As you may have heard, Slack is getting a redesign on December 19th. In a prior communication, RIT described some of the changes you may experience in your day-to-day interaction in Slack. The Center for Teaching and Learning has some additional considerations for you when it comes to using Slack for courses.

This Semester and Prior Semester Workspaces
Any existing workspaces will also receive the updated Slack design, this means all current and prior workspaces will become part of the unified sidebar list. Instructors should not abandon or leave old workspaces to try to clean up their sidebars. Instead, instructors should review the workspaces they own at https://rit.enterprise.slack.com/ to determine if there are workspaces that are no longer needed. Note that each workspace owner is responsible for ensuring workspace content is retained in accordance with relevant university policies such as C22.0 Records Management Policy.

You can request to have workspaces deleted by completing the form Enterprise Slack Workspace Requests.

Workspaces for Next Semester
There is no change to the request process. You are still welcome to have one workspace per course section per semester, an instructor workspace with many course-level channels, or whatever setup you feel works best for your course needs.

Regardless of your workspace configuration choice, all channels from all workspaces will be shown in one list by default. While you can use filters and adjust your sidebar preferences, the CTL recommends the following to help you manage your sidebar:

• The name of your channels will become more important for helping you and your students be in the right place. We recommend starting all channel names with a short course identifier and making the rest of the name clear to the channel's purpose. This includes editing the name of your #general and #random channel that you get by default. 
• Create custom sections in your sidebar. Only you see the custom sections, so you can use the organization method that makes sense to you. One option is to organize all channels for a course into a section to replicate their prior "workspace" feel. Another option is to group channels of similar importance together so you can have your higher priority channels near the top of the sidebar and the ones you need to check less frequently at the bottom of the sidebar.

If you would like to discuss the setup of your workspace in light of these changes, request a consultation with a CTL staff member. The CTL will also hold training sessions for instructors in December and January (register for trainings).