Using Mattermost as class hub

On the OpenETC site, Tannis has posted on some interesting ways that the open tools of the OpenETC are being used to support teaching & learning. It reminded me that I am looooong overdue posting about my own use of Mattermost last fall with students in my LRNT 528 course Facilitating in Digital Learning Environments.

As I mentioned in a blog post last summer, I wanted to try an IM-like chat tool for a number of reasons.

First, after using these types of IM tools myself for years, the conversations seem to be more free-flowing than occur in a standard Moodle discussion forum. Conversations in chat tools feel more like conversations. A bit more spontaneous and natural, and I wanted to see if a change in technology could bring that same natural energy to class discussions.

Second, chat tools blur the lines between synchronous and asynchronous communication and can make it easier to have a spontaneous chat session while still giving students who prefer the time and space afforded by asynchronous the opportunity to respond on their own time.

Third, chat tools have better support than most LMS discussion forums for more diverse methods of communication. GIF’s and emoticons are easy reaction tools that can help people create a social presence within a learning environment.

Finally, IM tools are increasingly common ways of collaborating and communicating on the web, and for this particular group of learners studying digital facilitation in online learning environments, it felt like an important tool for them to use at some point in their academic career as I can see these types of platforms becoming increasingly more important in digital facilitation.

Slack use in class seems to be increasingly common, but after their “mistake” last year where a number of user accounts (including academics & students located here in British Columbia) were deactivated for seemingly political reasons, I was not in a hurry to outsource my facilitation to them, especially when there was a viable open source alternative, Mattermost, being hosted here in BC by the OpenETC. This was my overarching reason to use Mattermost over Slack. So I created a team in Mattermost for my LRNT528 Digital Facilitation class in the hopes of doing a direct replacement of the Moodle discussion forums with Mattermost channels.

My cohort was small (14 students) and the facilitation class part of a larger Masters program in Learning & Technology, many with years of experience in teaching & learning roles, so I would classify the learners as tech savvy educators, which is one of the reasons I felt ok experimenting with a new technology.

That said, I wanted to be explicit with the students that Mattermost was an experiment, and provided some extra support to walk them through the account creation process, including a Q&A session specifically about using Mattermost in a course introductory synchronous session. Along the way, I was able to contribute back to the OpenETC some how-to documentation that I put together for my students that others can use in the future if they would like to do something similar. Living out the “contributions, not contracts” piece of our OpenETC philosophy.

In my week 1 course activities, I asked students to create their Mattermost accounts, update their user profile to add a photo or avatar, and post an introductory message tagging me to let me know they were in. These were fairly low stakes activities that would help to get them comfortable in the environment. As they entered the space and posted their welcome message, I made a point to greet them personally. I also pinned some general guidelines to the top of the Town Square channel that spelled out some general expectations for the space.

Welcome to the LRNT 528 Mattermost chat group. This will form the discussion hub of the course. There are channels set up for each of the scheduled discussions we will have in the course (CoI, TEK-VARIETY, and Final Reflection), plus this main channel called Town Square where you can post general questions.

Some guidelines for posts.

1. Keep your discussion posts to a single point. This will help keep your posts short.
2. If you find your posts are getting long (over 150 words), then you likely have a lot to say about the topic we’re discussing. In that case, consider writing a blog post on your blog and then paste the link to your blog post here.
3. Feel free to use memes, gif’s, and emoticons. These are legitimate forms of communication. That said, don’t needlessly use them, or use them as a replacement for genuine discussion.
4. Don’t feel the need to academically cite content in your posts, but do include links to external content that is relevant to the discussion.

Above all, read carefully, reflect before sharing, challenge tactfully, question thoughtfully, forgive mistakes (yours and theirs), and have fun learning.

I structured the Mattermost discussion area to include a general Town Square channel, two channels, one for each of the facilitated discussion I wanted to have in the course, and a Final Reflection channel where we could debrief the course at the end. I also created a Sandbox channel where students could post and experiment, but it turned out not to be needed as much of the experimentation with the platform happened in the general Town Square channel.

What worked well (my perspective)

Overall, the technology worked well. The conversations did seem more spontaneous, yet still well thought out. I did see an increase in the use of emoticons and gifs, and quite often could see conversations unfolding in real time by students who happened to be on the platform at the same time discussing course content.

Being able to have students tag others in a conversation is also a nice feature common in many IM platforms and not in the Moodle forums. You can @name someone to draw attention to a post, or bring someone directly into a discussion as opposed to if someone name drops you in a discussion forum post. I am beginning to think of the @name feature also as a form of attribution as I saw it used in ways to tag other learners who made a good point or that someone wanted to build on. And by using @all I was able to message all learners and draw attention to something – a salient point made by a learner, or to provide some further clarification.

Students also used the direct messaging feature of Mattermost to communicate with me which I appreciated as all course related conversations were now central within Mattemrost and not in my email account.

This was a digital facilitation course and students do an experiential learning assignment where they become the facilitators, designing a week of facilitation for other learners in the course and I was pleasantly surprised at how many of them decided to use Mattermost themselves for their own facilitation weeks, which said to me that they were feeling comfortable enough in the space to use it on their own.

What didn’t work well (my perspective)

On the downside, threaded conversations are a not quite as straightforward as in a discussion forum and sometimes it could feel overwhelming to figure out how to view and respond to specific threaded discussions. But once learners figured out how to use the threading feature it seemed to lessen the cognitive load of being presented with a wall of seemingly unstructured conversation when entering a channel.

What the students thought

I ran a short informal survey with the students at the end of the term to get their feedback on using Mattermost as compared to Moodle discussion forums, and overall they were quite happy with the tool comparing it favorably to Slack in terms of functionality. But more importantly, there was overwhelming consensus from the learners that Mattermost did change the way they participated in the class, and the technology did make them feel more engaged with both the course material and their classmates.

I can’t release the details of the feedback as it was an informal summary of students that was meant just for my own information. But the results were promising enough, and gave me enough information to show that there is something about the way that tools like Slack and Mattermost works that changes the way students participate and engage. I am planning on using Mattermost again this fall with a larger cohort and am going to pitch doing a SOTL focused piece of research on using it, this time with ethics approval so I can publish some findings next year.