Zulip

• Topics (i.e. the subject for a message thread) is the key feature of Zulip and its point is to keep a large amount of information organized by themes. If you don’t want to use Topics or it doesn’t match your flow, you might want to evaluate whether there is another chat platform that suits your needs better.

• Read about the basics of Zulip  to see the importance of topics. The guide also describes the three ways to use Zulip, and how we typically manage the flood of information in practice.

  • Give those guidelines to your students, as it is important that they understand how the chat is structured and how they can reply to topics and nagivate streams.

• Consider why you want a course chat.

  • Do you want a way to chat and ask questions/discuss in a lower-threshold platform than forum posts? Then this could be good.

  • Do you want a Q&A forum or an announcements board? Then this may work, but MyCourses also has good options for this.

  • Do you want a place for students groups to be able to chat among small groups? Zulip allows the creation of user groups and of private streams that can be used for this purpose, but MyCourses and Zoom might also be good alternatives.
    

• Create your channels (“streams”) before your students join, and make the important ones default streams, so that everyone will be subscribed. This can be done under “Manage organization”.

  • If you create a new default stream later, use the “clone subscribers” option to clone from another default stream, so that everyone will be subscribed.

  • Some common streams you might want are #general, #announcements, #questions. Some people have one stream per homework, exam, theme, and/or task.

  • The main point of streams is to be able to independently filter, mute, and subscribe to notifications. For example, it might be useful to view all questions about one homework in order, or request email notifications from the #announcements stream.

• You can create user groups (teams) with a certain name. The group can be @-mentioned together, or added to a stream.
• Create user groups clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen > Manage Organization > User groups.

• If you want a Q&A forum, make a stream called #questions, or smaller streams for specific topics, and direct students there.

  • You can click the check mark by a topic to mark it as resolved.

  • Remind students to make a new topic for each new question. This enables good follow-up via “Recent topics”.

  • If students don’t make a new topic or a topic goes off-track, edit the message and change the topic (change topic for “this message and all later messages”). This way, you keep questions organized, findable, and trackable.

  • If you don’t want to be answering questions in private message, make a clear policy on either reposting the questions publicly yourself (without identification), or directing the students to repost in the public stream themselves.

• If you want to limit students's permissions on the chat instance, you can consider disabling:

  • Adding streams, adding others to streams (if you want people to only ask and not make their own groups).

  • Disable private messages (if you really don’t want personal requests for help).

  • Adding bots, adding custom emojis.

  • Seeing email addresses.

  • Changing username.

• You can use the /poll [TITLE] command to make lightweight non-anonymous polls.

Yes, you should never be doing that manually. See "Creating channels, aka streams" for cloning membership of a stream from another.

Well, you don’t have to when replying. And this is sort of a natural trade-off needed to keep things organized and searchable: you have to think before you send. Most people consider this a worthy trade-off. Note that you can change the topic of messages after the fact, just talk and organize later as needed.