Discord: #notrolls #server #chat #channel #golive #edu
Dr Peter Thomas (then writing as founding director of HaileyburyX), with Lauren Sayer (former director of Digital Learning at Haileybury and now Executive Director, Digital Learning, Research and Innovation at Melbourne Girls Grammar) on Discord — one of the best products most people haven’t heard of.
“What do you like like about Discord?”
“Everything.” (Henry, 13).“We get on a voice call together and get the work done. It’s having someone else to talk to. And we are in control” (Josh, 16).
That unscientific and unrepresentative bit of user research probably sums up what most of the users of Discord think.
Discord is a text chat voice and video calling platform which has, until recently, been used by gamers. It was created by Jason Citron in 2015 out of his experience developing games. Like all the best products it came out of a simple pain point: it was hard for gamers to communicate.
Scroll forward to 2020, and Discord has north of 250 million users, with 14 million people logging on every day. Right now in Spain and France, the daily number of people talking on Discord has more than doubled since the beginning of 2020 (in Italy, it’s more than tripled).
There is a 50 per cent growth in daily voice users of Discord in the US. It’s being used to chat while playing games — but it’s now also a place where people can congregate, meet up and socialize. Or even to discuss Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science.
What accounts for this explosion in Discord use? And why do Henry and Josh think it’s so good?
Let’s dig in and find out. Then later, we’ll talk about potential applications for Discord in education.
If you want to do some pre-study look at TechRadar’s How to Use Discord.
Or just start a server.
Discord is a free platform which blends the kind of chat found in Slack with video calling and voice chat (Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Skype, Viber and many others) and an additional layer of features that serve the needs of gamers.
The specific need is to not slow down the important stuff you are doing — such as playing Rainbow Six Siege. As a result, Discord is designed to be both simple to use and not hog resources when processing power and bandwidth are needed elsewhere.
Discord also supports one of the other core aspects of gaming— the community that grows up around games — so it provides lots of tools that allow people to gather, hang out and socialise. Fans of a game or a game studio can gather to talk about what’s coming down the pipe in the new season of a game, exchange game strategies or just hang out in small or large groups.
And this is where it gets interesting.
Discord, in essence, is pretty simple. But dig in and there's a lot going on.
You register a Discord account (as usual, 13 or over) and you can set up a server.
It’s not a server in the hardware sense, but a community in which you can gather people, content and ways to communicate. You can set up many servers and toggle between them. You can join servers if they are public or get invited if they are private.
Once in a server, you can set up or join hashtag-marked channels which are where people discuss topics. Some channels are for text-based chat, some are group voice chats. In this sense, Discord looks and feels very much like Slack.
Discord servers include video calling within each server (now 50 people) and a live streaming function that allows anyone to stream any application in HD quality. Here Discord is like Zoom, but whereas Zoom calls and webinars have to be scheduled, Discord provides 24/7 availability for voice and video calling.
Discord also allows users to create custom bots — such as announcement bots or music bots — that automate some of the functions of a server or channel. These bots are configurable (or can be created) by users. (Slack also has bots but they are less configurable and often attached to apps that you can add to Slack channels). Discord says they have seen over 3 million bots created that have sent over 9.5 billion messages. They have also created a Verified Bots and Developers Programme, partnering with Stripe to provide identity verification for developers so ensuring that they can better protect user privacy as bots get used in more servers by more people.
Security is simple but very effective. As Discord says in their Parent’s Guide to Discord it is
“..super secure. We protect sensitive information — including contact information and conversations — from appearing in a public search. We’ve also designed features to protect everyone from inappropriate content or unwanted contact.”
One of these features is verification: a basic level of security a user must meet before they’re allowed to send text messages in a channel. This prevents bots and spam accounts from mass-joining a server.
Discord verification options for users joining a server start with none (anyone can join, which is good for a small private server of friends) through to Double Tableflip-Status ┻━┻彡 ヽ(ಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (verified email, registered user for 5+ minutes, server member for 10+ minutes and a verified phone number attached to their Discord account).
Discord also allows you to set the country of the server, which many other apps do not. This means that you can ensure that the data sits in the country in which you live.
But where Discord diverges from Slack, Zoom and others, is its configurability.
Servers have public and private channels, like Slack, but administrators of each server can assign an endless series of roles to each user which can have custom privileges, colours, and tags.
For example, most servers have moderator roles to help manage the community, but anything is possible including assigning special roles as a reward for contributions, supporting the community or just about anything else. All of these can be configured at both the server and channel level and roles can be changed and revoked at any time.
And while Discord’s core function is group chats, you can do global private messaging with those on your friend lists even if they are not inside a specific channel.
Having set up a server, users are invited to join with a custom invite link, which makes sure that chats are guarded (at least to some extent) from trolls and other outsiders.
Once in a server, and in the channels, you can connect other social media accounts. Since Discord started out as gamer-focused you would expect services like Steam, Twitch and XBox, but you can also add Twitter, Spotify and YouTube making it easier to get into conversations with people you already know outside of Discord.
To highlight one of the newer features, Discord has added noise suppression for situations where people are working in shared spaces.
There are also lots of other cool easter-egg features like slowmode that limits the number of messages a user is able to send in a channel based on a timed cooldown.
What’s the use case for K-12 educators?
Discord has been collecting up the ways that Discord is being used beyond gaming.
One example is for building a sense of community when studying remotely. As a student quoted in the article says:
“It’s so important to feel connected to our teachers and each other when we are so isolated and in such a difficult class…Using Discord brought us closer together as a physics class — we are already a small class of 22 students, so being able to joke around and send memes helps us not feel so alone during the distance learning.”
Discord has also created a Discord101 — How to use Discord for Your Classroom. It says Discord provides:
- A dedicated, free to use, invite-only class space
- Text channels to organize things like lessons, homework, or study groups
- Voice channels for both one-to-one and group discussions, or even office hours
- A real-time teaching environment where lessons can be shared with up to 50 people at a time
These are all great suggestions and educators are already using Discord for some of these.
But it's important to really understand what Discord does very well so as to leverage the benefits.
Servers are ecosystems
Perhaps the most important thing to recognise is that servers are ecosystems.
Servers can have their own rules for how the ecosystem is managed, a set of user roles tuned to the ecosystem and a set of resources in the form of bots and apps all designed specifically for it. All of these are set collaboratively by the administrators and users and can be constantly revised.
Seeing a server as an ecosystem opens up all kinds of possibilities.
Discord servers can be used for specific subjects, specific classes or year levels. Students can join some or all of these servers, and channels can be configured to carry anything from assignments and topics, through #general or #announcement channels for advice and support to #chillout for sharing resources that build community.
The user roles and the permissions built into Discord can be leveraged to allow students to do specific things (lead study groups, for example); and the fact that users’ roles are different on each server means that students can participate in many servers at the same time and assume different roles in each.
Real-time chat
Another thing to recognise is that Discord is real-time chat, not a comment thread or an asynchronous discussion forum.
This adds hugely to promoting focused engagement from students. They can step in and out of channels or chats and share content in channels or chats they themselves create. In the situation we find ourselves, waiting an hour for a response in a discussion forum can seem like a week and is profoundly hobbling to effective learning.
And for educators, this opens up the possibility to support one of the real needs of an educational community: real-time chat with a large group of educators. Twitter chats try very hard to achieve this through filtering by hashtag. But a real-time discussion on a specific topic, without the cross-pollination of the latest Married At First Sight tweets, would be valuable. Equally, the opportunity to form professional development groups centred on specific topics — using AR, resource-sharing for example — is useful and the real-time nature of Discord means that help could be on hand whenever you need it.
Not a social feed
As Discord is not a feed, it’s free from algorithmic curation that is a feature of social apps.
It’s interesting that Influencers have already realised that Discord works much better than, say Instagram, because when they announce a new video is dropping they can post to everyone in the #announcement channel and know that algorithms won’t curate it out. YouTube creator Diteschy, for example, says Discord is the only way to “avoid the chaos of the internet.”
In education, the real-time chat nature of Discord is very powerful either within a remote lesson or outside of it. Quoted in the Discord101 article, a US parent says:
“There are four of us and we all have Discord installed on both our computers and phones. Everything gets dropped into that server. From dinner’s ready to internships and job offers. …Seriously, Discord is always open on my computer,…I can’t imagine life without it.”
LearnBots
As we mentioned earlier, Discord bots — software that automates some of the features in servers and channels — are powerful. Not only can they be used to do simple housekeeping — such as greeting new users or moderating channels — but they can be used to curate materials that students see.
Although AI learnbots like those used in products like MATHiaU are a few steps away for Discord—they are probably not that many steps away.
There are already multipurpose bots such as ProBot that can be customized, and a whole host of music bots like FredBoat that can manipulate content from Spotify, Soundcoud and Twitch and support livestreaming.
Bots also provide a powerful learning environment in themselves as they allow students to program new bots in Python, Java, C# or Javascript. Students can also prototype bot behaviour using software like Figma, so leading them through the app development cycle from rapid prototyping through to deployment — at zero cost and with the opportunity to learn rapidly and test with a user base.
While still in its early stages, we would expect the Discord bot developer ecosystem to develop quickly through the Verified Bots and Developers Programme. Discord announced in April 2020 that:
“Bots will be simpler to use. They’ll feel like natural extensions of Discord, polished products for desktop, web, and mobile users. Developers will get powerful new tools to take their creations to the next level. It’ll be easier to turn great ideas into code.”
And always mindful of privacy, Discord is making verification a requirement for bots that run in 100 or more servers, so creating an opportunity for more powerful bot features at low risk for members of the Discord community.
Transparency, trolls and bad actors
Finally, Discord has taken a bold stance on transparency — identifying and managing bad content and malicious behaviour.
Discord’s aim is to make life difficult for ‘bad actors’ and to encourage users to play their part by reporting violations by being transparent about what those violations are.
We think that this is a very important part of encouraging digital student agency — students taking responsibility for managing communities rather than having others do it for them — or adopting the ‘everything is dangerous’ position often taken by more extreme education cybersecurity commentators.
You can read Discord’s 2019 transparency report here.
So is Discord a platform that shows promise for K-12 education? We think so.
We’re fans. That’s partly because we are fans of platforms that have a strong component of community-centricity, and partly because our aim is to explore new and promising applications and services that push at the edges of digital educational opportunity.
But as usual, we are not endorsing Discord. Our aim is to extend and enhance our digital literacy as educators for the benefit of our students. As we said in our article on TikTok:
This is not to endorse or recommend TikTok or any other app or platform. [We want to help] our community thrive when technology assumes, as it inevitably will, a much more significant role in what we learn and how we learn it.
But perhaps the only thing that will support our view is evidence — and so far, there isn’t enough.
We do have lots of anecdotal evidence of students using Discord as a backchannel but these are not part of ‘official’ accounts of edtech.
We do recognise, though, that platforms like Zoom can be problematic, as reported by many educators and many organisations, and not just because of the security concerns that have been widely reported (and often overblown). One common theme comes up: Zoom is exhausting. As an educator in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article said:
“Lots of the platforms that I use online to connect with people do all sorts of cool things that I could never do face to face,” she says. Zoom, on the other hand, “feels like a hollow impersonation of a face-to-face classroom.”
Some are already making strides in this space.
The Discord Center for Education, for example, is “a community for people who search for general education and help with school”. A search on DiscordMe, shows 572 servers dedicated to education in all different subject areas and interests.
We think the question is not Can Discord replace face to face interaction — fundamentally the wrong aim and the wrong focus — but Can Discord, with its rich feature set, become a part of an educator’s edtech toolkit?
