Before the first chat, consider giving your students a short handout with some basic etiquette instructions. You can even include these in the chat announcement. Following are some of the sample instructions:

"Start and end on time" is good advice for any class. For an online chat, it is especially important. If a face-to-face class starts late, you can keep the students engaged with conversation until the class starts. Most students will not walk out of the room, and when class does start, they will be there ready to participate. If an online chat starts late, you will have no idea if a participant has walked away from his/her computer while waiting for the chat to start and if/when he/she will return. In an online chat, a late starting time can make your students lose interest more easily, than in a face-to-face classroom.

You can help prevent this by coming to the chat prepared with some material. This is material which you can use for discussion before the chat begins, but that is not essential for the chat. For example, you might spend a few minutes asking the students about their experience level with online chats, or whether their navigation through the course is clear. Or, you may find some interesting or outrageous trivia about the chat subject, and quiz the students about it until all the participants have arrived.

Moodle's default Chat module lacks some advanced features that you would use to help manage a large chat. For example, some chat applications enable you to "whisper" to another user, that is, to send them a private message. If a student wants to ask a question to the teacher, without interrupting the chat, he/she can whisper that question to the teacher. Some chat applications also have a "raise your hand" function that enables a student to let the moderator know that he/she wants to speak. And for very large chats, the ability to enable only one person at a time to speak is also very useful. As Moodle's chat module is being developed, these capabilities might be added. But for now, the best way to keep a chat under control is to limit the number of participants.

If you must conduct a chat with a large number of participants, here are a few tips for managing the chat:

Students might enter the chat at different times. When a student enters a Moodle chat, that person sees only the transcript going forward; the student doesn't see what has already been said in the chat room. If you have a welcome message for students as they enter the chat, you'll need to repeat it each time a student enters the chat. Keep this message in a text file where you can quickly copy and paste it into your chat window.

If your greeting is several paragraphs long, you should be aware that Moodle's chat window does not recognize the Enter character. Therefore if you paste two or more paragraphs into the chat window, they will be recognized as one long paragraph. Instead, use Shift+Enter to create hard-line breaks between the paragraphs.

Chatting online requires more effort than talking. Limit the chat session to one specific topic or activity and stick to it. Students should come prepared to discuss one topic or complete one task only. As the moderator, you should be prepared to keep the chat on topic. Unless brainstorming and expanding, the topic is part of the chat's goals, you should respond to off topic postings by bringing them back on topic. This lends structure to the chat session and helps students stay focused.

You can insert HTML code into your chat. This is useful for sharing links, embedding graphics, and formatting text in your chat. To insert a link, just type the web address. In a chat, links that you type become automatically clickable. This is shown in the following screenshot:

You can insert images by placing them into the standard HTML image tag. If the image is on the Web, include the full link to the image.