How to Create a Community for a Group

If you would like to provide a Group with access to a Community, this can be achieved by creating a Community specific course!

Overview

Sometimes your courses will have members of a particular Group enrolled as well as students outside of that Group. If you are looking to create a Community that is only available to a specific Group instead of all students enrolled in your course, you'll need a way of controlling Community access.

Currently, when creating your Community, the following access options are available:

Logged in students - Students who are logged into your site can access your Community regardless of their enrollment status
Enrolled students - Limit access to one or more specific courses or bundles on your site. With this option, Community members are automatically added (or removed) based on their current enrollments.
Only me - Only the Site Owner and Site Admin will have access

We will be using the Enrolled students option and creating a Community Course that all students from your Group will be enrolled into. This will essentially be a new course that's purpose is to control access to your Community. This course can be set up quickly with a single welcome lesson letting your students know what to do!

We understand that this process is currently a bit of a workaround for giving Community access to a Group. This is our first iteration of our Community feature and we are continually making improvements. If Group access is functionality that you would love to have or if you have any other feedback about Communities, please let us know!

Create a Community Course

First things first, we will need to create a new course that will be used to control access to your Community.

To get started, you'll need to create a new course. We will come back to this course later to add more customizations, so you can just complete the following for now:

Go to Manage Learning Content
Select Courses
Click + New Course on the top right
Choose the Blank template
Name your course
Click Create Course

Create Your Community

Now that you have created your course, you can go ahead and create your Community! You can refer to our detailed instructions in the following artcle and make sure to set access to Enrolled students for the course you just created: Create a Community.

Customize Your Course

You're almost ready to give your Group access to your new course and Community! You'll just need to add some final customizations to your course.

Recommended Customizations

Add a course image - Since this course will display on the Student Dashboard, we recommend adding an image!
Set your course to Private and Hidden - When your course is Private, the checkout will be blocked, allowing you to fully control enrollments (and therefore access to your Community). Hidden courses will not display publicly on your site, so visitors without direct access will not see a landing page for this specific Community course.
Add a Text Lesson to your course to welcome students to your Community. You can include a direct link to your Community within this lesson!
Publish your course!

Optional Customizations

You can customize your course landing page if desired or consider redirecting the landing page straight to your Community page. This way, if students click the Course Overview on the course card displayed on their Student Dashboard, they will be taken straight to your Community!

We only recommend adding a redirect if your course is currently set to Hidden.

To Redirect a Course Landing Page to a Community Page

Copy your Community Share Link
Paste this link in an external text document for reference later
Go to Manage Learning Content
Select Courses
Click on your Community course
Select the Settings tab
Click Page Code

Paste the following code:

<script>window.location.href = "CommunityURL";</script>

Replace CommunityURL with your Community Share Link

Click SAVE

It should look something like this:

<script>window.location.href = "https://mysite.thinkific.com/communities/Q29tbXVuaXT3LTQy";</script>

Now if a student clicks See Overview on their course card, they will be taken to the Community page instead of the Course Landing page!

Enroll Your Group into Your Community Course

Great! Now that your new course and Community is set up, you can enroll your Group. You can filter for users within your Group and then use our Bulk Enroll feature to enroll all students at once.

Once your students are enrolled, they can start commenting and posting in your Community!