Fact sheet: Mattermost

Description

Mattermost is an open-source messaging platform for team communication that is hosted at TU Hamburg. The service offers individual and group chats, public and private channels, and direct messages, enabling asynchronous and synchronous communication in teaching. In addition to the chat function, functions for joint task management (boards) and workflow design (playbooks) are available.

Use in teaching

• Encourage discussion Teachers can initiate discussions on specialist topics in public or private channels and motivate students to actively exchange ideas.
• Organise group work Private channels and teams can be used in order to bring together groups of students for project work or exercises in a structured manner.
• Bundle communication Mattermost serves as a central communication channel for a course and replaces distributed email communication with channels sorted by topic.
• Organise project work Boards and playbooks can be used to distribute tasks, track progress and define joint workflows.
• Share materials spontaneously You can use the chat function to quickly share links, notes or small files with students – for larger files, we recommend storing them in the TU Cloud or GitLab and providing a link in the chat.

Stephanie Wichmann from the ZLL will be happy to advise you on the didactic use of the tool.

Technical requirements

Mattermost is operated at TU Hamburg at communicating.tuhh.de and can be used directly in your web browser. You can log in with your TUHH account (Kerberos/LDAP) via the TU Hamburg GitLab instance. Desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux as well as mobile apps for iOS and Android are available as options. To use Mattermost, you must be a member of a team – your teaching department or the data centre will set up the appropriate team.

Further links

• Instructions and FAQs from the data centre (DE)
• Experience report: Transparent and efficient communication with Mattermost (DE)
• Official Mattermost documentation

Costs

The use of Mattermost is free of charge for members of TU Hamburg. The service is operated and maintained by the TUHH data centre. There are no individual licence costs.

Data protection

GDPR-compliant RZ-Support RZ-Hosting Open Source

A service provided by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (ZLL) at TU Hamburg.