As an educator, you have the flexibility to choose which types of conversations are enabled for your experience. This allows you to define how learners, employers, and educators communicate within projects, ensuring that conversations align with your experience's structure and needs.
Main benefits of customizing conversation settings:
Tailor communication to fit project needs.
Keep conversations up to date with automatic syncing of team and employer memberships.
Set clear removal timeframes for better access and privacy management.
General
Conversation types
Experience administrators can enable or disable the following conversation types for their experience:
Team-only:
Private chats within individual teams (available only for team-based experiences). Ideal for team collaboration and communication throughout the project.Team + Employer:
Direct conversations between individual teams and their employer. Useful if the employer wants to keep each team working on the match separate due to different tasks or responsibilities.All Teams + Employer:
A shared conversation that includes all teams working on a match and the employer. If you enable "All Teams + Employer," you can set a timeframe for when teams are removed from the conversation after completing their project. Default removal time: 15 days after project completion. Teams will be notified of their removal timeframe in their final submission email. Once removed from the match conversation after the set timeframe, learners will no longer be able to send or receive messages within the conversation.No conversations:
Educators have the option to disable all conversation types. In this case, there will be no communication between team members and employers. This option is suitable for experiences where there are a large number of learners working on each project, and communication will only occur between the educator and the employer.
Conversation membership
Conversations will automatically sync with team and employer membership, including:
Adding or removing teams as their status changes (e.g., active, cancelled, deleted).
Adding or removing employers based on their access level granted by the project admin.
Updating team members in the conversation as they join or leave teams.
Learners cannot leave a "Team + Employer" or "All Teams + Employer" chat unless they leave the team itself.
How to
Manage conversation settings
To set or update your experience’s conversation settings, follow these steps:
Navigate to your experience settings.
Select the “Features” tab.
Scroll down to the "Conversations" section.
Select which conversation types should be enabled.
Save your changes.
Update conversation settings
You can update the conversation settings on an existing match if no teams have been created for that match yet. To update conversation settings on an existing match:
Navigate to your experience.
Click on the “Matches” tab and select a match.
Go to the match settings and click on the “Features” tab.
View or update the conversation settings as needed.
If teams already exist on the match, you will not be able to change the conversation types.
Best practices
Enable Team + Employer conversations for structured communication between teams and employers.
Use All Teams + Employer to foster cross-team collaboration, especially for multi-team projects.
Set a reasonable conversation removal period to balance access and privacy concerns.
Inform learners early about the chat settings and removal policies to set expectations.
FAQs
Can I change the conversation settings after a match is created?
Yes, you can update the conversation settings at any time, but changes will only apply to new matches. Existing matches will retain their original settings.
What happens if I do not set a removal timeframe?
If no timeframe is set for "All Teams + Employer" conversations, teams will remain in the conversation indefinitely unless manually removed.
Can learners opt out of conversations?
Learners cannot leave a "Team + Employer" or "All Teams + Employer" conversation unless they leave the team itself.