In LearnWorlds, the Community feature provides powerful tools for student engagement, but understanding the differences between Community spaces, Collections, Course spaces, and Course discussions can be tricky.
In this article, we will learn about what a community is and its key components, how to use collections to organize spaces, the purpose of course discussions, and how to create and manage spaces.
You can learn more about creating and managing the community in this article.
Community Overview
The community is built using collections, which contain spaces and course discussions. The Community includes the:
- General Community: Displays all community activity.
- Collections: Groups of spaces organized by themes.
- Course Spaces: Dedicated spaces for discussions related to each course.
- Spaces: Interactive areas within collections for user discussions.
Collections: Structuring Your Community
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.
For example, you could create a Collection called ‘Language Learning’ with spaces for Spanish, French, and German discussions.
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.
Learners can also participate in course-related conversations through a dedicated Course Discussion tab within their Course player.
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.
Spaces: Interactive Areas in Collections
Spaces are interactive areas within the community where users can communicate. Each space belongs to a Collection. You can, for example, create a space for ‘Book Club’ where members share their thoughts on readings.
As an admin, you 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.