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