Introduction to Communities

Create and manage online communities for a variety of purposes

Article Content

This article covers the following topics. Click on the topic to go to that section of the article.

Communities Introduction
Permissions
Communities Pre-conditions
Database Settings

Communities Introduction

A community can be set up by any user to provide a space to share documents, have online discussion, and more. It can be set up as public, or as protected and only accessed by authenticated users. There are three types of communities which can be used for different purposes. The three types are:

Community
Course website
Learning module

All communities can be configured to include features like announcements, discussion boards, document sharing, quizzes, events, and polling.

Communities is one of the few modules of Elentra that is not organization specific. That means you can see communities created within one organization across all organizations and you can add users from any organization to any community. When users are logged in they can access any of their communities without toggling between their organizations.

Typically, an organization's staff maintains course website communities, committee communities, and learning modules. Individual users can create communities for their study groups, professional learning communities, sports teams, and other clubs.

Permissions

All users (except guests invited to participate in an Elentra community) have the ability to:

Create a community
Administer a community
View community members

Note: Students do not have the ability to create an official course website that is connected to the course in Admin > Manage Courses > Content Tab.

Communities Pre-Conditions

In order to use all features of the Communities module, the following components must be built within Elentra:

Courses (for course websites)

Database Settings

Database Setting	Description
community_display_guest_enrollment
community_allow_leave_community	Controls whether users can leave communities they were added to by an admin.
community_course_outline_hide_pcoordinators	Use this option to hide program coordinators from the course website.
community_share_show_file_versions	Use this option to control whether or not users viewing files on a Documents page can see previous file versions.
course_website_autoenroll_audience	Control whether or not learners enrolled in a course will automatically be added to a course website.
course_website_associated_faculty_admins	Use this option to automatically provision all faculty associated with a course as administrators of the corresponding course website.