While there are many different ways to stay in touch with your Coursera friends in-game, one of the best and easiest ways is by using the coursera chat channel. The coursera chat channel is used by all members of the Courserrim kin as well as their friends in other kinships to stay in touch with each other.
By default, what you type into the chat window (which is by default in the lower left part of your LOTRO screen) will go out on the “say” channel. For example, if you type Hello World! into the chat window, right before you hit the return key it will look like this:
Say: Hello world!
When you hit the return key, your chat window will now show:
You say, ‘Hello World!’
… and the text Hello World! will be seen by all players in your local vicinity.
However, to converse with all your Coursera friends (who may not be nearby you) you need to join the coursera chat channel. You can do this by typing:
/joinchannel coursera
… into the chat window.
When you do this, you should get a message saying something like this:
You joined room 'coursera' (UserChat1). Number of members: 12.
This would mean that you have just defined coursera as user chat channel 1 (if you had previously created other user chat channels before creating the coursera channel, the message above might say something like UserChat2 or UserChat3 instead of UserChat1 -- if that occurs, you should just substitute the proper chat channel number in the examples below).
So, if you now type:
/1 Hello Courserrim!
… into the chat window and press the return key, it will be seen by all your Coursera friends who are online, wherever they happen to be in Middle Earth … you can tell that you have sent that message to the coursera channel since your chat window will now say:
[To coursera] ‘Hello Courserrim!’
The /1 in what you just typed indicates that you are directing your text to the coursera chat channel instead of to some other chat channel. Your chat window will now say User Chat 1: instead of Say: and from then on all the text you type will go to the coursera channel until you start directing your text to a different channel.
Here is a very detailed guide to LOTRO chat, for those of you who would like to learn more, or customize your chat experience.
When the first session of the Coursera course “Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative” was offered in 2013, many people who took that course were already LOTRO players and were in various kinships. Most of the new LOTRO players who took the course joined the Courserrim kinship. The Courserrim kinship continues to use the coursera chat channel (instead of the Courserrim kinship chat channel) for normal kinship chat so that all Coursera friends from all different kinships can communicate on the same channel.