Private spaces are exclusive, invite-only areas within your communities. This article explains what they are, how to create them, and how enrollment in private spaces works.
Learn what spaces are here: Organize and Navigate Your Thinkific Community.
What are Private Spaces?
Private spaces are exclusive, invite-only areas within your communities. While spaces can remain open to all, private spaces allow select sets of members, like course cohorts or project teams, to engage more meaningfully. Members can securely share resources, tips, and milestones while keeping discussions organized and streamlined, enhancing engagement without cluttering the broader feed.
Some of the ways you can use private spaces to create a better learning experience for your students include:
- Breakout collaboration sessions: Foster small-group discussions in an exclusive and focused space.
- Cohort-based learning: Maintain one community while creating private spaces for different student cohorts.
- Workshops and seminars: Provide dedicated discussion areas for students attending invite-only workshops or seminars.
Create a Private Space
To create a private space, follow these steps: Customize and Manage Your Community Spaces and toggle the Private space setting on.
Add Members to a Private Space
By default, only Site Admins are automatically added to a private space. Other users, including community moderators, must be manually added to a private space. To do that:
- Go to Products
- Select Communities
- Locate the community you want to work with in the list and click on the community card
- From the community page, locate the space you want to edit in the left navigation and click to open its name
- Select the cog icon at the top of the space
- Under Access, select Add a member
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Use a checkbox to select the members you want to add to the space.
You can only add members to a private space if they are enrolled in the community that the space is in.
- Click Add
- Click Save
Set Up Automatic Enrollment in Private Spaces
When you create a private space, you can add a course to the space to automatically grant access to the students enrolled in that course.
To set this up:
- Go to Products
- Select Communities
- Locate the community you want to work with in the list and click on the community card
- From the community page, locate the space you want to edit in the left navigation and click to open its name
- Select the cog icon at the top of the space
- Under Access, select Add a course
-
Under Automatic access, click + Add a course
If your community's access type is "Students in selected courses or bundles", only courses that have been selected in the access settings will appear on this list.
- Select the course(s) you would like to add
- Click Add
Students who are currently enrolled in the selected course(s) will have access to the private space.
Important Considerations
- Community access restrictions always apply on top of the space-level restrictions. It is not possible to give access to a private space but not the community the space is in.
- If you switch a public space to private, you must add members to it manually, as it will no longer be accessible to all community members.
- If a private space is made public, all community members will automatically gain access. If you switch it back to private again, the original members will still be there.