Logging Chat Sessions

You may or may not want all Chat room sessions logged in your course. If you have a session that is basically Q&A and not all students can participate because of the synchronous nature of a chat session, you can log the session. Those students who missed it can read the transcript at their leisure. On the other hand, if you set up a Chat room for students to casually chat (as a Student Lounge or whatever) you may not want to log that room.

If you click on the Chat link in the Build tab, you should see the current logging status for your chat rooms in the last column. If Logging is off and you want it logged,

1. On the Build tab select the Chat tool.
2. Select the ActionLink following the Chat room name you want logged and select the Edit Properties option.
3. At the bottom of the options, select the More Options link to expand the options displayed.
4. Under Enable logging, select the Maintain chat room log check box.
5. Click the Save button to save your changes!

When the Chat room page reappears, the final column (Logging) should now be set to "on."

If you want all new Chat rooms to be automatically logged, from the Build or Teach tab, select Manage Course --> Settings --> Chat. Simply set the “Logging is on by default in newly created chat rooms” option to True.

If you want all Chat room logs to automatically be viewable by students you will need to also set the “Allow Students to view chat logs” option to True (also found under Manage Course --> Settings --> Chat). However, you may want to clean up the Chat room logs before posting. Tomorrow’s tip will cover how to edit the log before posting for students to view.