Give learners a shared back-channel while they watch: questions, study help and the ordinary talk that keeps an asynchronous course from feeling lonely. Chat lives with the video, inside your LMS.
Built with instructors and learning designers who watched their cohorts drift into messaging apps nobody could see or join.
Learners talk while they watch or between sessions, without leaving the course.
The People Space shows presence, so a learner knows whether to expect a reply.
Any participant can open a direct conversation, including with an instructor or TA.
When chat becomes a real content question, it moves to a time-anchored thread.
A live channel tied to the video builds the sense that other people are in the room.
Learners help each other in the moment instead of waiting on an email reply.
Pin answers and address the whole group where they already are.
A People tab lists everyone in the course with their presence and a search box. A Chat tab holds the group conversation and every private thread, with a badge whenever something new arrives.
Online participants appear first with a green dot, offline ones follow in grey, both alphabetical, with search for anyone specific.
The Chat tab lists every conversation you are part of with its last message. A counter shows how many new messages are waiting.
The same rich text as the Comments Space: bold, italics, lists, highlight, blockquotes and emoji, with Shift + Enter for a new line.
Chat and the timeline divide the work between them. A question about a specific second belongs on the timeline, where the answer stays findable for everyone who watches later. Coordination, encouragement and quick check-ins belong in chat, where speed matters more than permanence. A TA who moves a good question from one to the other teaches the class where each kind of talk lives.
Learners who sense that others are present and reachable are more likely to keep going through difficult material.
Explaining to a peer deepens the explainer's understanding; hearing it in a peer's words helps the asker.
Help that arrives while the problem is still on screen is worth more than a fuller answer a day later.
Naming a difficulty precisely, and knowing where to take it, are skills a course can teach on purpose.
Group chat and the People Space give a cohort the channels it would otherwise build elsewhere, with the instructor able to see, join and steer them.
A live channel beside the player for the whole course, a section or a project team. Questions, study help and encouragement happen in real time, with the video on screen.
Any participant can open a private conversation with any other. Instructors use it for discreet feedback, learners for a longer exchange that does not belong in the group.
See who is online at any moment. Online participants are listed first with a green dot, offline ones in grey, and a search box finds anyone by name.
Instructors and TAs pin key answers and announcements so nobody misses them in a fast-moving stream, and can reference them again later.
Moderation, pinning and anonymity controls are built in, and roles let teaching assistants pin and respond across the groups they look after.
Bold, italics, lists, highlight, blockquotes and emoji, the same as the Comments Space. With People enabled, @mention anyone in the course, in chat or in a comment.
A counter shows how many new messages are waiting, whether you are in the Comments Space, Personal Notes or the People tab. Opening the chat clears it.
Annoto works across devices alongside your LMS, so the conversation is the same one whether a learner is at a desk or on a phone between classes.
Chat connects to the rest of the layer, too. With Managed Comments, an instructor can answer a public question with a private reply that opens as a chat with its author, visible to nobody else. And when a chat exchange turns into a real content question, it can move into a time-anchored thread on the timeline, where the answer stays attached to the moment it is about for every future viewer.
Chat earns its place wherever a course has a group that needs to talk while the video is open.
A few learners work through the week's recordings together, trading explanations as they go. The chat is where "does anyone get 18:40?" is answered by a peer in minutes, and where the group decides which questions to carry to the timeline or to office hours.
Teams coordinate a video assignment in the same place they review the footage: who records which part, what still needs a retake, when the draft is due. The instructor can see that the team is moving without joining every exchange.
Fully remote courses lose the hallway conversation; chat gives some of it back. When the cohort watches together, a teaching assistant works the channel while the instructor presents, answering quick questions immediately and parking the substantial ones for a pause. The session ends and the chat stays with the video.
A cohort going through a training programme together gets a channel that lives with the course videos rather than in a general-purpose messaging tool. The facilitator posts a weekly prompt tied to that week's video, peers compare how they would apply it, and a quiet group is easy to spot and nudge.
Scale is the main design decision. One chat for four hundred learners is noise; the same learners in sections or project teams of manageable size produce conversation people actually read. Large courses therefore work best when chat follows the existing group structure, with teaching assistants distributed across groups rather than watching a single firehose.
No extra app to install and nothing for learners to sign up for. The channel appears beside the player inside your LMS.
Enable the People Space and Chat for the course in the dashboard preferences. Participants, their presence and the conversation channels appear in the widget beside every course video.
Questions, study help and encouragement happen in real time in the group channel. Anyone can open a private one-to-one conversation, and @mentions pull a specific person into the exchange.
Instructors and TAs pin key answers so nobody misses them, move content questions to a time-anchored thread, and check the analytics to see which groups are active and which have gone quiet.
Healthy chat starts with stated norms rather than deletion. Post the expectations once in week one, ideally three lines: stay on course topics, disagree with ideas rather than people, and take content questions to the timeline so answers stay findable. After that, most moderation is redirection, and a weekly prompt from the teaching team is usually enough to keep quiet groups moving.
Chat activity sits in Annoto's analytics next to watch behaviour and discussion activity, so a group that has gone quiet is visible before a deadline makes it obvious.
For instructors the point is triage. Chat volume says where the energy is; the timeline says where the confusion is; watch data says who has not arrived yet. Read together, they tell a teaching team which group needs a visit this week and which can be left to run.
A course chat only works if it is where the course is. Annoto puts it in the video inside your LMS, ties it to the Comments Space, and keeps the activity in your analytics.
Annoto runs inside Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Brightspace and Open edX through LTI 1.3, on top of Kaltura, Panopto, Wistia, YouTube and Vimeo. Learners are already signed in, so there is no invitation link, no second account, and no messaging app the instructor cannot see.
Enabling People turns on @mentions in the Comments Space too, so a learner can pull a classmate to a specific moment. With Managed Comments, an instructor can reply privately to a public comment, and the exchange continues as a chat with its author. Everything stays in the same widget.
Lumo can summarise a video and explain a concept in plain language, so a group discussing a lecture has a common summary to argue from, and a teaching team has a starting point for the weekly prompt. You review it before anyone else does.
“Watching videos can be a lonely experience. Using Annoto made the students become active and reflect on the material.”
Time-anchored questions and answers that stay with the moment they are about.
Collaborative learning, flipped classroom, peer review and more, step by step.
Participation, watch behaviour and group activity per course, video and learner.
Every engagement, assessment and AI feature in one layer over your video.
Book a 20-minute demo and watch group chat work inside your LMS, on your own content, with the People Space and the timeline beside it.