Course Social Spaces: Which party is right for you?
We’re coming to the end of a semester and rolling out the carpet for the next one. Now’s a great time to review your course needs and begin taking a look at things that can be added (or removed!) to help facilitate your course.
An online social space can be a spot for students to ask questions among each other during a lecture, or could be an online discussion hub for a course, or it might just open up the class for students who are quiet in class to contribute their thoughts and questions. There are lots of ways to set up spaces for courses to come together and discuss.
If you’re interested in setting up a social space for you course it’s time to figure out the tool that best matches the scope you need.
Our first tool is the Moodle Discussion Forum. This is kind of like a UPEI party in a box. It’s ready to go and easy to set up. It has the double-edge that you have to have a UPEI login to be able to participate. Often these forums are used as an assessment tool, but using them as a place for student to engage with each other, ask questions, or introduce themselves is a great start to building community in your course.
The next three tools are all outside Moodle and they each have their own pros and cons. These tools are Slack, Twitter, and Mastodon.
Twitter is like a party in a public park. With Twitter you’re asking students to attend in the public, you don’t have control over the space as people are free to enter and leave as they wish, and you might have some people pass by, seeing what’s happening without letting you know it.
Twitter is a great tool for helping connect your students with the world at large. But like a true navigator, you should have experience and be knowledgeable of the space before deciding to guide your students.
Slack is a party in a private room. You can invite whomever you want, there’s more control over who gets in and who you can kick out if the need arises. You are still renting the space, so, as always, there are considerations to be made. Slack is much more like a chat space than a Twitter feed, so parallel conversations in the same room can be difficult. But the ability to create topic areas can be great for classes.
If Slack is a party in a private room, Mastodon could be a party in a place you’ve built. Mastodon is a very Twitter-like platform that has been published as Open Source. If you’re familiar with coding you’re able to take the shell of the platform and make your own changes to it. You are able to host your own version of it which could be more work than worth its while depending on your philosophy about online spaces, or your intentions have courses become communities.
All of these platforms have their own pros and cons, if you’re interested in seeing them in action or finding which is the best fit for your goals reach out to us and we’ll be happy to chat.
