Tools for communication with students

Office hours

• Zoom - Multiple options:
  • Schedule a meeting at a fixed time and allow students to join and discuss questions as a group together.
  • Enable "waiting room" when scheduling a meeting.  This requires the meeting host to individually allow users into the meeting.  This could be done one at a time or in small groups in the spirit of "allowing them to enter your office."
    • Demo of "waiting room" feature in Zoom for office hours
  • Enable "breakout rooms" when scheduling a meeting.  The attendees can join the meeting for a group conversation then the host and individuals can enter a breakout room for a private conversation.
    • Demo of "breakout room" feature in Zoom
  • Schedule a one-on-one meeting with a student.

Announcements and chat

Making announcements to your entire class can be conducted with either:

• Canvas Inbox - This is essentially email.  The students receive a message in their registered default email inbox and can reply to it individually.
• Canvas Announcements - The students will receive an email notification when an announcement is made and the announcement will be remain persistent under the announcements panel within Canvas.  You must enable the ability to reply to announcements explicitly as they are turned off by default.

You may also use Canvas Chat for informal question/answer exchanges with students in realtime.  This requires the Canvas page to remain open in your web browser and is quite feature limited.  We recommend alternatives below that are more feature rich.

• Slack -  Ubiquitous adoption by the Silicon Valley tech industry and startups.
  • Free version is feature rich enough for most needs
  • Allows 1-on-1 chat, or chat with a specific selection of any number of users.
  • Allows for creation of "channels" which can be used to communicate with all users under topical categories.
  • Seamless syncing between web interface, desktop, and mobile applications.
  • Demo of Slack for Teaching and Research
• Microsoft Teams - Microsoft's response to/copy/clone of Slack