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## How do you teach 1400+ students?
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The [Technical University of Munich](https://www.tum.de/en/) (TUM) is
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one of Europe’s top universities. Every year, its Department of
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Informatics ([ranked #1 in Germany][tum-ranking]) welcomes over a
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thousand freshmen to the undergraduate program.
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Teaching introductory computer science courses to 1400-2000 students
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at a time is a massive undertaking. Just answering student questions
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easily takes 1500+ messages *per homework exercise*. Instructors have
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cycled through product after product in search of a way to manage
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communication with students, and among the 30-50 person course staff.
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## Communication platform is key
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[Tobias Lasser](https://ciip.in.tum.de/people/lasser.html), lecturer
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at the TUM Department of Informatics, set out to teach an introductory
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algorithms class with 1400 students in April 2020, as the Covid-19
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pandemic was sweeping across Europe. With instruction moving online,
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he knew that finding an effective communication platform was more
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important than ever.
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“Our default teaching platform is Moodle, which is fine for
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announcements, but does not scale for discussions,” Tobias says. “Our
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2021-07-21 18:51:23 +02:00
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university also hosts Rocket.Chat, but when some colleagues tried it
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for a large class, it was a complete mess.” Due to strict European
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regulations, cloud-only solutions like Piazza, Slack and Discord were
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non-starters for data privacy reasons. “I checked Mattermost and
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Element, but wasn’t happy with the user interface for either.” That’s
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when Tobias came across Zulip.
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## “Better user experience than Slack”
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Tobias evaluated Zulip by visiting the [Zulip developer
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community][chat-zulip-org] to see it in action. “It takes a bit of
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time to get used to, but Zulip has the best user experience of all the
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chat apps I’ve tried,” Tobias says. “With the discussion organized by
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topic within each stream, Zulip is the only app that makes hundreds of
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conversations manageable.”
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Despite initially asking to use Slack, students came to love Zulip’s
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model. “Many students commented how great Zulip was on the course
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evaluation forms,” Tobias says.
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## Word about Zulip spreads
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Word about Tobias’s success with teaching with Zulip quickly spread
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throughout the department. One year later, the department’s Zulip
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organization is used by 4400 students and educators. “I’m working to
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establish Zulip as the new default communication platform for teaching
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in the department, for classes of all sizes”, Tobias says.
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Other instructors have loved using Zulip as well. “I consider Zulip to
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be the best tool in terms of privacy and usability, and try to
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implement it in all courses where I collaborate,” says Johannes Stöhr,
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teaching assistant for multiple courses at the department.
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## A welcoming open-source community
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Robert Imschweiler, an undergraduate at the TUM, is responsible for
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maintaining the department’s Zulip server. “Our chat needs to be
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self-hosted to comply with European laws about protecting student
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data,” Robert says. “Zulip has been extremely stable and requires no
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maintenance beyond installing updates.”
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When questions arise, Robert stops by the Zulip developer community to
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ask for advice. “Right before exams, we had over 1000 students online
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at once, and I was worried that the CPU usage was high. The community
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investigated my problem immediately, and a couple of days later they
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shared a patch that resolved it.” This patch to improve performance at
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scale was released to all users as part of [Zulip 4.0][zulip-4-blog].
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Since then, Robert has built several Zulip customizations for the
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department, and has had them merged to the upstream project. “I feel
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very welcomed as a new contributor and am glad that I’ve been able to
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contribute a few patches of my own,” Robert says.
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2021-07-23 19:35:01 +02:00
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---
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Learn more about [Zulip for Education](/for/education), and how
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Zulip is being used at the [University of California San Diego](/case-studies/ucsd).
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You can also check out our guides on using Zulip for [conferences](/for/events)
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and [research](/for/research)!
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2021-07-22 14:22:08 +02:00
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2021-07-09 22:03:43 +02:00
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[tum-ranking]: https://www.in.tum.de/en/the-department/profile-of-the-department/facts-figures/facts-and-figures-2020/
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[chat-zulip-org]: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zulip-org.html
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[zulip-4-blog]: https://blog.zulip.com/2021/05/13/zulip-4-0-released/
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