How to Create and Manage your School’s Community

Social Networks are the key to every new business or product. Making your students feel that they are part of a community where they can communicate, be guided, or stay updated on your school’s news can be beneficial. That is why in LearnWorlds, we offer a built-in Community where you can empower your strong community of users and allow them to be bonded and actively involved in the school. 

You can choose if you wish 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 to build a structure of your community by navigating to Communication → Community. 

In this article, we will dive into creating and setting up your school's Community. 

Community Overview

On your Community page, there are different tabs that refer to your general Community, Collections, and any Course spaces. In the course spaces tab, you can find a dedicated view for all your course discussions as well as the discussions taking place inside any social learning activity you might have added to your courses

The Community consists of collections that contain spaces and course discussions. On the Community page in the Collections tab, you can also see a + New collection button, which can be used to create a new collection, a Preview button, which can be used to preview the community, and an export option, which can be used to export community data.

Course discussions

While enrolled in a course, users have direct access to a dedicated discussion area called the course discussion tab. Here, learners can engage in discussions about course-related topics, exchange ideas and tips, and share their experiences.

To enable this option navigate to Settings → School Settings → Community access → 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

This 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).

Remember that with mentions, users receive a message in their inbox informing them that they have been tagged in a post.

Replies

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

With this option, admins or community managers can export a report in CSV or XL format that includes information about the users (username, email address, actions like comment or like, content, etc.) for all or selected spaces. 

After they have been exported, those reports can also be found under the Reports → Reports log.

Spaces

Spaces are areas within the community where users interact with one another. All spaces in the community belong to a Collection. As an admin, you can create unlimited Spaces. While creating a space, you can configure a set of settings to tailor it to your needs:

• Name
• If you want to allow members to sort posts (newest activity first, newest/oldest first)
• Choose the default feed sorting
• If you want to show space members
• If you want to hide space from the community
• Choose the permissions, reactions, and attachments users can use (Allow members to post, poll, comment, mention)

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. Once the space is created, this setting cannot change.
• 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.  You can check more information on how to create private spaces and import users in this article: How to Invite Space Members and Assign Space Managers in the Community

 The access of the spaces cannot be edited after its creation.

Collections

You can think of Collections as groups of spaces within your community. Admins can freely create collections and add new spaces under 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, click the plus icon or the Add Collection button under the Collections tab. You will need to add the name and the description of the collection (the description is only for your reference and won't show to your users).

The order of your collections can be changed, and the name can be edited after the 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

In your school community, there are 3 distinct user roles, each with its own set of permissions enabling specific actions within the community.

• Community Manager: They can help you organize your community structure in spaces and collections and moderate community content.
• Space Manager: They can moderate community spaces.
• Space Member: The users of your school that visit and use community

Note: The space admin is automatically assigned to the person who created the space (an admin or a community manager). 

All Community Managers are also Space Managers (for all spaces, private or public). Community managers can invite or delete members from a space, change the space settings, and promote members to space admins.

You can find more information in the following articles:  How to Create a Space Manager Role and How to use the LearnWorlds School Community.

The "STAFF" label visible alongside member names is applicable to Admins/Instructors or roles derived from them and can be customized using the Site Language. 

Notes: 

• You can create multiple collections, change 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.