Varun Singireddy and Kyle Bourcier from Ferris State University presented a detailed explanation and demo of the use of Discord for communication in courses. I had heard about Discord before and was interested in learning more about its capabilities. The presenters provided enough information for me to understand how Discord is useful and different from Slack. Discord allows users to set up “Servers” for groups, set permissions for different user types, easily invite participants and edit options, and even include markdown in several languages. They demonstrated the use of Discord and described these and other features. Discord has several advantages including accessibility and responsiveness on a variety of devices and use of bots! They set up a bot for a course server with abilities to perform automated functions. Bots can be assigned roles. Some automation functions require scripting. Nevertheless, some simple functions can be implemented. Discord has built in commands. The example provided by Varun Singireddy and Kyle Bourcier was a keyword to respond automatically: triggered by a match to the word syllabus, the bot responds with the location of the syllabus, including responding with attachments! The automated responses can include links and personalized responses. Another demonstration was for announcements that can be scheduled: the bot can be used to create an auto feed in the announcements channel to be triggered hours or days before an assignment due date. Audio pings can be set to notify users logged into Discord. I can envision setting up announcements in advance of projects and also creating responses for common requests for guidelines and information. Kyle Bourcier mentioned some of the limitations of Discord. There are (currently) caps for live streams of 99 users and 25 for video conferences. While these are limitations, and Discord appears to currently not have a recording feature, for most of our course enrollments this should work! Todd Zakrajsek asked questions about the origin and use of Discord. I didn’t know Discord has been around for several years! I love how the speakers ended by offering their contact information, both email addresses as well as Discord usernames. I can think of ways of using Discord in courses and helping students get immediate responses to common questions as well as reminders of their assignments. I do wonder about accessibility of Discord and privacy policy. Still, it is worth considering and comparing Discord to Slack or TopHat’s Slate communication system.
