What is a Community?
Communities are groups of people with a common interest, interacting and sharing information online. In Learner Community, members of your community can upload files, interact in discussions, ask and answer questions, and earn badges to show their expertise.
How can I use Communities?
There are many ways that a community can be useful to your learners. You can create communities for special events that will allow participants to collaborate before, during and after the event. Communities have been used as general discussion boards for association members. Badging can be enhanced through a community by letting community members earn badges for their participation and upvoting by other participants.
Communities offer four different ways for members to communicate with each other. The main Community Dashboard will display recent activities in all 4 types, along with links to a page for each. Below is a list of the types of interactions available:
- Q&A - Participants can ask questions, submit responses and find answers. Each question and answer can be up-voted by other community members. The creator of the question can also select a correct answer from the responses and participants can comment on other responses.
- Discussions - Participants can participate in discussion topics and create their own topics.
- Files - Participants can download and share files.
- Badges - Participants can show off the badges they have earned.
- Click on the
button to create your Community. At this time, you can only create a single Community on your portal.
- Give your Community a Name.
- Set the Privacy to either allow anyone to see the content, or only allow logged-in users to see the content. (Note: it will always be required to log in to participate in the Community).
- Upload the Community Logo, which will display at the top of the main page. You can return and replace this logo in the future.
- Fill in the content for your "About" page in the Community. This page will be accessible from the Community main menu and should give your learners information about the purpose of the Community. This information is entered in an HTML editor and can include formatting, links, images, files, etc. (optional)
- Provide an Introduction message to your learners. This content will display below the Community logo. This information is entered in an HTML editor and can include formatting, links, images, files, etc. (optional)
- Add Categories for your Discussions. These will be in a drop-down select box when creating a new discussion. Type your new category in the provided field and click
. (Note: Categories cannot be deleted once created.)
- Click on the
button to Publish your Community to the Live site.
- Click on the
button to see the default relative link to the Community. This link can be customized. You will add this linke to your primary Learner Community URL/Domain. You can include the link to the Community on your portal, include it in your email notifications, and/or distribute it separately to your learners.