Besides Discord, what is a great platform for a group of students to connect and support each other when doing a remote course?
Not sure who to tag to get reach about this question, but will go for @actuallyautistic in case some people have had experience of various platforms this way.
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Some more info for those who might want it:
The students are on the same course studying technical topics but may have very little prior experience of tech. They may be based anywhere in the world, so different time zones, cultures, career backgrounds and aspirations. Around 100-120 students is the expected size of the community that would want to connect. Purposes would be to chat about the course, support each other (but not for academic misconduct, obviously! 😜) May benefit from the ability to have group video calls for chats or study-together sessions, but this could be via another platform (like Zoom / Teams).
It sounds like an official Discord may be being set up, but it could be months away as it has taken some time to materialise already. My thinking is that it doesn’t make sense to invest time and energy into a temporary Discord community if we’ll all be switching later.
The students all have MS Teams, so a Teams channel may be good. But what else is there? What am I forgetting? 🤔
Cy
in reply to JB 🐎 :neuro: • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Cy • •Cy
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •XMPP is good for private conversations. Their group chat support, while absolutely on par with IRC, doesn't really work without some DNS shenanigans. I don't have to purchase conference.fedicy.us.to in order to have an IRC server.
XMPP is very federated, so any jabber account on any server can join a group chat on a particular server, but that's not really an advantage to a private group, that wouldn't be allowing other servers in the first place.
Sooo that's why I recommend IRC.
CC: @AnAutieAtUni@beige.party