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What it does

You can use the Chat Room tool for real-time, unstructured conversations among site participants who are signed on to the site at the same time.

Instructors can easily create an "Online Office Hours" chat room for student questions and answers. Dispersed collaboration groups can use Chat as a space to have conversations across distances or catch up with conversations that they may have missed.

Key concepts

Multiple rooms: Site leaders can use Options to add rooms to accommodate more than one discussion. Participants can click Change Room to access other discussions.

Default room: Site leaders can use Options to specify which room is visible by default to participants accessing the tool.

Display: Changes you make in Options also apply to how the Chat Room features appear to site participants.

Things to consider

• The Chat Room tool alerts users to other participants who have entered the same chat room. This way, users know who is available to talk.
• Site leaders can specify how many chat messages are archived and for how long, or they can allow participants to configure their own archive settings.
• The Chat Room tool does not provide a way to chat privately. By default, all messages are visible to all participants. However, you can remove read access for a particular role, and thereby for all participants with that role, by modifying the Chat Room permissions.