Having a community within your school is essential for fostering engagement. Integrating a community directly into your courses elevates learner interaction. By using the social learning activity, you can add a course or community public space within your courses, allowing users to connect with peers, ask questions, share ideas, and participate in discussions.
This feature enhances the learning experience by making it more interactive and enjoyable. For instance, learners can introduce themselves, provide feedback on completed courses, or engage in reflective discussions.
In this article, we will learn how to create and set up a social learning activity.
Create a Social Learning Activity
1. Go to your course and navigate to Contents → Course Outline.
2. Click on Add activity under your selected course section.
3. Click on Social from the list of activities.
When you navigate to this category, you will see various templates crafted to assist you in building your course. Select the one most relevant to you, and let the social learning begin! Some available options are:
- Introduce yourself
- Think and Share
- Ask questions and discuss
- Self-reflection
- Assessment discussion
- Certification and exam activities
- Course Completion feedback
- Craft, share, and shine
- Exploring beyond the course
Social feed in Ebooks
If you prefer not to use the available templates, you can add the social widget to an ebook, by clicking on the plus icon in a section, and choosing the Social Feed option.
After adding the social widget to the ebook, select the space you want to link to this specific social widget. Linking the widget to a space means connecting it to an actual space in your Community where discussions will take place.
You have two options:
- Course Spaces: These spaces exist only in the context of this learning activity, and they won't be visible on the community page. You can access it in the “Course spaces” tab of the Community admin page.
- Community Spaces: Add one of the existing public spaces.
You can create course spaces within the social feed widget in your courses. These spaces will only exist in the context of the specific learning activity and will not be visible in your community.
When adding a social activity or a social feed widget to eBooks, mentioning a specific user (@username) or all users (@all) will ensure that only users enrolled in the courses are available and receive a mention notification.Managing your Course Spaces
To manage your course spaces, go to the “Course spaces” tab on the Community admin page. Here, you can find all created spaces, including regular course discussions.
Instructors can access the course spaces tab and moderate their content (edit or delete posts) for their assigned courses. User Experience
Here’s what the social feed activity looks like for users:
Posting and Engagement: Users can post content, comment on others' posts, and engage in discussions.
Media Uploads: Users can upload various media, including images (with the option to upload multiple images in one post), files, or polls—all within the same activity interface.