Course communication platforms are new but the need for them is not. This became clear through the difficult transition to remote teaching due to the pandemic. Evidently, efficient course communication plays a large role in student learning whether your course is in-person or online. Course communication has suffered as educators and students have been forced to rely on tools not built for education.

Businesses have software built for them, to serve their needs, via tools like Slack and Teams. Both team communication and course communication are equally important. So, shouldn't educators and students have software built for them? Enter: Course Communication Software.

What is a Course Communication Platform?

A course communication platform (CCP) makes course communication more transparent, organized, and efficient. It's easy to use, offers both asynchronous and synchronous communication, and supports courses of all sizes.

What does a Course Communication Platform do?

You may be thinkingーthis sounds interesting, but what does it actually do for my course? A course communication platform helps foster a better learning experience for students through:

Why Business Communication Software and Discussion Forums aren't enough

Since the shift to online learning, there has been a huge surge in usage for tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Campuswire, and Piazza. But, only Campuswire, Piazza, and Learnshare are built for educators and students. Slack and Teams do not have their incentives aligned with what the needs of educators are.

With Slack and Teams, important questions and class discussions are consistently lost under newer messages. Slack doesn't offer any form of asynchronous communication, eliminating any opportunity for in-depth and detailed discussion. Features desperately needed by educators and students will never be added, as these products aren’t meant to serve the needs of higher education or cohort-based courses.

Piazza is a Q&A platform built for higher education that lacks a few things that a course communication platform needs. To start, Piazza doesn't offer synchronous communication (real-time chat) or have a very modern user experience. For this reason, there's far less overall participation on Piazza versus a course communication platform as student collaboration is limited to just Q&A.

Real-time chat allows for students to develop a sense of community within a course. It gives students the confidence to ask questions and engage in discussions without the need to be overly structured. Providing students with a space to discuss their thoughts freely is important, especially for courses that are online or follow a hybrid model.

Campuswire is an online learning and teaching tool built for live online courses. It offers both asynchronous and synchronous communication. Campuswire offers a Zoom-like video tool for live lectures. This allows educators to teach and monetize their online courses with students from around the world. Therefore, although it's a tool built for educators, its main purpose is not for course communication.

Just like Slack exists solely for team communication, course communication deserves products built to serve this specific need in education.

Why Learning Management Systems aren't enough

Learning Management Systems like Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle do have the scattered functionality across their product for enabling effective course communication. But, without willing and consistent student participation, long feature checklists don't matter.

Course communication software has one goal: to make course communication as efficient and as easy as possible. Since it does only one thing, it has to do it really well. Learning management systems by design offer so much functionality for all things learning and teaching. So much to the point where they can't optimize their product for this one specific benefit like a course communication platform does.

Getting Started With Course Communication Software

The beauty of course communication platforms is that they’re so easy to use, you can even pick one up and start using it in the middle of your course! For example, with Learnshare, you can go from sign-up to creating your course and inviting students in under 5 minutes. No time-consuming onboarding required!

A course communication tool should not feel like a chore to use for educators or students. It improves course communication, transparency, and increases student collaboration. It supports courses of all sizes and benefits every type of course, whether online or in-person. Education deserves solutions built for the needs of both educators and studentsーand course communication software is exactly that.

If you’re interested in seeing what a course communication platform can do, you can sign up and create your course on Learnshare for free.

Course communication platforms are new but the need for them is not. This became clear through the difficult transition to remote teaching due to the pandemic. Evidently, efficient course communication plays a large role in student learning whether your course is in-person or online. Course communication has suffered as educators and students have been forced to rely on tools not built for education.

Businesses have software built for them, to serve their needs, via tools like Slack and Teams. Both team communication and course communication are equally important. So, shouldn't educators and students have software built for them? Enter: Course Communication Software.

What is a Course Communication Platform?

A course communication platform (CCP) makes course communication more transparent, organized, and efficient. It's easy to use, offers both asynchronous and synchronous communication, and supports courses of all sizes.

What does a Course Communication Platform do?

You may be thinkingーthis sounds interesting, but what does it actually do for my course? A course communication platform helps foster a better learning experience for students through:

Why Business Communication Software and Discussion Forums aren't enough

Since the shift to online learning, there has been a huge surge in usage for tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Campuswire, and Piazza. But, only Campuswire, Piazza, and Learnshare are built for educators and students. Slack and Teams do not have their incentives aligned with what the needs of educators are.

With Slack and Teams, important questions and class discussions are consistently lost under newer messages. Slack doesn't offer any form of asynchronous communication, eliminating any opportunity for in-depth and detailed discussion. Features desperately needed by educators and students will never be added, as these products aren’t meant to serve the needs of higher education or cohort-based courses.

Piazza is a Q&A platform built for higher education that lacks a few things that a course communication platform needs. To start, Piazza doesn't offer synchronous communication (real-time chat) or have a very modern user experience. For this reason, there's far less overall participation on Piazza versus a course communication platform as student collaboration is limited to just Q&A.

Real-time chat allows for students to develop a sense of community within a course. It gives students the confidence to ask questions and engage in discussions without the need to be overly structured. Providing students with a space to discuss their thoughts freely is important, especially for courses that are online or follow a hybrid model.

Campuswire is an online learning and teaching tool built for live online courses. It offers both asynchronous and synchronous communication. Campuswire offers a Zoom-like video tool for live lectures. This allows educators to teach and monetize their online courses with students from around the world. Therefore, although it's a tool built for educators, its main purpose is not for course communication.

Just like Slack exists solely for team communication, course communication deserves products built to serve this specific need in education.

Why Learning Management Systems aren't enough

Learning Management Systems like Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle do have the scattered functionality across their product for enabling effective course communication. But, without willing and consistent student participation, long feature checklists don't matter.

Course communication software has one goal: to make course communication as efficient and as easy as possible. Since it does only one thing, it has to do it really well. Learning management systems by design offer so much functionality for all things learning and teaching. So much to the point where they can't optimize their product for this one specific benefit like a course communication platform does.

Getting Started With Course Communication Software

The beauty of course communication platforms is that they’re so easy to use, you can even pick one up and start using it in the middle of your course! For example, with Learnshare, you can go from sign-up to creating your course and inviting students in under 5 minutes. No time-consuming onboarding required!

A course communication tool should not feel like a chore to use for educators or students. It improves course communication, transparency, and increases student collaboration. It supports courses of all sizes and benefits every type of course, whether online or in-person. Education deserves solutions built for the needs of both educators and studentsーand course communication software is exactly that.

If you’re interested in seeing what a course communication platform can do, you can sign up and create your course on Learnshare for free.

This article will discuss all things blended learning and provide you with a step-by-step guide for implementing it in your course.

Blended learning has become increasingly popular in higher education over the last few years. So, we wanted to provide a resource for those who are looking to implement blended pedagogical methods into their courses.

Now let's get started!

What is Blended Learning?

Blended or “hybrid” learning incorporates online or remote teaching with traditional teaching methods. Through leveraging technology, there’s a blend of teacher-led and student-driven learning.

An example of a blended learning activity is having discussions about a required reading online. Students can discuss the reading amongst each other using an LMS forum or Learnshare.

Here are some more examples of how face-to-face activities can be tweaked to support a blended learning environment.

Benefits of Blended Learning in Higher Education

In a study conducted with a blended class design and traditional class design, 78% of students recommended that the instructor continues to use the blended approach. Below are some additional benefits of blended course design:

Student Benefits from Blended Learning:

• Self-paced and student-centered learning
• Students learn from each other
• Increased student participation and collaboration
• Higher satisfaction with the learning experience

Instructor Benefits from Blended Learning:

• Increased course efficiency
• Improved student learning outcomes

Risks of Blended Learning

There are two main risks of incorporating a blended learning approach into your course:

1. Choosing the wrong technology, and
2. Not allocating enough time to ensure students are comfortable with each tool

To help reduce these risks, it’s necessary to make sure you’re using technology not for the sake of using technology but for a specific benefit. Technology is a tool, not a solution. The outcome you’re looking for should be defined before you decide what tool(s) you want to use in your course. Every tool should play a particular role in improving some aspect of your course.

Pro tip: In the study mentioned before, there was one main weakness mentioned by students about blended course design. It was the "difficulty of learning on their own and not being able to immediately ask questions if they were unsure about the material.” Course communication tools like Learnshare help solve this problem. With designated topics for questions and chatrooms, students always have a place to collaborate and get feedback.

Free Tools & Resources For Implementing Blended Learning

1. Poll Everywhere
   

Poll Everywhere provides a platform for every student to ask questions, participate in group activities, and share thoughts and insights, right from their phone or computer.

Blended Learning with Poll Everywhere

A polling tool opens up the opportunity for creating both a blended classroom and an active learning environment. With Poll Everywhere, you can embed interactive activities directly into your lecture or presentation. You can ask questions about the course material to help gauge student understanding. Students will then have the opportunity to respond on the web or on their phones and you can see the results in real-time.

2. Discord, Slack, & Teams

I’ve grouped these tools together as they all offer similar opportunities for creating a blended classroom. The main benefit of these products in higher education is that they offer fast, synchronous communication through real-time chat. With it, students can get answers to quick questions they have from instructors and their peers.

Blended Learning with Discord, Slack, & Teams

Real-time chat improves student participation and collaboration drastically. With real-time chat, questions that may have been saved for in-class discussions are now sent over direct message or in a designated chatroom for questions.

Pro tip: This should not be used as a replacement for a discussion board. Important discussions, questions, and announcements are easily buried beneath other chats. The benefits of having both a discussion forum and real-time chat cannot be understated.

3. Socrative

Quizzes, surveys, team activities, and content from educators around the world – all in one easy-to-use assessment tool.

Blended Learning with Socrative

With Socrative, you can bring short quizzes online at the beginning or end of each lecture. You can see student answers in real-time which helps gauge the comprehension of an assignment or lecture. Responses are saved online so that you can better understand how student command over course material is changing.

4. Learnshare

Learnshare is a course communication platform that uniquely combines the benefits of chat tools like Slack with long-form discussions like an LMS forum. All course discussions, resources, and announcements are in one place. Learnshare works as the default “hub” where your course lives online.

Blended Learning with Learnshare

With Learnshare, you have the same opportunity as with Slack, Discord, and Teams to create a blended classroom using real-time chat. All of your questions and discussions are also neatly organized in topics defined by you so that it fits your course and makes sense to students!

7 Steps to Implementing Blended Learning in Your Course

Measuring the Success of Your Blended Course Design

You can measure success in a couple of ways. If you’re teaching many of the same courses, you have the opportunity to experiment and learn what students find most beneficial.

You can have one course be your “control” and one your “experiment”. In the control, your course can function as normal. In the experiment, you can implement a blended course design leveraging one or several different tools. You can measure the results of the different course designs from student performance and feedback. Gathering student feedback as much as possible is essential.

If you’re teaching both a traditional and a blended course, you can survey students on an ongoing basis. This includes before the course starts, during, and after the course completes. You should be using the same questions so that you can track the following over time:

Final Thoughts

A blended learning environment provides significant benefits to both instructors and students. But, it's important to note that simply using technology is not enough. You have to be using the right technology. It has to fit your course. Your teaching style. It has to be easy and not complicated for students to use. Since online learning asks more of students than traditional learning methods, you have to be listening to student feedback as often as possible.

Questions? Get in touch on Twitter.

In an era that is becoming increasingly remote, efficient and organized course communication is more important than ever before. Chat tools and discussion forums have become standard across both higher education and cohort-based courses. To make the most of this transition online, you’re going to need the right platform to back you up.

In this article, you can take a look at how Slack and Learnshare compare, how they perform and discover which is right for your course.

Learnshare’s all-in-one Course Communication Platform vs Slack: An Overview

The best course communication tools organize all questions, announcements, and discussions in one place. It provides a place for both formal and informal participation, lowering the barrier of engagement and increasing student collaboration. Ideally, you want a platform that’s built to serve educators and combines all your course communication channels into one place.

Learnshare

Learnshare is a free course communication platform made for educators and students. It combines synchronous real-time chat with an intuitive asynchronous discussion forum, providing both topic-based discussion and chat rooms. This ensures that all course information is neatly organized and easily searchable.

Through this combination, courses utilizing Learnshare can see drastic increases in student engagement and collaboration. Also, setting up your Learnshare course takes just a few minutes!

Slack

Slack is a business communication tool. It’s built for businesses and teams to collaborate in one workspace rather than email. Slack offers real-time instant messaging via channel-based discussion rooms and direct messaging.

Since Slack was created for teams and enterprises, its pricing and business model reflect that. For this reason, most courses are forced to rely on Slack’s free plan. This is a problem as the free plan limits storage and the search history of messages. Therefore, important questions and discussions from earlier in your course will not be accessible after you reach your Slack workspaces messaging limit unless you upgrade.

Learnshare vs Slack: A comparison of features and tools

In this section, we’ll be comparing Learnshare’s features to those of Slack’s. Both Learnshare and Slack offer:

Only Learnshare offers:

Now, let’s take a deeper look into the core features of these two products.

Topic-based Chatrooms

Learnshare offers similar chat functionality as Slack. All course discussions and questions can be asked in chatrooms defined by the course instructor, ensuring that students have a specific space to collaborate in when needed.

Although real-time chat provides a ton of benefits for course communication, it does have its shortcomings. For example, chatrooms are known to be noisy. This means that important questions, discussions, and course announcements can get buried under newer messages. This is especially true in courses that are fully online, have a large number of students, or have a lot of student engagement. For this reason, Learnshare also includes a modern and easy-to-use discussion forum.

Discussion Forum

Learnshare uniquely combines an intuitive discussion forum along with real-time chat. Slack, as mentioned, only offers chat-based messaging. Learnshare also provides Topics. Topics are asynchronous spaces for all members of your course to share ideas and collaborate.

Discussion posts follow the traditional post, comment, and reply functionality that is seen across most social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn, for example.

Learnshare’s forum for discussion and Q&A provides an organized archive of all course content. The benefits of a discussion forum, from increasing student collaboration to its impact on student learning, cannot be understated.

Students need to be able to find and access answers to past questions as the course progresses. This is why a heavy reliance on Slack can lead to inefficiencies and feel overwhelming. As more messages are sent, important course information will get lost as there are simply too many chats to search through and manage.

We also offer instructor post notifications. Every time an instructor posts a question, discussion, or announcement in a topic, all members of the course will be notified. This helps ensure that no important course information goes unnoticed.

Choosing the right communication platform for your course

Before deciding on a communication platform, you’ll want to think about your goals for the course and what you want out of the tool you’re going to use. Consider the features you need, how you’re going to use it, and how it impacts student learning. The best platform will be the one that aligns your needs as an educator with your course as a whole.

Asking the following questions could help make the decision clearer:

1. How many students do you have in your course?

• If you have a large number of students in your course, Slack may become too noisy and difficult to effectively manage.

2. Is your course in-person, online, or does it follow a hybrid model?

3. How are you planning to use either tool?

4. Are you currently satisfied with the communication tool you’re using?

Why Learnshare is the best choice for your course

Made for learning and teaching

Learnshare was created to specifically serve educators and students. We only succeed when you do. Slack, on the other hand, was created for the needs of businesses and teams. Like businesses have software built for them, educators and students deserves to benefit from products built for them as well.

Easy to use

Learnshare’s modern and intuitive design makes it incredibly easy to get started with. You’ll go from signing up to creating your course and inviting students in less than 5 minutes!

Creates an archive of knowledge

Looking back on older course material and re-familiarizing oneself with the correct information is a key part of the learning experience. With Learnshare, students will be able to filter through older course information efficiently, finding exactly what they need whenever they need it.

Summary

Both Slack and Learnshare are powerful platforms that can provide many benefits for your course. However, Learnshare’s unique combination of chatrooms and a modern discussion forum make it extremely versatile. Being a course communication platform, Learnshare is designed and regularly updated with only educators and students in mind. Slack can't say the same.

All things considered, Slack is a feature-rich and well-designed product that can work for your course. But, even those that have used Slack for years may be surprised by the experience Learnshare can provide in comparison.

Ready to sign up and see what Learnshare can do for you? Create your course for free here.

Learnshare Basics

Learnshare is a course communication platform. It makes course communication more transparent, organized, and efficient. Through leveraging both asynchronous and synchronous communication, you can do away with all other tools you use for course communication. This includes your discussion forum, Slack, and even email!

Learnshare streamlines course communication through both Topics and Chats:

Here, we’ll show you how to set up your course in Learnshare’s secure, course communication platform. With this guide, you'll see how easy it is to set up your virtual digital classroom in under 5 minutes!

Setting up your Course

Create your course after signing up for Learnshare.

Create your course Topics

Course topics are where all course announcements, discussions, and Q&A are organized and archived. Every post, comment, and answer within your topics are easily searchable by keyword, ensuring that students can access the information they need, whenever they need it. Rather than spending countless hours every week answering student questions in siloed email chains, everyone in your course can now collaborate directly in the appropriate topic.

Your topic names should be relevant and easily understood by all members of your course. They should help inform everyone what the topic is for and what they should or shouldn’t be posting in it.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to start off more broad with your initial topics so that when students first join your course, it’s easier to get oriented. Then, as your course progresses and more specific conversations happen outside of the scope of topics you’ve already created, you can add more topics for these conversations organically.

When creating a topic, you can also add a topic description to help further explain what the topic is for and how it should be used! When you first create your course, we create some default topics for you. These topics are General, Introductions, and Announcements.

We provide three setting options for topics: Open, Read-only, and Instructor-only:

Create your course Chats

Just like topics, you can create course-wide chatrooms for members to collaborate in real-time. We create a default "General" chat for you. Chats have the same two setting options as topics.

Chats help reduce the need for email by allowing you and students to collaborate in real-time. With chat, it’s possible for messages to get buried under newer messages as your course becomes more active. So, chats are best used for informal discussions and quick questions rather than in-depth discussions or Q&A, which are better suited for topics.

Inviting Students

Invite students through course settings via the gear icon in the top left margin of your course.

Learnshare creates a custom invite link found in your course settings. Simply share the invite link with everyone you want to provide access with to your course. The most common way to do this is by sending an email with the link to your class roster and any other instructors you have in your course.

Once students sign up for Learnshare and click your course invite link, they'll be automatically given access to your course. If they're not already signed up for Learnshare and click the link without an account, Learnshare will direct them to the registration page and once they sign up they'll be added to your course immediately.

For your security, course invite links expire after 30 days. If someone tries to join your course with the expired link, they will be told to contact the course instructor for the updated link. Your course invite link should be kept private only be shared with those who you want to have access to your course.

Using Learnshare in your Course

Welcoming Students & Setting Course Guidelines

Once you’ve created your course topics, chats, and have invited students, you’re ready to use Learnshare! To ensure that both you and students get the most out of your course, you’ll want to set clear expectations for how Learnshare should be used.

Here are some tips for making communication more efficient with Learnshare:

Pro Tip: Before inviting students, make sure to pin your welcome post and include any information that could help students get started with your Learnshare course. This could include information about your discussion guidelines or first steps they should take after joining!

When to post in Topics versus Chats

Topics, being asynchronous, can be used in times where there's no expectation for an immediate response. This helps ensure that all members of the course are able to use Learnshare efficiently as there's no urgent pressure to drop what they're doing to respond.

Chats, being synchronous, can be used in times where there's a time-constraint for a response or answer. For example, a direct message can be used in place of email so that a student can get an answer to their question while putting the final touches on a project before submitting.

Members of your course can also ask themselves the following questions to help make the answer more clear:

• Will I want access to this information later?
• Will other members of the course want access to this information later?

If the answer to either of the above questions is yes, it’s likely a good idea to choose to post within a topic rather than a chat. This way, the content of the post and its comments or answers will be archived and easily accessible in the future.

Posting in Topics

There are two different post types you use within topics: Discussions and Questions. Both can be upvoted by members of your course. Upvotes can be used as a way to show support for a question or discussion.

Discussions are similar to the post, comment, and reply functionality that would see on a Facebook or LinkedIn post. They support comments, replies, and likes.

Questions have answers rather than comments. Questions uniquely have one of two labels assigned to them: resolved and unresolved. By default, when a new question is posted it will be automatically marked as unresolved. This allows for everyone in the course to easily see what questions still need answers. Once a question receives the correct answer, course instructors can then toggle the "unresolved" label to "resolved" to keep their course organized.

Notifications

Learnshare offers both in-app and email notifications to help everyone stay connected. Notifications will be created for comments, replies, and mentions.

Mentions

Mentions allow you to tag individual members or all members of your course at once. For example, by adding @everyone in your post, you will send the post as an email and in-app notification to everyone in your course. You can use @ mentions and notifications to ensure that no important information or announcement goes unnoticed. Mentions are supported in both topics and chats.

Pinning

Instructors can “pin” important posts at the top of a topic. With pins, students have fast and easy access to important course information at their fingertips.

Course Links

Instructors can create course links in the bottom left margin of their course. Course links can be used as a way to provide quick access to important course materials and resources.

Course Settings

Managing Your Course

All your course settings are managed through the gear icon located in the top left of your course. As an instructor, you can delete any post, comment, reply, or chat in your courseーeven if it’s not your own. Students only have the ability to delete their own.

Pro Tip: Don't worry about trying to make every small detail perfect before inviting students. You can continue to make changes and improve your course as it evolves naturally over time!

Summary

Your Learnshare course helps act as a virtual classroom where all members of your course can collaborate without ever having to step foot into a classroom. Through leveraging the power of both topics and chats, you’ll be able to improve communication in your course with ease.

Questions about Learnshare? Send me an email or get in touch on Twitter.

Efficient and effective course communication is more important than ever. In this article, we’ll go over 8 options you have for improving communication in your course. Let’s get started!

Use a course communication tool

Although asynchronous channels like email and discussion boards work, they're far from optimal. The simplest way to improve communication is to combine all communication channels into one place, rather than using multiple tools. This helps ensure that all important course information is easily accessible to students at all times. Some options for course communication are Slack, Discord, and Learnshare. You can read more about course communication platforms here.

Create and share course communication guidelines

It’s important to set clear expectations for how your communication tool of choice should be used. For example, have students make the extra effort to eliminate repetitive questions. Ask students to search through past questions and discussions before creating a new post or sending a message to ensure a similar question hasn't already been asked and answered.

You can also ask students to distinguish between urgent and non-urgent questions before posting. For non-urgent questions, have students post them publicly in a chatroom or in your discussion forum for other students to have a chance to answer. For urgent or personal questions, you can have students send you a private direct message.

Welcome and onboard students to your course

Introductions

Pro Tip: The faster and higher amount of responses students get on their posts, the better. Receiving quick responses helps students feel more welcome and willing to participate. Making the effort as an instructor to respond promptly and engage with students can help establish a strong community-like foundation in your course.

Create a searchable knowledge base (FAQ)

If you use a tool that supports asynchronous posting and commenting, you can give students a resource to reference throughout your course. You can also continue to update and add information to it organically as your course progresses!

Virtual office hours

If you’re using a tool that offers real-time chat like Slack, Discord, or Learnshare, you can schedule time with students for virtual office hours. For example, with Learnshare you can create a chatroom specifically for questions during office hours.

During office hours, students can send questions in the chatroom and instructors can reply directly in real-time. Since messages are easily searchable by keyword, every student will have access to the same information and can reference the material whenever needed.

Provide extra credit for participation and answering other student questions

This can be a great option for increasing peer-to-peer collaboration and reducing your workload as an instructor. Give students the chance to answer each other’s non-urgent questions first. You’ll then be able to save time by simply verifying or endorsing correct answers, rather than answering them all yourself!

An additional benefit of having students answer each other's questions is that you'll get a better idea about where your class as a whole may be struggling with course material.

Encourage informal participation and collaboration

Graded and structured discussions do have their place. But, providing a space for students to engage with each other without having to worry about perfect grammar or receiving a grade will lead to more consistent participation.

The more students have fun and feel comfortable engaging with one another, the more they'll want to collaborate. Although this may seem less important on the surface, it can drastically impact how much students take away from the course.

A great way to reap the benefits from this is using synchronous chatrooms—rather than an asynchronous forum or discussion board. The reason for this being that real-time chat is faster and lowers the barrier for participation. This allows for a more free-flowing, organic conversation.

Looking for a new tool?

If you’re looking for a tool that can help make course communication more efficient, Learnshare can help. It’s a unique course communication platform that combines the benefits of both asynchronous and synchronous discussion into one tool. Through leveraging both a forum and real-time chat, there’s an unlimited amount of ways that you can use Learnshare in your course. Create your course for free here.

The positive impact of engaging course discussions and Q&A has become extremely clear with the shift to online and remote learning. There are many tools available that can be used as a course forum and for ongoing course discussion. In this article, we’ll take deep a look into both Piazza and Learnshare to see how they compare and discover which is right for your course.

Learnshare’s all-in-one Course Communication Platform vs Piazza: An Overview

The best course communication tools organize all course communication and information into one place. This includes questions, announcements, and discussions. They provide a place for both formal and informal participation, lowering the barrier of engagement and increasing student collaboration.

Ideally, you want your communication platform to not be limited to just Q&A or chat, but to combine both so that all online collaboration is in one place. This ensures that important course information isn't scattered across different tools where it can be lost or difficult to find.

Piazza

Piazza is a free-to-use Q&A platform. Student questions each have their own folder so that there’s a place to go when there's a question about a specific topic. But, a major downside of Piazza is that its functionality as a course communication tool is quite limited as it's mainly used for only Q&A.

Learnshare

It combines synchronous, Slack-like real-time chat with an intuitive asynchronous discussion forum. It also provides topic-based discussion spaces just like Piazza folders. This ensures that all course information is neatly organized in one place and easily searchable.

This unique combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication poses many benefits such as increasing student collaboration and participation.

Learnshare vs Piazza: A comparison of features and tools

In this section, we’ll be comparing Learnshare’s features to those of Piazza’s. Both Learnshare and Piazza offer the following:

Chatrooms and Direct Messaging: Why are they important?

Speed & Convenience

If you’ve used Slack or Microsoft Teams chat functionality before, you’re likely familiar with the advantages it provides in course communication. If you’ve never used a real-time chat app before, you may be surprised by the impact it can have on the student learning experience.

Email is notoriously clunky and over-reliance can quickly lead to an increase in your weekly workload. With real-time chat, you can replace email in your course completely. No longer do student questions live in siloed email chains. Students can ask questions in course-wide chatrooms or a direct message and get answers quickly in real-time.

Increases participation & peer-to-peer collaboration

Traditional asynchronous post and comment functionality has its benefits. It helps act as an archive for ongoing questions and discussions. But, creating in-depth posts and discussion questions requires a much larger investment than sending a message or chat. For example, a post requires a title, body, and proper formatting. It also demands a much larger mental contribution because once you post it, it’s there forever.

Participating in a chatroom discussion removes the mental barrier for contributing. In a chatroom, messages are buried under one another, allowing students to not worry about what they post as much. The conversation is ongoing, helping students feel comfortable jumping in and out of the conversation.

With chats, all that’s needed is text. No formatting or title required. Also, a formal post simply isn’t always needed or the best choice for communication. For example, does the question of “when is the next assignment due?” need to be a post or email?

Builds a community of learners

Students should feel comfortable asking questions and engaging with everyone in the course. The more comfortable they feel, the more they’ll participate. With course-wide chatrooms, course discussions are no longer a chore due to it lacking the structure of a traditional forum.

With real-time chat, communication is far more informal and aligned with what everyday online communication looks and feels like for students. With topic-based chatrooms, course discussion is more organic, free-flowing, and ongoing.

Choosing the right communication tool for your course

Before deciding on a communication platform, you’ll want to think about your goals for the course and what you want out of the tool you’re going to use. Consider the features you need, how you’re going to use it, and how it impacts student learning. The best platform will be the one that aligns your needs as an educator with your course as a whole.

Asking the following questions could help make the decision clearer:

1. How important is peer-to-peer collaboration and participation in your course?

2. Are you relying too heavily on email?

3. Is course communication spread across too many tools?

4. What are you looking to get out of the tool(s) you’re using?

5. Are you currently satisfied with the communication tool you’re using?

Why Learnshare is the best choice for your course

Combine all your communication channels into one place

No longer is course information scattered across different tools. Everything will be easily accessible to all students so that they can access the information they need quickly.

Get the benefits of a forum and real-time time chat

Both discussion boards and chatroom-based tools have their unique benefits. Discussion boards work great for archiving important questions and answers. Chat tools help break down mental barriers and allow students to feel more comfortable engaging.

But, the combination of using something like your LMS forum or Piazza and Slack creates confusion for students regarding what to use and when to use it. Instead, you can use a tool that combines the best of both in one place. This will eliminate confusion and any communication gaps created from using multiple tools.

Build a community of learners and increase participation

Chatrooms and direct messaging have many benefits. But, the community-building aspect is by far the most powerful. When students are comfortable engaging with everyone in the course, the impact on collaboration and learning can be significant.

Every time a student posts a question or engages in a discussion where they wouldn't have in a traditional Q&A platform, it gives the next student the confidence to do the same.

Summary

Both Learnshare and Piazza are useful tools that can pose many benefits in your course. Piazza is a reliable Q&A platform that's been used in higher education for years. Learnshare is an all-in-one course communication platform. It's incredibly versatile, easy to use, and assists in creating an environment of consistent student participation and collaboration. Even those who’ve been using Piazza may be surprised by the impact Learnshare can have in comparison.

Ready to sign up and see what Learnshare can do for you? Create your course for free here.

Topics are spaces for all members of your course to share ideas and collaborate. If you’ve used Slack or Discord, you’re likely familiar with them. If not, that’s no issue at all - they’re quite simple to get the hang of!

Benefits of Topics

Organizes your course

Topics provide structure and clarity to your course. You can add as many or as little as you’d like ー structuring your course in a way that makes sense for your course and your students. When you have topics that work for your course, there’s a place to go for everything. Both you and your students can focus on the discussions and course material that matters most.

Keeps everyone on the same page

Topics give everyone a shared view of ongoing discussions and Q&A. Every student has full access to the same information helping to increase transparency in your course.

Ongoing searchable archive

As your course progresses, more and more discussions and questions will be posted. Since topics are easily searchable, your topics become more useful over time. Students can find the information they need, whenever they need it.

Naming Topics

Your topic names should be relevant and easily understood by all members of your course. The name of a topic should help inform members of what the topic is for and what they should or shouldn’t be posting in it.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to start off more broad with your first few topics so that when students first join your course, it’s easy to get oriented. Topics such as "Homework Questions" and "Exam Questions" are common. Then, as your course progresses and more specific conversations are started outside of the scope of topics you’ve already created, you can add more topics for these conversations organically.

Pro Tip: When creating a topic, you can also add a topic description to help further explain what the topic is for and how it should be used!

Topic Settings

With Learnshare, there are three different types of topics:

1. Access to all: Everyone in the course has access
2. Read-only: Everyone in the course has access, but only instructors can post
3. Instructor-only: Only visible and accessible to instructors

Creating and Managing Topics

To create a topic, click the white + in the left margin of your course. You can add a topic name, description, and choose the type of topic you'd like to create.

To manage your topics, go to your course settings via the gear icon in the top left of your course. From here, you can delete or edit topics as needed.

Questions about topics? Send me an email.

This article discusses teaching tools, tips, & best practices for higher education and cohort-based courses.

Email is the default communication medium between instructors and students. But, it actually isn’t needed at all. By using the right tools and setting clear communication guidelines with students, email can be a thing of the past. Choosing to reduce email and using a different tool for course communication leads to many benefits for both you and your students. These benefits include increased student engagement, learning, and countless time saved.

With the rise of distance and online learning due to the pandemic, it's more important than ever to be using the right tools. This article will explore the best free resources available in higher education for both improving course communication as well as the benefits your course receives from these tools.

Email Isn't Optimal For Teaching or Course Communication

To start, email works fine for communicating directly with students. There’s no arguing that. But, just because it works, doesn’t mean that it’s optimal.

For example, here are some common risks associated with heavy reliance on email:

Even if you haven't run into any of the above examples, there's still the opportunity cost of email versus other tools that you have to consider. This means that although email may work fine for you, other tools can still provide more value in comparison.

For example, a common combination of communication tools outside of the classroom is email & the LMS discussion board. When the discussion board is used for student Q&A, questions that are usually sent to instructors through email are instead posted there. This provides a couple of key benefits. Students answer each other's questions, which saves the instructor time. Additionally, student command over course material increases through peer-to-peer learning.

Benefits of Forums & Discussion Boards: Peer-to-Peer Learning

Although some discussion boards can feel like a pain to use due to their dated design & limited functionality, they are effective. Providing a place for students to collaborate and discuss course material online is incredibly valuable.

We know that every student learns at a different pace. For this reason, asynchronous online discussions are key for improving student learning outcomes. Here’s a brief summary of a study that shows the benefits of online discussion forums in higher education:

“By transferring discussions to an online environment, opportunities for learning from each other have improved. Data suggests that students perform better in an environment where a mixture of classroom and online technologies is employed and there is no decay in the interest on the topic. In general, students perceived improvement in learning because of the online environment and appreciated the opportunities it has provided for a deeper understanding of content-based issues, appreciation of multiple views, and reflection of their own learning and perceptions.”

Another study conducted based on students’ use of the Moodle LMS discussion board found that “online discussion boards are effective in influencing the performance of the enrolled students", and that students:

• Performed better on exams
• Were more confident about their performances on exams
• Were more engaged in the course
• Were more likely to recommend the course to others, and
• Were more satisfied with the learning experience

The benefits of an asynchronous discussion board are huge. Yet, there’s even more potential to improve online communication and collaboration. This is through utilizing a real-time, synchronous communication tool. The combination of these two tools is extremely effective. With a synchronous tool, there’s a place for short-form discussions and quick questions. With an asynchronous tool, there's a place for detailed ideas, discussions, and questions.

By giving students the opportunity to collaborate, ask questions, and engage with other learners, they'll feel more connected to the course and more empowered to learn.

Blending Asynchronous & Synchronous Communication Online

As we’ve covered, the two main ways in which instructors & students engage with one another are email and a discussion forum. Although these options work, they’re both asynchronous. This hurts student participation and engagement. This is where synchronous tools that offer real-time chat can be beneficial. Some of these tools are Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams.

These tools enable fast, synchronous communication between users. Due to the nature of chat tools, the mental barrier that exists for participation is lowered dramatically. Being less formal than traditional forums opens up students to participating more often. If you don't use a discussion forum, it’s common to think that this type of tool isn’t needed. But, real-time chat actually benefits all instructors in every course.

The tools listed above are not built for higher education. But, the value that real-time chat offers in the academic setting is huge. With real-time chat, email is no longer the default option for quick questions in your course.

Direct messaging and group chats allow for fast, short-form communication that traditionally only exists in class or through live video chats. With real-time chat, student engagement increases, and far less time is spent on email.

Tools For Reducing Email & Improving Course Communication

To reduce email, it’s important to use the right tool(s) for your course. LMS discussion boards work fine. But, they’re not very intuitive and commonly feel like a pain to use. Other forum options for online discussions include Piazza, Reddit, and Learnshare.

1. Piazza

Piazza works great for providing structure for student questions. Class assignments each have their own folder so that students have a place to go when they have a question about a specific topic. But, a major downside of Piazza is that its functionality as a course course communication tool is quite limited as it's mainly used for only Q&A.

2. Reddit

Reddit is another option, which surprisingly works well as a course forum. Students are familiar with it and it’s easy to use. Although Reddit does have a more intuitive feel, it is a social media site. This means that it’s missing some important features for college courses and can cause frequent distractions.

If you’re interested in giving Reddit a try, make sure to select the private community setting when creating the course. This makes sure that class discussions are visible only to instructors and students.

3. Learnshare

Learnshare is a course communication platform that combines the benefits of real-time chat tools like Slack with long-form post and comment functionality like Piazza & Reddit. With Learnshare, all course discussions, resources, and announcements are all in one place. It works as the default “hub” where your course lives online.

4. Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams

Slack, Discord, and Teams are very well-designed and have a few key features that are valuable. This includes direct messaging, voice chat, and push notifications for important announcements. There are a few limitations associated with these options though. For example, there may be a bit of a learning curve involved for less tech-savvy users.

Course discussions can also be buried and lost under newer messages. So, if you’re going to use one of these tools, it’s best to consider using another tool as well for long-form discussions and questions. This way, all important course information is archived and organized.

Guidelines For Improving Course Communication & Eliminating Email

Eliminating email in your course requires more than just the proper use of the right tool(s). You must also establish clear guidelines about course communication with your students. An approach proven to be effective is defining course communication guidelines in the syllabus.

These guidelines commonly include:

Eliminating email requires a direct approach to making communication as efficient as possible. Using both a real-time chat tool and a forum for long-form course discussions is common. This way, quick questions have their place through direct messaging and real-time chat. Important class discussions are organized and easily searchable in your discussion forum.

With these tools, students can find answers to questions while consistently engaging with other students. Email is no longer the default communication medium. Using two communication tools works. But, it can create unnecessary communication gaps in your class as course resources are scattered. This is where an all-in-one course communication platform that offers both real-time chat and a course forum like Learnshare can help.

Deciding What’s Right For Your Course

There’s plenty of options out there for improving course communication. But, not all are right for you.

It’s important to take the following into consideration before making a decision:

1. What is your goal for using the tool(s)?
2. In what ways does it improve your course?
3. How will it affect student learning?
4. How easy is it to use for both you and students? 
5. Does adding this tool to your course make communication more or less efficient?
6. Are you using too many different tools & creating communication gaps?

Looking for a new tool?

If you’re considering leveraging real-time chat or a more intuitive course discussion forum, you should consider a course communication platform. Course communication software is incredibly easy to get started with and something you and your students will want to use. Our course communication tool, Learnshare, combines the best of tools like Slack, Piazza, and Reddit into one. Create your course for free here.

Questions? Send me an email.