Building a Community can be a great way to engage your students. Communities are an opportunity to create a more supportive learning environment, where students and creators alike can build fruitful relationships. Profiles support those goals by allowing community members to communicate who they are, and better understand who they are talking to — they make it easier to find common ground, recognize shared interests, and feel safe interacting with fellow-students and instructors.
In this article:
How to Mention a Student or Instructor
About This Feature
Member profiles allow everyone participating in a community to share some basic information about themselves with their fellow students and instructors. This information then becomes available to other members as they read posts and replies, so everyone has a better understanding of who they are talking to. Students can use profiles to find out who is local to them, discover who may have experience in an area they are working on, or boost their own network for professional connections. The transparency of a profile fosters a safe environment in which relationships can be built with peers that share common interests.
Profiles also allow creators to learn more about their students, gain insights into their backgrounds and interests, and their potential as audiences for future course content and marketing.
For example: Let's say you had targeted the marketing for your course at a specific industry. You may choose to visit your Community to see if the members enrolled in your course and Community are representative of the intended target audience. If they turn out to be from a different industry, this could potentially inform your decision to invest marketing to an adjacent industry as well.
With Mentions, you can tag someone in a post, comment or a reply to their comment to notify them that you are reaching out to them specifically.
How It Works
When a student joins a community on your site, they can edit their details and provide some information to share publicly within the community. Admins and course instructors can also fill out their profile information. This includes a profile picture, job title, organization and local time zone.
Profiles also allow you to view a student or admin's recent activity, such as comments and posts within the community as well as a list of courses your students have previously completed.
Mentions allow you to mention other members in a post, comment, or reply to a comment by tagging individuals to notify them (by email) of content relevant to them or in response to a thread they are part of.
The Mentions feature is triggered when “@” is typed in the post or comment (or reply) text box, which triggers a dropdown list of members showing the name and image associated with the profile.
Important Considerations
- Students will have one community profile attached to their account on your Thinkific site. This means that their profile and information will remain the same in different communities across your site.
- You will be required to sign in to your account in order to access your available Communities.
- A Community can also be accessed through a direct link to the Community page
How to Edit Your Profile
Does your navigation look different? Thinkific is currently trying out some improvements to our Admin Dashboard Navigation, as part of our ongoing effort to improve your user experience and workflow. As a result, some of our customers may be seeing a slightly different version of their Dashboard Navigation Menu. If that’s you, please take a look at this article, which explains some of the key differences.
To edit your profile, start by signing in to your Thinkific site and navigating to the Community. For students, this will be available from the Student Dashboard.
Site Owners or Admins can also access the Community by selecting Communities under the Manage Learning Content section of the Admin Dashboard, and then selecting Go To Community from the ellipsis menu next to a particular community.
- Once you have signed in to the Community, click on your user icon on the top right of the screen and select My account
- This will take you to the Edit Profile view by default
- Fill out or update the available fields
- (Optional) Click Upload New Image to upload a profile image
- When you have finished editing your profile, click Save Changes
You can also access your profile from within the Community by viewing your own profile and clicking the Edit profile link.
Note that while the email associated with your account appears under Edit Profile, this email will not appear when other community members view your profile.
How to View a Profile
- Navigate to your community as outlined in the steps above
- Click on a community member's profile picture or name
- This will bring up a window showing information about the user
How to Mention A Student or Instructor
- Navigate to your community as outlined in the steps above
- Create a new post, or begin typing a comment
- Type "@" and select the profile from the dropdown menu
- Finish your comment and hit Post Comment
Frequently Asked Questions
Do students have to fill out their profile information? Can I choose what fields are required or optional?
Other than their name, students are not required to fill out their profile information, and can choose how much information to share or withhold; for example, some students may be comfortable adding a personal photograph to their profile, while others may prefer not to upload an image at all.
It is not currently possible to set fields as required, or choose which profile fields a student must fill out. However, we are constantly making improvements to Communities in order to better address the needs of our creators. If you want to submit feedback or request a specific feature, you can send us your thoughts — we're always looking for input from creators, to make sure we're moving in the right direction!