Team chat for teaching, learning, and community.

Mattermost is secure private messaging for courses, teams, and learning communities at UBC. It is an open source team chat technology similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams. It is a transformative communication and collaboration technology, combining threaded discussions with real-time chat in an intuitive and flexible way. Features like persistent history, advanced search capability, file sharing, typing status, mobile apps, and emoji reactions add up to a versatile tool that is still easy to use.

Mattermost users co-create a demo space.

What is this tool for?

Team chat is for anytime communication: any time, any device. Anytime doesn’t mean all the time. You set your availability and customize your own notification preferences.

Research shows how timely interactions with instructors, collaboration with classmates, and a sense of community can enhance teaching and learning. This is particularly important in an online learning environment. Team chat gives students a direct communication channel to their instructor and each other, helping them connect, ask questions, seek clarification, collaborate, and build community.

Mattermost is an example of a low-bandwidth high-immediacy tool. It facilitates synchronous interactions even if high speed internet is not available.

Mattermost is fully supported as a learning technology and is available for use in any credit course.

Highlights

Mattermost is CWL-authenticated and stays in sync with your classlist.
Mattermost is open source. UBC contributes to the codebase. We host it ourselves.
Mattermost is FIPPA compliant (it follows provincial privacy policy) and all data is stored in Canada.

How do I get started?

We suggest meeting with someone from our Learning Technology Support team who can orient you to the platform and ensure it will be beneficial to you. Ready?

Please note that this request form is only for Faculty of Education. If you are from another Faculty, go to the LT Hub Mattermost page to get started.

Use Cases and Evaluation Outcomes

Explore how others have used Mattermost to support online community on our Mattermost Case Studies page.
On the LT Hub’s Mattermost Pilot webpage, you can read about faculty and student response, and recommendations for how to use it in your course.
This UBC Pilot Evaluation Outcomes document summarizes what we learned during the evaluation stage of the pilot.
You can also read the full UBC Mattermost Technology Evaluation Report, which has been released under a Creative Commons license.

Additional Resources

Get Started With Mattermost: Installing Apps
Review a page of respectful environment, copyright, and privacy policies you can use for your course team.
Read all about the Team Chat Pilot Project, led by Ian Linkletter from ETS.
Learn about additional Open Learning Technologies supported by ETS.
Mattermost.org Website
Slack: a new tool for education?
Mattermost Chat Pilot – One Year update!
Mattermost User Guide

Similar Tools

Microsoft Teams (available in late August)
Slack (free plan is not FIPPA compliant)

Support Available

Support for this tool is provided by Educational Technology Support.