With the editing turned on, in the section where you wish to add your chatroom, click the “Add an activity or resource” link and choose Chat.

Adding the Chat Room activity

Defining the Chat Room settings

In the next screen, whatever you type in the name field will form the link that students click on to enter the chat. So, it is helpful to give it a name that suggests its purpose. Type the description of the chat in the next field to include precise instructions for students regarding the subject of the chat. If the Display description on module box is ticked the description will appear on the module page just below the name of the Chat.

Setting the Chat Room times

The next section sets the day and hour of the next chat session. These details will appear in the calendar so students know the schedule but it doesn't stop them accessing the chatroom at any other time.  If you don't wish to schedule chat times then ignore this and choose from the next settings.

There are four options for scheduling future chat sessions:

• Don’t publish any chat times - there are no set times and students are welcome to chat at any time.
• No repeats - publish the specified time only- only the Next chat time will be published. This could be used to schedule special events or meetings or simply to help learners identify a common time in which they can expect to find other learners in the chat room.
• At the same time every day - Daily chats are useful for scheduling daily office hours or work sessions with learners.
• At the same time every week -This setting will schedule a chat for the same day and time every week, which could be useful for instance for meeting and reviewing key ideas and questions related to the week’s content/assessment.

For courses involving users across different time zones, it is useful to know that the time you set here will be adjusted to match the time zone of the user viewing it.

Saving past Chat Room sessions

Choose from the dropdown how many days to save - or save everything by selecting Never delete messages. If you have any concerns about discussions that might take place in your chat room, you may want to keep transcripts to check the suitablility of what is discussed. If your learners are using the chatroom to collaborate on a group project you won’t want to delete the messages until the project is complete.

Click on Save and Return to Module when you have completed editing the settings page.

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