The LearnWorlds Community feature is designed to create a sense of belonging for your students by providing a space for communication, updates, and collaboration. It helps students feel connected and actively involved in your school's ecosystem. By building a strong community, you foster engagement and enhance the learning experience.
Examples of how to use the Community feature:
- Create discussion spaces for students to share thoughts on specific courses.
- Keep students updated with school announcements and news.
- Offer a space for students to ask questions and receive peer or instructor guidance.
- Organize collections for various topics or subjects to structure conversations.
- Build private spaces for smaller group discussions or advanced learning.
In this article, we will explore how to set up and manage your school’s Community in LearnWorlds.
You can choose to offer a Community and manage the Community access settings by navigating to Settings → School Settings → Community Access. When the community option is activated, you can start building a structure of your community by navigating to Communication → Community.
Community Overview
The Community page includes multiple tabs:
- General Community: Displays all community activity.
- Collections: Groups of spaces organized by themes.
- Course Spaces: Dedicated spaces for discussions related to each course.
The community is built using collections, which contain spaces and course discussions. On the Community page, under the Collections tab, you will find options to:
- Create a new collection using the "+ New Collection" button.
- Preview your community.
- Export community data.
Course discussions
Learners can participate in course-related conversations through a dedicated Course Discussion tab. This space is ideal for students to exchange ideas, ask questions, and share experiences.
To enable Course Discussions:
1. Go to Settings → School Settings → Community Access.
2. Enable Course Discussions.
You can enable or disable various options for your course discussions. Additionally, you can choose whether the discussions will be available in the course player and the community or exclusively in the course player. If you make it available in both the course player and the community, all posts will also appear in the corresponding course space within the community. For more detailed information, check this article.
While this is the user view of course discussion, admins and other user roles can take advantage of course discussion, too. This option is visible in the authoring mode for admins, community managers, and instructors. In the Course Discussions, you can locate easy and fast posts added to the course discussions.
Instructors can view discussions from the courses they are assigned to, while admins and community managers have access to all discussions.
Mentions and Replies
The mentions tab allows you to locate all the posts you have been mentioned in, whether this is a tag by name or a tag that includes everyone (@all). Users receive inbox notifications when mentioned in a post.
In the replies section, everyone can check the replies to their posts. This tab will gather all the comments the users got under their posts. When there is a new comment a notification will appear next to replied indicating the unread messages that exist there.
Export Community Data
Admins or community managers can export user activity data, including usernames, email addresses, and actions (like comments or likes). The report can be exported as CSV or XLS files for selected spaces.
After they have been exported, those reports can also be found under the Reports → Reports log.
Spaces
Spaces are interactive areas within the community where users can communicate. Each space belongs to a Collection.
Admins can create spaces and configure settings such as:
- Space name
- Allowing members to sort posts (newest activity first, newest/oldest first)
- Choose the default feed sorting
- Member visibility: If you want to show space members
- Space visibility: If you want to hide space from the community
- Permissions for posting, reactions, and attachments.
Space access also needs to be chosen while creating the space. Select if you would like the space to be private or public.
- Public spaces will be accessible to the entire community and all users.
- Private space: In this case, only invited members can view and join the space. If you choose to have a private space, you also have to choose which users will be included and invite them.
The access of the spaces cannot be edited after its creation.Collections
Collections are groups of spaces within your community. Admins can create collections and add spaces to them. This way, you can better organize the conversations in thematic areas and control how the community's left-side navigation will appear to the members.
To create a new collection:
1. Click the plus icon or the Add Collection button under the Collections tab.
2. Add the name and the description of the collection (the description is only for your reference and won't show to your users).
You can rearrange and edit collection names after creation.
There are some collections created automatically in your community:
1. Course discussions: The course discussion space collection contains all course spaces (i.e., course discussions). As courses are added to the platform, more course spaces are created. Community admins cannot add any spaces under this collection.
Course discussions will not be available in the Community if you have not enabled the Course discussions to be shared in the school community setting under Community Access Settings.
2. Spaces collection: When you first enable the community, our system creates a default collection that contains the #General public space. Feel free to completely customize this to reflect the community structure you wish to have in your school. Only admins can create/remove spaces in this space collection.
User roles within your school community
Three distinct user roles control the management and interaction within the community:
- Community Manager: Organizes spaces and collections, and moderates content.
- Space Manager: Manages individual spaces within the community.
- Space Member: Regular users interacting in the community.
The person who creates a space is automatically assigned as the space manager. Community Managers have complete access to all spaces and can invite or delete members, modify settings, and assign admins.
You can find more information in the following articles:
The "STAFF" label visible alongside member names applies to Admins/Instructors or roles derived from them and can be customized using the Site Language.
Key Notes
- You can create multiple collections, adjust their order, and move spaces between collections.
- Moving spaces doesn’t apply to the system-generated collections (i.e., you can’t move a course discussion elsewhere).
- Users who don’t have access to any space within a collection will not be able to see the collection at all.
- Collections can be deleted; however, before deleting a collection, spaces need to be deleted or moved to another collection.
- Only administrative roles can create spaces (like school admins and communication managers).
- Whenever a new post is shared by your school’s users, the respective email notification will be sent to the email inserted under the Admin Notifications, keeping you informed even if you are not logged in to the school.
- A user will receive a notification for a post in their inbox only if it has been mentioned by name on the respective post (this email can be configured under Community emails). It's not feasible for users to receive notifications for every new community post.
| You can find more information on using the Community and the available options in this article. |