Each lesson in the CS Tutor has its own Chat Room. The Chat Room allows for text communication between professors and students viewing a particular lesson. The title bar displays the class, professor, and lesson for the chat room. For this scenario, it is assumed that a student has already login to the server and has a tutorial open. For instructors, they are assumed only to have login to the server.

A student or instructor enters the Chat Room by selecting "Chat" from the "View" menu. Students will automatically login to the Chat Room associated with the lesson. Professors will be displayed a dialog box where he inputs the class name and lesson for the Chat Room he wants to login to. Once the professor or student has login, they will see the Chat Room as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The "Online Participants" window displays all users currently login to the Chat Room. For a Chat Room in which only the current user is login, only his name will be displayed. For a Chat Room in which more than one user is logged in, their names will also be displayed in that window. The window to the right of the "Online Participants" is the "History" window that displays the messages that have been sent. Only messages that have been sent after the user logs in to the Chat Room will be displayed. Below this window is the "Enter Text" text field that is used to sent messages in the Chat Room.

Figure 2 shows an example of a Chat Room with only the current user logged in. Their user name is the only one in the "Online Participants" window since he is the only user in the Chat Room. As more people login, this window will update with the new users.

Figure 2

To send a message the user inputs the message he wants to send in the "Enter Text" text field. Figure 3 shows a Chat Room session where the user has inputted a message. To send the message, he would push the "Send" button. This would display the message in the "History" window for all other users to see. To clear the message, the user would push the "Clear" button.

Figure 3

Since the chat room is an open forum for sharing ideas, all users have the same privileges. This includes both instructors and students.