Teaching Citizen Research on Discord: The Platform
In yesterday’s post, I outlined the concept of a course on citizen research that I developed and offered from mid-January to mid-February 2022. The course served as a pilot for the Canadian Centre for Learning (CCL), a new initiative for post-secondary and continuing education dedicated to principles of free expression, open debate, and mutual respect. We are preparing a first round of courses to start in April but together with one colleague, we jumped the queue and into the cold water! For six weeks, I participated in Dr. Angela Durante’s Permaculture Growing on Wednesday evenings and taught Introduction to Citizen Research on Thursday afternoons.
Together with other members of the CCL Technology Committee, I reviewed and assessed a variety of video conferencing and broader communications platforms that might support teaching and learning. I do not have the space and time to go into much detail on the very many options for online learning communities (e.g. edX, Teachable) or learning management systems (e.g. Canvas, Moodle), but I will share some of the characteristics of the video conferencing tools that I considered for my course. The gold standard for most of us was Zoom due to its availability in our home institutions—former home institutions for many in the group who were let go during the fall term or did not get their regular winter contracts due to campus vaccination policies.
Google Meet seems to have slightly better parameters, including free 60-minute meeting times compared to Zoom’s 40 minutes, but the requirement to have a Google account was prohibitive. Webex was a contender but somehow fell off the wagon, possibly due to a perceived gap in usability and lack of a slick factor.
A promising discovery was made in the open-source Jitsi platform, which appears to emulate much of Zoom’s look, feel, and functionality. We now use Jitsi for some meetings. However, we have not tested its stability for groups beyond 5-10 participants. There are some indications that live classes beyond 15-35 (??) participants could become unstable, although the free version is supposed to support unlimited meetings with up to 100 participants each. To participate in a Jitsi call (“conference”), users do not need to create accounts. While there are security features such as locking a meeting and removing participants, in a classroom context knowing your students and actually having a semi-automatic registration option like the one provided by Zoom might be more important than user privacy.
Telegram is widely used among independent thinkers these days. The social media platform is organized into two types of “chats”: one-way “channels” for announcements (with option to enable comments) and two-way “groups” for unlimited messaging between members. Here, registration is replaced by membership in a chat, which does require a Telegram account (see above note regarding Google accounts).
In addition to formatted text, messages can include the typical attachment types (photos, voice recordings, videos, files). A list of each of these attachment types along with a list of links included in chat messages is available to chat members. Thus, when using Telegram for teaching, an instructor could post learning materials within the flow of messages. If posting with some discipline, students should be able to find relevant messages and attachments through the attachment lists or the search function.
Both channels and groups allow for audio and video group calls (“video chats” in groups, “video streaming” in channels). These include screen-sharing and are therefore suitable for live classes. However, a recommended or maximum number of participants is unknown and in my experience, even small video chats can get choppy. Lastly, chats can be grouped into folders for house keeping on the user’s end, e.g. multiple course channels could be sorted into a program folder.
I think the main reason that I did not select Telegram for the Citizen Research course was that I was not fully aware of the options for structuring information that I just described!
As far as streaming apps go, Twitch is among the better-known options. There is a report out about a game design professor using Twitch to teach about Twitch early in the coronavirus pandemic. It seems that the main problem was that the stream could not be restricted to registered students and thus the live chat became unruly and distracting. I did not pursue this option simply because I have only once participated in a Twich stream. In fact, I have never live-streamed, thus Twitch also stands in for other live-streaming options including Facebook and Youtube that could be further explored for teaching online, since they too include live chat as a (limited) feedback mechanism from students to the instructor.
I hope I haven’t completely worn you down before turning to the core subject of this post: my experience using Discord for teaching. Discord is a communication platform first adopted by the online gaming community. It can be used through a web browser, a desktop program, or a mobile app and is currently popular with post-secondary students. The Discord window shown above is organized from left to right and top to bottom. In the top left, the Discord icon provides access to one-on-one messages with other users. The remainder of the left panel shows the icons of each server that the user has joined. I scrambled all but the icons for Dr. Durante’s permaculture server and my “Rebel Academy”, the name I gave on a whim to the server hosting the citizen research course.
With the server selected, the second panel from left shows channels organized into categories. I used categories to simulate a brick-and-mortar academy with entrance, hallways, institutes, classrooms, and a library. Within these optional categories, there are only two types of channels, text channels and voice channels. When a channel such as “cr-101-resources” is selected, the main area of the window shows its contents. The selected text channel is used to share learning materials and associated instructor messages. Another text channel, “cr-101-classroom”, was used as live chat during class sessions, while the voice channel “cr-101-live” was used for video/audio conferencing. Monitoring of the chat was a bit more challenging during class sessions than it is using Zoom’s chat panel.
On the right-hand side of the Discord window, we see the list of online and offline users who joined this server. I erased the user names and icons but you can see 72 individuals signed up for Rebel Academy. One of these is a bot, YAGPDB or Yet Another General Purpose Discord Bot. Bots can be used to add functionality to a server such as automatic moderation, polling, gaming, scheduling, or donations. I used YAGPDB for self-assigned roles. Roles determine the permissions a user has within a server or specific channels. This includes permission to view specific channels, send messages, and interact within voice channels; address user groups across channels; invite others to the server, change their names, and perform other user management tasks; as well as permissions for many other actions.
While Discord has powerful user management for student enrolment and access permissions, and is very well organized in terms of messaging and resource sharing, we ran into a major limitation with using the “go live” function of voice channels for synchronous (live) teaching: There is a limit of 25 participants as soon as one participant, including the instructor, activates their video. While screen sharing with audio-only users is unlimited, it is essential for many instructors to share their own video and be able to see at least some of the participating students. This limitation would be addressed if Discord allowed up to 25 video participants and additional audio-only participants, yet this is not currently possible. It may very well be the case that Discord’s servers would not be able to handle such a setup, as we did experience video and audio quality issues and dropping connections.
While my colleague decided to move her class sessions over to Zoom, I stuck with Discord’s video chat since I had no more than a dozen synchronous participants in any week. Note that video recording is not available within Discord. Instructors and students in the pilot courses were happy with using Discord for class-related communications. However, we did not test another essential feature of learning management systems: assignment submission, grading, and feedback. This could be addressed via direct messaging between student and instructor, but only for very small classes. Otherwise, it may be possible to develop a channel structure and associated permissions in a way to support these functions. Lastly, while enrolment was managed implicit through server invites and assignment of the “CR 101 Student” role, payment of tuition fees would also require more thought. The pilot courses were offered for free, but future iterations within the CCL won’t. It might again be possible to find a bot that can handle e.g. donations to the instructor.
Overall, it was a worthwhile experience testing the Discord app for teaching an innovative course via a novel platform. I may repeat the experience with the improvements sketched above, or combine Discord with class sessions offered via Jitsi, or else move to Telegram for a new experiment. I have already created a Telegram channel for announcements regarding Rebel Academy.