Moodle – Chat

What does the Chat activity do?

The Chat activity allows participants to engage in a text-based, real-time synchronous discussion via the web. Chat activities are especially useful when users, such as distance learning students, are not able to meet face-to-face.

Adding a Chat

Step 1

Before you can make any changes to your Moodle site content, you must first enable editing. To do this, click on the 'Edit mode' button located at the top right of the page.

Step 2

With editing enabled, you will see in each topic the following button:

Step 3

Click the Chat icon from the list to add. You can find more information about chats by clicking "Explore this tool".

Step 4

Add a name for your chat. You can also add a description, and choose whether to display it on the course page (if not, students will see it when clicking on the chat).

Step 5 - Chat Sessions

There are now further options you can explore to customise a Chat activity:

• Next chat time – allows you to schedule the next Chat session details. The link will appear in the 'Upcoming events' block on the unit homepage.

• Repeat/Publish session times – you can choose from four options to schedule future Chat sessions:

  • Don’t publish any chat times

  • No repeats – publish the specified time only

  • At the same time every day

  • At the same time every week

• Save past sessions – when users take part in a Chat session, a complete transcript is created. Use this option to select how long Chat transcripts are saved and available for viewing or download.

• Everyone can view past sessions – you can decide whether or not to allow everyone to view past Chat sessions. Lecturers in a course can always view transcripts, however, you can also choose to make the transcripts available to all students on the course.

Step 6 - Common module settings

The Common module settings in this section controls how groups are managed within the Chat activity.

Moodle allows you to create a single Chat activity that can be split between groups (only if you have previously created groups for the site). For more information on groups, please see the Groups and Groupings guides and tutorials.

Group conversations within each Chat activity can be made either visible or invisible to other groups via the Group mode drop down list. The available options are shown below:

• No groups – all students can see all messages (default).

• Separate groups – students can only see messages from their own group.

• Visible groups – students can see another group’s messages, but can only reply to their own group’s messages.

Other options on the setup page can be left at their default settings.

Step 7

When you are finished, click on the 'Save and display' button to view your chat.