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+## How do you teach 1400+ students?
+
+The [Technical University of Munich](https://www.tum.de/en/) (TUM) is
+one of Europe’s top universities. Every year, its Department of
+Informatics ([ranked #1 in Germany][tum-ranking]) 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](https://ciip.in.tum.de/people/lasser.html), 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](/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]
+[czo-patch-thread] that resolved it.” This patch to improve performance at
+scale was released to all users as part of [Zulip 4.0][zulip-4-blog].
+
+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](/for/education/), and how
+Zulip is being used at the [University of California San
+Diego](/case-studies/ucsd/) and the [National University of Córdoba](/case-studies/university-of-cordoba/).
+You can also check out our guides on using Zulip for [conferences](/for/events/)
+and [research](/for/research/)!
+
+
+[tum-ranking]: https://www.in.tum.de/en/the-department/profile-of-the-department/facts-figures/facts-and-figures-2020/
+[czo-patch-thread]: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/3-backend/topic/Tornado.20performance/near/1111686
+[zulip-4-blog]: https://blog.zulip.com/2021/05/13/zulip-4-0-released/