Insights from the FLO EdTech Sandbox Sessions
3.1 Building Learning Communities with Mattermost
Ian Linkletter
As part of the BCcampus FLO EdTech Sandbox Series, Ian Linkletter presented about Mattermost as a technology for building community in an online learning environment. In this post you will learn about the key features of Mattermost, recommendations for maximizing its pedagogical benefits, and some takeaways from the session.
Ian Linkletter is an emerging technology and open education librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology
Mattermost is an open-source team chat tool that facilitates communication and collaboration. It’s similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams, but because it is open source, it has advantages over vendor-controlled options. Mattermost supports “anytime” communication — any time, any place, any device. With Mattermost, students can benefit from a low-bandwidth way to synchronously or asynchronously communicate in writing with their instructor and other members of their learning community.
Session participants were familiar with vendor-controlled team chat tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom Chat, Discord, Rocket.Chat, Workplace by Meta, and Google Workplace. Popularized by the launch of Slack in 2013, and building from decades-old chat tools like Internet Relay Chat, team-chat software is characterized by a shared feature set. Mattermost has all the following features:
- Teams are standalone groups of people who form a learning community, such as a course section.
- Channels are public or private chat spaces in a team. In the sandbox session we used an Introductions channel to share information about ourselves, such as our institutions and pronouns. Anyone can create a private channel and invite others for a group project.
- Direct messages are available for both one-to-one and group communication.
- File sharing allows you to upload and preview files in a chat.
- Notifications include push, web, email, or none.
- Search for keywords and hashtags by date.
- Threaded conversations allow you to selectively follow conversations that you are interested in.
- Markdown offers you with rich text formatting.
- Use reactions and emojis to, for example, indicate when participants have finished reading an article. In our sandbox session we read Clint Lalonde’s “Why I want to try Mattermost for classroom discussions.”
- User profiles are visible only to teammates and include pictures, display names, and status.
- Apps and mobile compatibility are supported with Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.
When it comes to learning technology, accessibility is a requirement, not a feature. I have personally tested Mattermost’s keyboard navigability and found it to be thorough. Mattermost has a third-party “A” rating for Web Contact Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and an online Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. Inexplicably, though, Mattermost does not support alternative text for uploaded images. As a workaround, al