Brent Warner
This is The HigherEdTech podcast Season Two episode 15 Discord in Education with Adam Lopez.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I am Tim VanNorman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. There’s gonna be a fun one today.

Brent Warner
Yeah, we’re right back with Adam. Hey, Adam. Yes.

Adam Lopez
Hey, what’s up? Welcome. I’m super happy to be back and and to be welcomed on to the show.

Brent Warner
Yeah. This is the first time so you’re not the first person we’ve had on two times. But you are the first person that we’ve had on two times in a row.

Tim Van Norman
Yes.

Adam Lopez
Nice, honored, honored to do and I’m really excited about this conversation, too. I was kind of holding a little bit back on this topic last time.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Yeah. So for people who didn’t listen last time around, or to the last episode, if you haven’t caught that. I would say you want to listen to that one first, because it’s all about Adam’s work doing the esports coordinator at IVC. And that ties in a lot to why we’re talking to you today. Because we are talking about discord, the the big conversation that just keeps growing like the discord and education conversation is popping up everywhere. I think.

Tim Van Norman
You know, we’re seeing that. I’ve heard it in at least three different meetings that I’ve been in lately, I’ve had a lot of people coming to me asking me about it. And finding out that Adam Lopez, they’re using it for our IVC eSports. This is great. And we decided to pick your brain. Thank you, by the way, for those listening. Take a look at our website. And there you can join our discord if you would like there’s a link that we’re putting on the website. But we’ve created a Discord server and there’s a video we recorded set doing the setup and different things on that. So if you’re interested in that at all, just a little plug for our website, thehigheredtechpodcast.com

Brent Warner
Yeah, so we’ll have the links up there. We’ll put the video that kind of does the walkthrough on how to set up a server and set up the first couple of channels. This was important for us because Tim, for you and me who don’t really know that much. I mean, I’ve been on discord a little bit like in some in a couple of servers, but I haven’t gone very deep. And so even just seeing that, from the setup perspective really helped me understand how things are organized better. So I think we should dig into it. Like I think people are people are hearing it, people are talking about it. People are wondering, so let’s just get right to the basics. Adam, what is discord?

Adam Lopez
Yeah, so I would say that discord is currently the most functional and frictionless communication software in Western culture right now. It was originally created to meet demands for friends to communicate between video gaming, and that just spawned all this crazy amount of functionality. And it’s been developing in such a sophisticated manner. For the last few years, it launched I believe, in 2015, I’ve been using it since 2016, I had no idea it was gonna get this popular. But when I started realizing it, it kind of all, kind of all make sense now that now that I’ve had my experience with it, yeah.

Brent Warner
And I’m going to simplify or kind of kind of focus in a little bit on the way that I see it. Or, you know, temporarily and then Adam, you will open our eyes as we continue talking. But in the most basic form, I would say that it’s a series of chat rooms, right like, basically like it’s it’s the opportunity people jump in, they have a channel where they can see they’re talking about a topic and they can chat with each other starting with text. And we’ll get into the different options beyond that, but but it’s it’s a pretty straightforward… I hate – I’m trying not to say these things wrong because it’s straightforward. It’s also very in depth at the same time. But but a straightforward chat. Almost. I think Tim you and I kind of mentioned harking back to like AOL Instant Messenger, right? It’s it’s like click type write to the person or write to the group of people that you’re trying to talk to.

Tim Van Norman
And I love the fact that when somebody sends you a message, it’ll pop up on your screen and stuff like that. So harkening back to that AOL Instant Messenger where you might have multiple channels in the later years where it was working well, before, you know, before AOL went its own way. But which I know AOL is still there. And for those people who are still on it, well, I’m sorry. But that said, yes, this, this is quite an advanced system includes video, audio, share screen share all kinds of different things. Adam, from my understanding, and please correct me, because I’m often wrong on these types of things. This was, you said it was developed for people to share. But this is really popular with gamers, so that they can do things like share their screen and have their friends watching what they’re doing while they’re gaming.

Adam Lopez
Yeah, it totally is. So just kind of like a bit of history on that is, in the past, when gamers started to have this desire to connect outside of the games, there, there came some software so that, for instance, there were things like ventrilo was really popular, and that was the way people to get into channels and just have conversations on computers. And then other software popped up that was like Teamspeak and Mumble had a little bit of the functionality that we see with Discord. And nothing really like came in and just did a really good job, people were before discord using Skype. And that’s just because it was very simple, very straightforward. And the voice communication algorithm was faster than anything else out there. So in milliseconds with video gaming, where milliseconds matter, we wanted to communicate as fast as possible. So that’s why we gravitated to Skype. And then ever since the gamers have moved to discord, it’s just been discord all the way since like 2016.

Brent Warner
Now, Adam, I think that one thing that a lot of people are going, you know, people who are listening might be interested, but they are still thinking of classes and education in terms of zoom. And I think, you know, we’ve kind of in the last year, we’ve all become semi somewhat level of zoom pros, or whatever can you do for me, like, even in the most simple terms, but like a side by side breakdown of like, what is discord versus what is zoom? Right? How are they similar? How are they different? Why would someone choose discord versus why would they choose zoom?

Adam Lopez
Mm hmm. So So zoom is great just because like it has, it’s very intuitive and easy. It’s It’s It’s simple clicks. And just to kind of give an analogy, zoom is checkers and discord is more for DHS. So just, you’re looking to get a whole bunch more functionality out of it. And it still is intuitive, like when we recorded that that last video that we just did, I feel like I almost didn’t even need to say much Tim was just kind of going off on his own there and doing a great job, it was very easy for him to move through the software. So it but it’s a little bit easier to use zoom like just because it’s just a click away to get people in once they have the software. So So that’s, that’s great. But just the returns on investment on discord is so high. If you take the time to learn the software, and get it functioning and get your Discord server engine going or just using discord in general, you’re going to get a lot of it. Some of the best benefits though with zoom is that I think it has a higher capacity for video calls. So on discord, you’re limited to 25 accounts being on a video call. And then you’re also limited to only screen sharing with 50 people in a server once more than 50 people try to click on it, they’re gonna get a message that says we can’t connect you at the time. So I think outside of that, though, I think that discord is just a really good option for for places where you want to have a lot of like cohesion and a controlled environment and a lot of functionality.

Tim Van Norman
From my perspective, and Adam, please correct me if I’m wrong. I and I’m no I’m going to say that quite a bit. Because I feel like I’m so new to this that I’m often going to be wrong. But I would say that zoom is is more if you want if I want to have a meeting with Brent in zoom, I need to send him a link that he goes to and comes back to me if he wants to have a meeting with me. And I’m the one with the zoom account he has requested of me. And then I sent him the link and we both join versus Discord. It looks like everybody’s on. And at any moment. Brent could say Hey, are you available? Here you go? Absolutely no, no interface back and forth that you have to there’s no, the handshake is faster. How’s that floor and anybody can started at any time.

Adam Lopez
That’s a great thing to be saying. I totally agree. And I’m kind of ashamed that I missed that that benefit just now. It’s so it’s so great with that because right now I use it for an open office. So I’ll sit in a channel called Adams Open Office. And that just means anybody who wants to come and talk to me can. And that’s those are my office hours right now. So that that is it is great for that. And it is a little bit more casual in the interactions, which can be a little bit more welcoming for students.

Tim Van Norman
Well, there’s that there’s also the fact that they could theoretically hit you 24 hours a day, and you can get them back when you’re ready.

Adam Lopez
Exactly. And that’s so powerful.

Tim Van Norman
And zoom doesn’t really have that type of chat capability.

Adam Lopez
And think about it too. This way. They’re coming in, a lot of students are coming home, and they’re jumping into discord already. How great is it that now your classroom is a part of that picture that they’re having when they jump on the computer?

Tim Van Norman
That’s true. Yes, true. So is there any really a good ability to record? So one of the things that we use zoom for his lectures are something like that? Would there be an ability to record easily? Or is that something that practically, you know, I can record anything I want, I use a package called screencast o Matic and I can record my screen. So I could do it that way. But does this is there things like that built in?

Adam Lopez
You know, I think that discord should hire you as a consultant, because adding that functionality is probably one of the last things they really need to do. It is a little bit more challenging to record. And it’s a shame that that’s not streamlined right now, if I want to record a discord conversation, or a discord screensharing, and I use outside software, which is called OBS, and that that can get a little bit more complicated compared to them.

Brent Warner
That makes sense. So I think what we need to get into this conversation is the real conversation around what people are worried about with discord is, you know, we’re starting to see people going well, what about, you know, cheating, or these students are setting up things outside of our classroom? And we don’t know about it? Or, you know, there’s this whole world of conversation. And I think, you know, Tim, you and I have already had this conversation quite a few times. And, Adam, I guess, from your perspective, as a teacher who runs inside of these things. Do you have concerns with how, how students are using discord? Or do you feel pretty good about it all?

Adam Lopez
I feel really good about it, because I, I’ve changed my methods of evaluation to ensure that cheating is not possible. So I’m not using you know, multiple choice repeated things. I’m using very targeted, personal types discussions to to go through the current course that I’m running, so that, you know, they can’t they can’t cheat on that they have to type things about themselves. So what they did on their own research. And so I think just changing your methods of evaluation, and there’s going to be no stopping it, the students are going to be able to get into a discord together, no matter what. And it’s not as if you would stop students from linking discord to each other in a zoom chat, because now you’re just the teacher get in the way of students fostering friendships, and that’s definitely not going to happen, right? So they’re gonna get into a Discord server or chat. And no matter what, it’s just great that now we can be there to moderate a lot of those conversations,

Brent Warner
can we focus on that part a little bit, because I think that’s just so important. I don’t want to brush over it, which is, especially now but at all times, students are looking to build their own communities, right. And like, they want to connect with each other, they want to find people that are doing certain things or, or share hobbies or interests, or whatever it is. And for them to say, hey, I want to get together with my classmates, I want to be able to talk to them, I want to be able to share ideas on what we’re doing in class. I mean, I cannot imagine not encouraging. That, to me is a painful way to think about it, which is like, I’m gonna shut that down. It’s like, well, we spend, I spend a lot of my time in class trying to build a community where they are comfortable with each other where they like, become friends and say, Hey, like, you know, back in the, in the, in the before days, it was like if they if my students told me Hey, we went out to lunch together, and we were talking about this, I’m like, Yes, that is awesome. Like that, to me matters so much because that’s part of the school and college experience is like making friends and connecting and finding things that you like, and that will make you more engaged in the class overall.

Adam Lopez
Totally, and what a more relevant time to be doing something like that and connecting students in that way. And that’s such a great thing about discord too is we already know that pretty much like 70% plus of our youth are video gaming. So by integrating discord now they’re gonna get into a class with with their peers, and then they can see when their video gaming and what they’re gaming on. So if they share a towel, they say, hey, you play Apex two, why don’t we play together? I have a feeling that I would have made like so many more friends if I knew which video games my peers were playing 100% I Oh, You play Halo I do, too. Let’s play Halo like I would have, I would have loved to figure that out. So I think I think it’s great to be to be, you know, promoting and fostering that. Now,

Brent Warner
I heard this just because you’re talking about seeing what video games people are playing, I was in a little workshop A while ago or a presentation, and one is on teachers using it. And they would said that one of the nice things about being in discord and having their students in discord was that they could actually see when their students are playing video games, is that is that a feature inside of there? Like if they’re saying they’re playing a game, like you can connect it inside of discord? Is that? Did I misunderstand that?

Adam Lopez
No, that’s completely accurate. And it even goes further. So you can develop your profile to have links to your steam profile, which is a very commonly used platform for playing games, you can have links to your twitch account. So if you’re a streamer, people can click and see what you’ve been streaming. And, and seeing the video games, that’s just all gonna be settings that they could set on their own site. So if they want to share with video games they’re playing, it’s gonna pop up next to their name and the servers.

Brent Warner
So I could be teaching class and I could be like, hey, Adam, I know that you’re playing. What was the game you mentioned the other day vault Valhalla or the vault Valley

Valheim! That’s right.

Like, if you’re playing a game right now and not paying attention in class,

Adam Lopez
you completely caught me, I got it open right here! Okay.

Tim Van Norman
So this just to help people who, who might be struggling with the technology part of it and stuff like that. I and this is oversimplifying this completely, but I equated this kind of use it as an analogy to the students get coming out of your class and going to the cafeteria, and eating together. They they’re spending time they’re building the community they’re talking, they may not be talking about your class, they may be talking about anything. And number one, no teacher would go in and say you can’t talk together in your class about the class or about whatever, that’s not going to happen. But number two, they’re going to naturally do some of that certain ones will. And so this eye looks like to me simplifying this way down, okay, because it’s got a lot of different features. But this looks like that same sort of thing where students can gather with or without the teacher, they can do, they can have conversations about anything, and feel safe in doing it. And they get to know each other pictures, you can share all kinds of things all running all at the same time, even video and audio back and forth. Yeah. To me, that gives that takes that person who might be more comfortable behind their computer screen, rather than out in public and engages them as well.

Adam Lopez
Absolutely. And and I love this analogy of going into the cafeteria. And if educators host a server properly, and really do get their students to have their conversations in the server outside of private conversations, or maybe their own servers that they set up. And that’s going to happen, don’t feel bad about that. But imagine if you could also look into those conversations happening in the cafeteria, and clarify things and say, Oh, wait, actually, that’s a little bit we can kind of change your your viewpoint on this topic, because I think you don’t necessarily understand the material right now, or, and just having that ability to jump into conversations is so powerful, and that welcome, like you said, there’s gonna be students who, who are more responsive behind a computer. And that’s just gonna be another way to reach him.

Brent Warner
Now, there are two kind of sides to this, right, because on the one side, students can set up their own servers, drop it into the chat for the class, and everybody goes, or however many people are interested go in and join. I’ve been telling Tim for quite a while my son, you know, as soon as he went to Cal State Fullerton said every single class he went into someone was dropping a link. And so there’s always like a Discord server. But then the other side is that a teacher can build their course server, right. And so I think there’s nothing really we can do about the student build servers. Except, I would personally probably if a student built one and dropped it into a chat, I would probably ask them if they want me to join it. Like, hey, do you want me to join this? Or do you not want, like, if you want your privacy, I’m gonna respect that. But if you want me to join, to be able to give feedback, then wonderful, I will. But I think it’s, it’s, you know, for our listeners, for the purpose of our show, we’re really talking about like, what does it look like for a teacher to build a server? And how are you going to utilize that for your class?

Adam Lopez
So I think you covered some really good topics, and and the episode two episodes ago, about, like, just introducing it slowly, I think that’s a really great way to start is, maybe you should just start your first semester of experiments with discord, being in a server with your students where they talk. And that’s all that happens if they they want to ask questions about that material or anything you’re there, and you’re ready to answer them. There are ways that you can start to integrate evaluation and assignments into discord, it is going to get a little bit more challenging. There, there’s so much you can do with it, it just gets very difficult because now we’re going to be talking about bots and bots are are things that are that are robot accounts that come into your server and have administrative powers. And they can do so many different things with their algorithms. So for instance, one that we’re currently developing for the esports program is one that tracks attendance automatically. So it will report when they enter voice, voice comms, and then when they exit. So if I’m trying to track my players attendance to the practice in the scrimmages, then our bot will then report that and that’s automated, great, I have less work to do. That’s awesome. What we’re doing right now for just how it looks for our program. And I don’t know exactly how all teachers are doing it. But I think it’s great to use it just as maybe for a discussion posts forum, where you are encouraging students just to, to cover topics in the material. And the way it looks for our program is that we have weekly assignments where students do research, and then they post or they, they just do some sort of assignment. And then they post their results in a channel. So all the other students can see it. And then I then can go into there and evaluate it and then add the grade to campus. There are other things we could do with bots, and it gets really complicated. And the sky’s the limits there. But that’s what I’m currently doing.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. I love I love the description. But I’m sure some people got scared when you said there are robots that come in and automatic control

Tim Van Norman
with administrative rights. Right, I was hearing that going, Oh, no, my, my son, when I was talking about this, before, before we started recording and stuff, my son talked about one of his professors last semester, I had one server, and he must have done created a channel for each of his classes. And so he had a general area where everybody could talk. But you only belong to the channel that you were associated with which class you were in. So you had class discussions, but you had a discussion that would be for every hit for that professor and everybody that’s associated with it. That sounds to me like a really great place. So that you wouldn’t have to try to follow 12 different locations, or, you know, because I’ve got these four classes that I’m teaching, and then I’ve got these other things that I’m doing, it would like minimize it down to one group, that that could be really interesting and useful. I can see this has got a lot of really interesting potential.

Adam Lopez
Absolutely. And I think I could also use the esports programming club as an example of a project based learning class, because that’s, that’s what it is, it is a project based learning experience for our students being involved in the sports program. So what we do with roles is we have our guy, I want to say we have probably like 40 different roles right now, maybe more. And they all have very specific responsibility. I mean, sorry, permissions, and those permissions, open up all the different channels and avenues so that it keeps it very clean for your users. And then also very organized for yourself to moderate and understand because, like he said, that the channels is, is the biggest part about this, setting up your channels is huge. And just as a rule of thumb, while we’re while we’re on the topic of channels, a rule that a lot of communities follow is that for every category, you want to have 15 channels, don’t go past that, if you can keep it smaller, good. But yeah, there’s so much functionality with the roles, people can see what their positions are, for instance, with the esports class that we’re running, it’s in the same Discord server as the rest of the program. But I’ve assigned a role that is the name of the course, to the students enrolled in the course. And then that opens up seven different channels for them where the course happens.

Tim Van Norman
Nice.

Brent Warner
Okay, so that makes sense now, so you can have, and I want to make sure I get this terminology, right, because you’ve got categories, which would be the way that you set this up on the left hand column, you’ve got categories, right. So that might theoretically be a class for me It might be Yes, I’ll add right and then The channels inside of that category could be, you know, I don’t know, essay one or the novel that we’re reading or, or some sort of breakdown in terms of how we’re organizing. Adam, I saw, I’m in the IVC eSports. One, thanks to your invitation. And you’ve got like, tons of breakdown, like, like all sorts of different things. So like one of it’s just like, here are the games you’re interested in, join that channel, right? Here are announcements and overall things right. And so that it’s really fascinating to see, I think that I would encourage people to try to get into different servers to see how people have them organized, because that can give you a sense of structuring to understand what’s going to work for you what’s going to work for your classes, all those types of things.

Adam Lopez
Mm hmm. And another topic of this, too, I think it is really important to let it grow organically. One thing that we just rolled out, was a survey asking our students enrolled in the esports. Course, like, what do you think about the way it’s set up so far? Maybe we need to change things up. But I mean, they’re, they know so much like, my goodness, I can do my best to keep up with the students with this, but it’s not gonna happen. They’re the ones developing the bots. They’re the ones who tell me about all these different features that I don’t know about. So it’s great to just kind of ask them like, what do you think about the way we’re currently doing things? And how can we improve it?

Brent Warner
So Adam, are you? Are you mostly using discord? Or are you in Canvas? Or zoom or anything else at all? Or is it just like, hey, only your grades are in Canvas, and everything else is in discord?

Adam Lopez
Last one. Everything’s in Discord. 100%, you know, just to be culturally responsive, especially to eSports. Um, everything is done in the professional world is mostly in Discord. Sometimes companies opt into stuff like Slack, or they use emails, but definitely discord is is our bread and butter for the program.

Brent Warner
Okay, awesome. That’s a, that’s a really, I think for some people, that’s going to be a mind blowing. But, but it totally makes sense. Like, the more I look at it, the more I kind of put it through the educators lens, I can see why that makes sense. And depending on the purposes and the goals of your course, absolutely. They’re they’re yours particular, with the project based learning and all of those things I can I can really see the value in there, but I am interested, how do you you know, how do you provide an assignment, for example? Or how do you, you know, say like, Hey, here’s the document that you need to look at, and how do you keep that structured and organized in a way that you can easily reuse it, for example, in the next semester?

Adam Lopez
And I don’t know just how much I want to share, because this is my secret to success. No, I I’d love to share. So what we what we’re doing right now, this is just an experiment. I don’t know if this is the best way to do things. And this is also a performance class where they’re engaging in practices and scrimmages. So I only set a slightly supplement their their learning experience, they’re getting a lot with their coaches, their analysts in their managers right now and just working together in the games. But what I do is, I have a channel, that’s an announcement channel, it’s called weekly updates and assignments, I will develop an assignment in a separate server, and type out everything that I want. In this assignment, there’ll be links in there, I am limited, I think it’s like 2000 characters, so I do have to keep it small. And if I need to, I’ll just separate them into two different messages and then put them right back to back. And in this in this message, it will add the role. So they’ll get pinged. And they’ll see Oh, here’s the weekly update for what’s called IO to one intercollegiate, intercollegiate, eSports. And I will say, for instance, in week two, I was promoting the use of social media as a as a part of the class and I linked them to all our social media said, Hey, guys, make sure to follow IVC on all platforms. And then I gave him a warning and said these assignments are graded please entry duties, because I think that first they weren’t really taking it seriously, because maybe they’re not used to discord being a class, right. And then I said, we set up profiles. On last week, we set up profiles on different social platforms. This is going to do a lot for you in the program for this week, find and follow a new account on any of the platforms that you believe will help you achieve your goals with eSports. And in two to four sentences, tell us who you followed and why. And so this is just and then they would go into a separate channel that I even have LinkedIn, this message that they can left click will bring them to the channel, and they could just answer those questions and do the assignment. And so that’s how I’ve been doing it just to slightly supplement them, but they’re also getting a lot of rigor on their own just by being in conversations. And in the team comes engaging in the practices and scrimmages.

Tim Van Norman
That sounds great, Adam. So one thing, if you were getting too long in that, you could always use your Google account from IVC, new a Google Doc that could be 20 pages long, and just give them a link to that, as their information. Absolutely saying, you know, utilizing the current technology, I was looking at this, and I get a lot of people asking about group work. And I think that could be really useful is setting up separate channels, or different groups in your class, and letting them work together in this channel. And then they can bring the final product back into Canvas, if that’s where you’re going to have it or something like that. But it would give them that ability to work together in their own little world. And it can be synchronous, or asynchronous. And doing that. So that’s really, that’s an interesting thoughts going on here.

Adam Lopez
Definitely, they could you could make their own channel for their project, give them the role that only allows them to see that channel, and you can give it to be involved in the conversations that was they developed the project, you can moderate and see what’s going on, let them fail forward or get involved depending on what you want to do. I think there’s definitely a lot of functionality here. And I think it is, you know, I’m slowly beginning to realize that this may be a direction that education goes.

Brent Warner
I think they’re, I mean, I think this is a good point for a lot of people who might want to just say, Hey, I’m ready to start looking at it. And so but before before we kind of wrap up, I want to I want to share just briefly you did touch on this Adam, but the roles and the the function of roles, because I think a lot of people are concerned, they say, Well, I just don’t have any control over what goes on inside of there, or whatever it is, as we went through before, before the show in the pre show and the recording, which people can go watch on the site. It is crazy granular how much you can get into like, you can listen, but you cannot speak you can you can see this channel, but you can’t see that one like it, you can get into all sorts of real real deep dive kind of nerdy tech choices, flipping the switch is on on options for everything. So can you just briefly cover like, what roles what the category of this thing called roles does, and how it can help teachers? Mm hmm.

Adam Lopez
So So roles would pretty, it pretty much just adds the extra layer of the dimensions that allows you to customize your space. And so, for instance, let’s say that we have leaders within the sports program, and I have a role called the ecosystem leaders. And so I give them that role. And that will open up all the channels. So from there, they can then involve themselves. And we can do so much with that we can change who gets to react, who gets to who gets the message, let’s say you have an announcements channel, and you want to be the only one who can post in there so it doesn’t get gets muddied. And people can always see the most relevant announcement, you can do stuff like that. It really it really just has lots of functionality, like you’re saying. And by developing roles, it’s going to be easier to really customize and get into that that granular like nitty gritty stuff.

Brent Warner
I love it. So, Tim, you built the discord server for us today. I think there’s a you know, this conversation could keep going. But I think we should wrap up I think we should let people try to explore and and we invite you to come and explore with us.

Tim Van Norman
Yes, absolutely. We will, we will learn an awful lot, hosting the server and stuff like that. I do want to mention one thing that especially as we’re talking about education, one of the big concerns that seems to come up is this is a wild wild west. People can do anything they want what if they start cheating or doing something inappropriate or whatever in the server that I’m looking at right now that I set up, I have the ability to literally click on one thing and I can remove or block a person in one click and they are out they can get back in and stuff like that. Then the other thing is if you go to discord comm slash safety, they’ve got a whole lot of information. That discord is building things in to make it more and more safe for students. Minimize cheating, doing a lot of things. Basically, when you go in you have to agree not to share copyrighted material and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of stuff built in. discord is really trying to move out of the complete Wild Wild West into at least only the Wild West, not wild wild. So but they’re they’re moving in the right direction, you can actually get people kicked off of discord overall, overall completely. If they are doing things. discord will suspend an account and then go ahead and just get rid of them. And they can’t get back in with that email address. They can’t create a new account. So it does have the bigger possibilities. Even more. So I would say then zoom does in some of these cases. So do be aware that there there is a lot of safety that’s being built in. It’s not safe yet. But it’s it’s being built in and they’re heading the right direction.

Adam Lopez
Totally, they definitely are heading the right direction. I mean, just recently, I want to say it was about a month ago, discord was COPPA approved. And if teachers are worried about or educators are worried about maybe some inappropriate things being said within the server, they can also once again, like we’re talking about the depths of discord here, they can have a bot that they can bring into the server that will specifically target inappropriate language or links, and then it will delete them immediately.

Brent Warner
Oh, nice. Yeah. And so you don’t even have to be watching it. Like you’re not have to worry about something going on at two in the morning or something like that, right?

Adam Lopez
Definitely. And I would advocate also to have a few student leaders within there that you really trust and give them administrative abilities.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and I think that’s a big part of it, too, is like you trust the students, you you work with them, you’re going to have people that want that leadership level and feel appreciative of being given some responsibility there. And that’s going to build a better community too. I think at the end of the day,

Adam Lopez
totally and I don’t know if we touched that we’ve talked about it really quick and I know we want to wrap this up but I almost forgot it this is something that’s that’s really powerful. If you go into discord and you liberate your student leaders to develop those channels and develop those categories, it’s going to be so much better off they they would love to own that space right if you give them the creative powers it’s the same thing as putting my kindergartners finger painting on the wall and saying this is your space you own it and they will do so much for the functionality or love it.

Brent Warner
Okay, so come join our discord configure see play with it, we’re learning it right now. As you’re as you’re listening to this episode, it’s, it’s hot for us. It’s brand new, we’re gonna I think we’re gonna keep going with it. And we’re gonna see what happens when we were running. So I’ll set up the page at the higher ed tech dot the higher ed tech podcast comm slash Discord. And that will take people directly to the invite page. So as long as you’re logged in, then you can go follow along and join our server. I think that’ll be the easiest way for people to find it or they can go I’ll put a button on the higher ed tech podcast.com homepage as well. Excellent.

Tim Van Norman
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about discord and education with Adam Lopez. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast Comm. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast calm and let us know your thoughts. And of course if you have ideas for future shows, you can go there or you can go to our discord and leave us ideas over on the discord and share what you’re thinking.

Tim Van Norman
For everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support 9494 or 515696 or by emailing IVC tech@ivc.edu. Do you have questions about technology in your classroom? Please contact me Tim van Norman at t Van norman@ivc.edu or, hey, come to discord and let’s talk. That’s right.

Brent Warner
Yeah, you can find me on discord too. Or you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim van Norman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Thanks, everybody. Hope to see you soon.