One of the keys to a successful chat session is limiting the number of participants. If you are teaching a large class, consider breaking the class into groups and holding a review session for each group. Moodle enables you to separate any class or specific activity into groups. The members of one group cannot participate in the activities of another group. So, when you separate your class into groups, you've essentially created a separate chat for each group. The groups can be totally separate so that the members of each group cannot even see each others' work, or be visible to each other so that the members of one group can see but not participate in all the other groups' work.

When you create a group in Moodle, it exists at the course level. This means the group can be applied to all activities within the course and not outside.

If you separate the students into groups for a chat and then use those groups in other activities, the students will have the same group in those other activities. Before separating students into groups for a chat, you should consider the effect that the grouping will have on any other activity in the course.

If you want to use different groups for different activities, you will need to either:

The key settings in the Editing Chat window are:

If the study group has not worked together before, you might want to jump-start their relationship by assigning each student in the group a different review topic to prepare for the chat. You should also prepare review questions to ask each student during the chat. Remember that in an online chat, it's very easy for students to "lurk" and watch without participating. You need to be ready to draw them out with questions about the review material that you've assigned.

Typing is more difficult than speaking and people naturally take the path of least resistance. Keep your questions open ended and encourage students to elaborate so that they do not give one word answers, which is an easy way out.

There are a variety of situations where you might want to chat one-on-one. Reviewing a student's assignment is one of them. Moodle does not offer an obvious way to limit the participants in a chat to just you and one selected student. Just as we used a workaround in Chapter 2 to set up a private forum for one student and the teacher, we need to use a workaround here to set up a private chat.

Workaround 2: Hiding the chat

Another way to keep a chat room private is to hide the chat after the desired participants are in the chat room. In this case, you would schedule a chat time with the designated student. In the following screenshot, you can see that William Rice and Moodle Student2 have entered the chat room. At that point, William Rice clicks the Update this Chat button to enter the Editing Chat page.

Once on the Editing Chat page, for the Visible setting, he selects Hide.

The chat will now be hidden from other students. You and the student who have already entered will remain in the chat.

The procedure for copying a transcript of a chat from a past course into a current course is as follows:

The Everyone can view past sessions setting enables students to view the transcripts of past chats. This means you can save the chat transcripts from previous classes and use them as reference material in the future. However, the very presence of a chat room in your course means that students can enter the chat room at any time and engage in a chat session. How do you include the transcript of a past chat in your course, without creating an active chat room? The answer is Moodle's Override Roles function.

From the Editing Chat window, select Override roles. By default, the Talk in a chat option is checked only for the Student role. Selecting Prevent for this capability will disable the student's permission to talk in the chat room, while still allowing them to Read chat logs.

One of the keys to a successful foreign language chat is preparing the students' vocabulary. Before starting chat, agree upon the topic with your foreign counterpart. Prepare your students by building their vocabulary in that topic. Also, give the students a list of keystrokes for foreign language characters. Feel free to copy the following table for the benefit of your students.

You can take several approaches for reviewing chat logs. One of the easiest approaches is to have students copy a minimum number of lines from their chat logs into an online assignment and edit these in the assignment window. Or you can copy lines from the various chats yourself and compile them into a document that you ask the students to edit online. This enables you to choose the chat portions that offer the greatest opportunity for learning.

Moodle's Assignment module gives you an easy place to present the transcript and instruct the student to edit it.

In order to copy a chat transcript in Moodle, as you select the text, also select the avatars (pictures) of the participants and the time of each posting. Refer to the screenshot displaying chat transcripts:

You might not want to include the avatars and times in the transcript. To create a copy of the transcript without these, do the following:

Select the part of the chat transcript that you want to copy, as shown in the previous screenshot and follow the procedure:

After you have compiled chat transcripts, you can assign students the task of editing them for spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and logic. This is especially useful in a language course, after your students have participated in a foreign language chat. You can then compile parts of the chat transcripts into an assignment, and have the students find and correct any mistakes that they or their foreign partners made.