## Chat Room: Overview

### What it does

You can use the Chat Room tool for real-time, unstructured conversations among site participants who are signed on to the site at the same time.

Instructors can easily create an "Online Office Hours" chat room for student questions and answers. Dispersed collaboration groups can use Chat as a space to have conversations across distances or catch up with conversations that they may have missed.

### Key concepts

Multiple rooms: The Chat Room tool allows for more than one room that a site owner (or anyone with the appropriate permissions) can create for specific kinds of conversation. These additional chat rooms can be created using the Options feature.

Display: Changes that a site owner makes to a chat room display using the `Options...` button also apply to how the Chat Room features appear to students.

### Things to consider

- The Chat Room tool alerts users to the other participants who are also logged into the site and have entered the same chat room. This way, users know who is available to talk.
- Chat messages are saved and visible to all users so that all site participants can benefit from clarifying conversations and questions and answers. By default, all Chat messages are shown for at least three days.
- The Chat Room tool does not provide a way to chat privately. By default, all messages are visible to all participants. However, you can remove read access for a particular role, and thereby for all participants with that role, by modifying the Chat Room permissions.
- Only one chat room can be active at any given time.