What is a community - a brief introduction

The concept of communities in the TRIKKS platform basically gives learners with shared goals, motivations and interests a place to:

• Connect and collaborate with other members and subject experts in the same community
• Tap into a common knowledge base by sharing their expertise and competence within a certain topic or subject matter.
• Attend events relevant to their community

The idea is based on social learning. They provide an opportunity to all members, and not just facilitators, to create and share content, ask questions, initiate and participate in discussions, solicit feedback from subject matter experts, share files among other collaborative activities. Communities can be compared to the dynamics of other well-known social networks (facebook, linkedIn etc.).

How to create a community?

The concept of communities should be enabled at an academy level by the academy administrators, and several permissions can be setup accordingly:

Note: Enabling communities in you academy might have an additional cost depending on your subscription. 

Once enabled, communities can be created from the left side menu by clicking the 'Create' icon:

Important to note that communities can be created with 3 different types of privacy settings, as shown below:

Creating different post types in a community

The first tab of any community is the 'feed' tab where members can choose to create from 12 different types of posts available.

Once posted, a post can be commented on by other community members as well as given different reactions. 

Different community tabs and their functionality

The following tabs are available at the top section of the community:

The second tab that is the 'content' tab, offers 4 valuable ways to create and organize content within a community:

It is possible to simply upload a single file here, or create a collection consisting of many files pertaining to a collection topic. It is also possible to reuse an existing content from the academy and upload to this section or create a new piece of content from scratch using the toolbox. 

The 'events' tab gives the possibility to add events to a community:

The 'files' tab allows uploading files directly from your system.

The 'members' tab is where new members can be invited into the community and the community admins/facilitators can manage the existing list of members.

In addition, the community admins/facilitators always have access to the 'actions' drop-down where different settings and styles can be applied to the given community:

Overall, each learning community can have their own shared goals built around their specific learning needs. At the same time, there are elements of learning communities that help to make them an enjoyable and rewarding environment for its members.