Title: 7.1 Instant Messaging and Chat
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Moodle Messaging

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...

Chat activity

The Moodle chat activity allows you to create a multi-user instant messaging environment very easily and is really useful if you'd like to have a synchronous online discussion with some or all of your students. Perhaps for an online tutorial session every Wednesday morning or a one-off discussion around a particular topic.

Creating a chat activity is much like creating any other activity in Moodle, select 'chat' from the 'add an activity' drop down to see the chat creation form:

You could have the chat open all the time, but it's likely to be more effective if you publish specific times for you and your students to be online and in the chat session. You may have the chat session as a one-off, or you can have it repeating every week or month (see the repeat sessions setting).

You also have the option of saving the chat messages for a specified period of time. If you allow everyone to view the past sessions, then those who weren't able to participate can still read what the discussions were about. On the other hand, you may see instant messaging and chats as more informal and not want to keep the message history.

Like online forums, you may need to lay down some ground rules for how the chat is used, what is appropriate to discuss. You're likely to need to moderate chat sessions in much the same way as you would for an asynchronous forum. You may find that having more than 10 or so users in one chat session can be difficult to manage, especially if many students post messages at the same time.

 | Try creating a chat activity and invite some of the other course participants to join in, this will help you get a feel for how a chat session could work with your students and gives you the chance to play with some of the chat settings.