Bringing Communication 2.0 to Higher EducationImproving communication methods in the Computer Science department at UCL

Tobias Büschel | MSc Computer Science

Tobias Büscheltobias.buschel.15@ucl.ac.uk / +44-(0)7775-754494linkedin.com/in/tbuschel Collaborators

AbstractCommunication in higher education has long relied on channels such as emails and Moodle/Blackboard groups to deliver information to stakeholders. While these are justified ways of delivering official announcements, students have sought after better possibilities to organize themselves since a long time.

Social platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp are omnipresent in a student’s life and have thus also gained popularity to act as communication tools for students in universities. Unfortunately, such social networks are not ideal as they face a handful of disadvantages such as privacy and bad structure.

Luckily, the tech industry has produced a great messaging app called Slack that aims to change exactly that by making communication fun, structured, and most importantly more intuitive. We have piloted Slack with 69 students of the MSc Computer Science degree program at UCL and had great success with the study. It not only helped students to reduce emails, we also saw other advantages such as shy students being more involved and an emergence of a community in which students actively help each other. In the last six months these students have exchanged over 116,000 messages within the team.

As the outcome of this initial study was very positive, we would now like to implement the technology for the entire CS department at UCL and thereby start a discussion that will challenge and disrupt the way communication is regarded in higher education.

Acknowledgements§Ghita Kouadri Mostefaoui (CS Department)§Jenny Marie & Abbie King (ChangeMakers)§Moira Wright (Digital Education)§Janina Dewitz (Digital Education)§Sarah Hamid (Slack)§and many other people involved

Pilot Study Statistics

§ poor structure

§ spam

§ advertisements

§ personal space

§ posting based system

§ user limit: 256

§ mobile focused

§ poor file sharing & 16MB limit

§ personal space

§ message based system

§ not mobile friendly

§ lack of integrations

§ poor usability / too complex

§ hard to maintain

§ poor user interface

Communication 1.0

Communication 2.0

Slack Computer Science Community

§mobile & desktop friendly

§easy-to-use

§integrations (GitHub, RSS etc.)

§communication is structured around different channels

Public channels

§ modules

§ cohorts

§ career tips

§ events, software, alumni

§ etc.

Private channels

§ study groups

§ research groups

§ advanced teaching groups

§ project groups

§ direct messages

Pilot Study – Questionnaire Results

How has it impacted your course/university experience?

§“It has transformed it! I love using it and I think it's great for sharing information in an efficient manner. Having a licence would have been even more great, since searching older messages and files is only possible with the licence.”

§“Get knowledge from classmates about subjects and courses. Created much more of a community feeling within the course. Slack is the main means of contact with other people on the course for me. It has greatly enhanced my course experience.”

§“When away from campus, slack has been a useful way to talk with other students about the course. As someone who's principally opposed to joining social networks on the grounds of their being too creepy by half, I've found slack to be a real crutch in this regard.”

§“Very positively. Just being able to share information, knowledge, resources, and get to know each other better. It's an excellent excellent platform - any contact I have with anyone on the course is done through slack.”

Would you recommend Slack to other students? If no,

why not?

§37 out of 37 answered: Yes§“Yes, after using Slack for six months my productivity has increased exponentially.”