Zulip for instructors

Introduction

Zulip is an online discussion tool with latex support. It has been used by some Aalto teachers as an external service on individual courses. For spring and summer 2021, Zulip was provided by Aalto CS as a pilot solution for all School of Science departments’ course needs. For the autumn 2021 and spring 2022, the pilot at SCI continues and is widened in small scale also for other schools. The pilot refers to a) a fixed-term project with clear lifecycle needs, like in courses which start and end at certain times and after which the Zulip instance can be deleted; b) a transitional period between current state and possible production use or change to other solutions; and c) a basic solution with without all the fancy features or user interface. During the pilot users are expected to provide feedback, which will effect on the decision-making for future solutions, and the development of usability.

CS-IT hosts Zulip the chat instances for you. These chat instances are hosted at <chat-name>.zulip.aalto.fi (or older instances at <chat-name>.zulip.cs.aalto.fi). Login to the chats is available with Aalto accounts. Email registration for external users is also possible via invitations. After logging in for the first time with an Aalto account, if no matching Zulip account was found, you are prompted to “Register” and create one. Once the Zulip account has been created, it should be linked to your Aalto credentials.

Internal or confidential matters should not be discussed on the platform.

Get started / request Zulip

Note

From the academic year 2022-2023, Zulip will be available for all Aalto courses. From July 21th onwards, chat realms can be requested using the new form at https://zulip.aalto.fi/requests/.

Note

If you encounter issues, report them to CS-IT or on #zulip-support at scicomp.zulip.cs.aalto.fi

You can also give/discuss feedback, complaints or suggestions on #zulip-feedback at scicomp.zulip.cs.aalto.fi

Note

You can test out Zulip at testrealm.zulip.cs.aalto.fi. Use the Aalto login. This chat is for testing only.

After you have received the chat instance

Within few days of requesting an instance, you should have gotten details for your chat instance in email. After this you

  • Can login to the chat instance <chat-instance>.zulip.cs.aalto.fi with your Aalto account

  • Should already have the owner role assigned.

  • Can configure the chat instance from (cog wheel in the top-right corner) -> Manage organization

    • Please carefully read the Configuration section before making changes

  • Can appoint more admins/owners (e.g. TAs)

    1. Ask them to login first

    2. Change their role from Manage organization -> Users

Configuring your organization

Below are listed the most important settings found under Manage organization in Zulip. There is no easy way for us to enforce these, so it is your responsibility as organization owner or admin to make sure they are set correctly. Make sure any owners/admins you appoint are aware of these as well.

Note

Settings that are not mentioned here, you can configure to your liking. However you should still exercise care, since you are responsible for the service and safety of your user’s data. If you would like advice, please ask us.

Organization settings / Video chat provider

  • Set to None

  • The default provider (Jitsi) has not been evaluated or approved by Aalto

  • Integration with Aalto Zoom may come later on

Organization permissions / Invitation settings

Do not set both “Organizational Premissions→Invitations = not required” and “Authentication methods→Email = enabled” at the same time.

You can allow signup by Aalto account or any email. You can allow anyone to signup or make it invitation only. But you can not set “Anyone with Aalto account may signup without invitation, but by email you must be invited” (Zulip limitation). So, we have to work around this, otherwise bots and random people might join in your chat. If the chat needs to include external users, make it invite only.

The exact questions and answers:

  • Are invitations required for joining in the organization?

    • If you are only allowing Aalto Login (see ‘Authentication methods’): Can be set to No,… (But still, anyone with Aalto account can join)

    • If you are allowing external users/email registration (see ‘Authentication methods’ below): Set to Yes, only admins can send invitations. (You can invite people via their Aalto email address for Aalto login)

Organization permissions / Who can access user email addresses

  • Set this to Admins only or Nobody

Organization permissions / Who can add bots

  • Set to Admins only

  • Consult CS-IT before deploying any bots

Authentication methods

  • AzureAD

    • This is Aalto Login and should be enabled

  • Email

    • This allows users to register using an email address

    • We cannot allow random people or bots to register freely

    • If you enable this, make the chat invitation only as described in ‘Invitation settings’ above, for the reason described there.

Users

  • You can manage users here.

  • Please be careful with who you assign admins/owners. These roles should be only given to course staff.

  • The “moderator” role can has extra permissions assigned, such as managing streams and renaming topics. This could be good for course staff/TAs.

Other settings, up to you

  • You allow messages to be edited longer using Settings → Organization Settings. It is often useful to set this to a longer period.

Practical hints

There is a fine line between a discussion platform and chat, normal chat and topic-based chat, and chaos and order. Here, we give suggestions for you, based on what other teachers have learned.

  • Topics (basically, like subject for a message thread) is the key feature of Zulip. It is explained more below, but basically keeps things organized. If you don’t want to do that or it doesn’t match your flow, you won’t like the model.

  • Read the guidelines for students to see the importance of topics and the three ways to use Zulip, and how we typically manage the flood of information in practice.

  • Give these guidelines to your students (copy and paste from the student page).

  • Consider why you want a course chat.

    • Do you want a way to chat and ask questions/discuss in a lower-threshold platform than forum posts? Then this could be good.

    • Do you want a Q&A forum or support center? Then this may work, but would MyCourses be a better forum?

    • Do you want a place for students groups to be able to chat among small groups?

    • Do you mainly want announcements? Then maybe simply use MyCourses?

  • Create your channels (“streams”) before your students join, and make the important ones default streams (this is done under “Manage organization”), so that everyone will be subscribed (since peolpe will always forget to join streams).

    • If you do create a new default stream later, use the “clone subscribers” option to clone from another default stream, so that everyone will be subscribed.

    • Some common streams you might want are #general, #announcements, #questions. Some people have one stream per homework, exam, theme, and/or task.

    • The main point of streams is to be able to independently filter, mute, and subscribe to notifications. For example, it might be useful to view all questions about one homework in order, or request email notifications from the #announcements stream.

  • You can create user groups (teams) with a certain name. The group can be @-mentioned together, or added to a stream.

  • Moderators (and others) can organize other people’s messages by topic. Edit the message to do this, including other people’s. Hotkey is e.

  • If you want a Q&A forum, make a stream called #questions, or smaller streams for specific topics, and direct students there.

    • You can click the check mark by a topic to mark it as resolved.

    • Remind students to make a new topic for each new question. This enables good follow-up via “Recent topics”

    • If students don’t make a new topic (or a topic goes off-track), edit the message and change the topic (change topic for “this message and all later messages”). Then, you keep questions organized, findable, and trackable.

    • If you don’t want to be answering questions in private message (who does?… it leads to duplicate work), make a clear policy on either reposting the questions publicly yourself (without identification), or directing the students to repost in the public steam themselves.

  • If you want to limit students to not be able to do anything, you can consider disabling:

    • Adding streams, adding others to streams (if you want people to only ask and not make their own groups).

    • Disable private messages (if you really don’t want personal requests for help).

    • Adding bots, adding custom emojis.

    • Seeing email addresses. Changing their name.

  • On the other hand, you might want to “allow message editing” to a much longer period and allow message deleting. For Q&A these are quite useful to have.

  • You can use the /poll [TITLE] command to make lightweight non-anonymous polls. For anonymous polls, someone has used a bot called Errbot, but we don’t currently know much about that.

FAQ

  • Is there an easier way than subscribing students manually when streams are created? Yes, you should never be doing that manually. See above for cloning membership of a stream from another.

  • Isn’t it too much work to have to give a topic to every message? Well, you don’t have to when replying. And this is sort of a natural trade-off needed to keep things organized and searchable: you have to think before you send. Most people consider this a worthy trade-off. Note that you can change the topic of messages after the fact, just talk and organize later as needed.

Extra requested features

(see also the student page)

  • Anonymous polls (a pull request exists with this feature)

  • Anonymous discussion

  • More fine-grained permissions for TAs. DONE: moderator role now exists.

  • Support for bots and other advanced features (more like permission to recommend them, bot support works very well already).

  • Pinned topics (pull request exists, high-priority issue, #19483).

  • Long-term invitations (upcoming, high-priority issue, #20337)