Why not Slack (or Teams)

We will not be using Slack (or Microsoft Teams) in class. While these are popular tools, and in many ways better than some of the tools we will use, they are not permitted by the University.

We will not be using Slack for official class discussions. The University does not support it (or allow it for class). It is not clear that the free version complies with FERPA. Slack has FERPA compliance, but it seems that in order to achieve that, we need to set up some kind of authentication, which requires an expesive paid account.

I have a love/hate relationship with Slack. I resisted it for many years, but have come to appreciate it as many people I work with (and whose opinions I trust).

(if it were legal) Slack could potentially be used in place of Piazza. However, Piazza is better tuned to work for the classroom use case because it organizes things by topic first.

Microsoft Teams is supported by the University, provides really good video conference support, and integrates well with the University email and other systems. However, it doesn’t support asynchronous discussions in a class as well as Piazza.