This is message from a student in the University of Victoria EDCI336 Commons, hosted in the OpenETC Mattermost as a community for the Technology Innovation in Education course.

Students use this as a means for communication within their cohorts   but it is also a growing community including students in previous semesters.

The message sent to the course team reads:

Second semester is wrapping up for everyone. Thought I would drop a note and say thanks for introducing us to Mattermost. Cohort 2 has really bonded using Mattermost as a central hub for everything. We’re having a zoom chat right now (we’re about seven hours in) and reflecting back on the last semester. It was just commented that our experiences have 100% been made possible by our class with you two and some comparison between our cohort and the other cohort is that we took to Mattermost as a tool and they did not. We’ve formed some solid, potentially lifelong, friendships over this platform and its been instrumental to our cohort’s mental health and survival through this semester (which has been a tonne harder than the previous one) So on behalf of Cohort 2, thank you both!

Here is but a small example of the use of Mattermost for communication and bonding.