Slacking Off in Class: Setting Up Your Team (Part 2)

You’ve got the team setup the way you want, permissions figured out, authentication set. You’re ready to go, right? Almost. There are still some things left to work out. For this, we’ll be focusing on channels and notifications.

Let’s look at channels, first.

Channels

The channels you create will depend entirely on whether you’re using an entire team for just one class (Math 101 Fall 2017) or if you’re part of a shared team, say My University English Department’s larger Slack team. We’ll go with a single-class team first.

Channels for single-class teams

With this type of team, you don’t need to worry about creating private groups. You can invite your entire class to the team and set all of the open channels as default channels for everyone. This is probably the simplest way of going about it.

At this point you’ll most likely be looking at your course structure in your LMS and creating channels based on content modules or subject areas. For example, if you’ve designed your class to have 4 content modules, you’d have channels that likely look like this:

• general
• info
• module1
• module2
• module3
• module4
• social

I’ll get into the different channels shortly. Regardless, this way all students will see those public channels and be added to them automatically. Questions and discussions that fall within each module will go into that module’s channel. Conveniently, when you’re directing students to do this in your assignment instructions or elsewhere, you can copy the link directly to the Slack channel. For example, https://my.slack.com/messages/module1/

If you’d like to have sub-topics within each module, you can either create a channel for each of those topics or create a post about the sub-topic in the module channel and students can comment directly to that, rather than ‘openly’ in the channel. It adds an extra layer of organization. It really is up to you.

Channels in a larger team

It can be a bit trickier when you’re in a much larger team with other departments or programs. In this case, open channels like #module1 won’t work as you’re likely to conflict with other instructors wanting to use the same thing. In this case, you might want to just add your class code and number in front of the channel names, like math101-module1. Unless you have multiple sections of the same class within each Slack team (at which point you’ll need to figure out another naming convention), you don’t need to worry about specifying which semester/year (math101fall2017, for example), as when the semester is over you can archive each channel and use the name (math101) again next time. So, your channel list might look something like:

• announcements (open)
• admin (private; administrators and owners only)
• advising (open)
• english (private; department channel)
• math101 (private; general class channel)
• math101-module1 (private)
• math101-module2 (private)
• math101-module3 (private)
• math101-module4 (private)
• social (open)

Note: Slack is releasing an Enterprise version that provides a combination of “federation across multiple teams” as well as some (as yet unknown) method of (assumed) segregation to mitigate this issue.

As time goes on, as an instructor/administrator, you’ll start seeing a growing and daunting list of channels. While this may look confusing to you, remember that students will only even see a fraction of these as private groups do not appear to anyone that hasn’t been invited to them. In the above case, students not enrolled in and invited to the math101 channels would just see this list of open channels:

• announcements
• advising
• social

So just keep that in mind: don’t let the numbers worry you.

What to do with the channels

The content-specific channels are pretty obvious in terms of what goes in there. But what about the others? Well, that’s up to you. Here are some suggestions:

• Create a #general channel where you can pin items like your syllabus and class schedule, weekly readings, and other announcements (more on automating this later).
• Create an #info channel for automated updates from the course or academic calendars (also more on this later).
• For larger teams, create a #meta channel where users can ask questions or post tips about Slack, itself.
• Create a #jobs channel where people can forward relevant job openings.
• Open a #social channel for users to share things like meet-ups and event announcements. Great for supporting student activities.
• Again, for larger teams, create #advising-undergrad and #advising-grad where your program/department advisors can share important information like class openings or closings, pending deadlines, etc.

Tip: Create a Google Document or Slack post that contains a list of all the open (and relevant closed) channels and share it with the admins/owners/instructors/staff. Stick it in the closed channel accessible to those users. Include in the document the names of the channels and the purpose of them. Instruct users to check that list before creating channels!

Regardless of what channels you decide to create, always remember to set the channel purpose/topic so users know exactly what should go in each. Having users ask advising questions in the #social channel isn’t all that productive. If you have any suggestions for interesting channels, please share them in the comments!

Notifications

Now that you have your channels set up, it’s important that you can actually keep track of what’s going on in them. I cannot stress enough how important setting up the right notifications is. Get started by going to https://my.slack.com/account/notifications

There are two types of notifications: desktop and mobile.

Desktop Notifications

If you teach online, you’re likely in front of a computer most of the day. Keep in mind that Desktop notifications refer to the actual card that pops up and displays the content of the notification. Activity on the Slack team will still show the small blue dot on the icon, regardless.

For desktop notifications, as an instructor, you don’t want to be notified of every single message posted in your Slack channels. You’ll want to set this to Only Direct Messages & Highlight Words. (More on highlight words below.)

Mobile Push Notifications

This should be identical to the Desktop notification setting unless you want your device to explode.

Mobile Push Timing

A wonderful feature, this gives you the option to delay mobile notifications for a set period of time when you’re inactive at the desktop. Let me explain, assuming you’ve chosen After I’ve been idle on the desktop for: 2 minutes.

You’re in your office but not on your computer. You’re reading, for example. A student sends you a DM, which prompts the desktop notification, but you don’t hear it because your computer is muted or you’ve got headphones on, whatever. Now, as you’re technically inactive at the desktop, that triggers the mobile push notification to your device, which is in your pocket. After two minutes, the notification will appear on your phone. If you happen to turn around during those two minutes and get back on the computer, that countdown is cancelled and you see the desktop notification. This keeps you from getting redundant notifications on your phone.

As for the setting, I like two minutes.

Channel Specific Settings

You will want to spend great attention to these settings. For channels like #random or the automated #info channel, you might want to mute them. For the #math101-module1 channel that’s the channel relevant to the content you’re covering in class right now, maybe you want to get desktop notifications for everything but only mobile notifications for mentions. Essentially, this section is where you can set timely prioritized notifications on a per-channel basis.

Additional Settings

There are some extra settings below that are useful in very specific ways.

• Email Preferences: if you’re using class-based teams and have classes from previous semesters or will be unable to log into Slack/use your device for a time, getting emailed digests of notifications is very useful. Also, turning on the weekly email updates for owners and admins is a great way to keep track of the team as a whole.
• Highlight Words: you can set arbitrary words that will notify you. For example, if you have a nickname your students call you by (“Doc,” for example) or you want to keep track of a user mentioning that some system “is down,” you can add that here. You’ll get notified just as you would from a DM or @mention.
• Marking Messages as Read: leaving this as the default helps you pick back up in a channel where you left off so you don’t miss anything.

You’ll want to play with these settings until you’ve found something that works best for you. You’ll also want to provide your students with a Slack notification policy that they should be using. You don’t want students muting everything, do you?

Next up, customizing your Slack team with applications and integrations!