this is where Moodle's chat activity comes in...