Community overview
Community is how people in your organization talk to each other: announcements that go out to an audience, spaces where a group discusses something, and direct messages between two people.
What this does
Section titled “What this does”Three things, each with a different reach:
| What it’s for | Who sees it | |
|---|---|---|
| Announcements | One-to-many. Something the organization needs people to know. | An audience you choose |
| Spaces | Many-to-many. An ongoing conversation about a course, a year group, a team. | The space’s members |
| Messages | One-to-one. A private conversation. | The two people in it |
Everything is signed-in only. There are no public spaces and no anonymous access at any level.
Your organization may rename these — Space in particular. See Terminology.
Turn it on
Section titled “Turn it on”- Open Org settings and choose Community under People.
- Turn on Enable community.
- Check the preset it picked for your kind of organization, and adjust anything that doesn’t match how you work.
The preset matters more than anything else on the page, because it sets the defaults for who may message whom, whether learner posts are reviewed before anyone sees them, and whether learners may attach images. A school and a company get very different answers, and the preset gives you the right starting point rather than a blank policy.
Settings are inherited by sub-organizations. A sub-organization that saves its own settings stops following the parent from that point — the page tells you so before you save.
Where each person meets it
Section titled “Where each person meets it”| Who | Where | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Staff | Community in the sidebar | Spaces, announcements and their reach, direct messages, the moderation queue |
| Learners | Community in their own navigation | Spaces they belong to, announcements addressed to them, messages where policy allows |
| Guardians | Community in the guardian portal | Announcements addressed to them, and messages with staff where policy allows |
A course page carries a Discussion button that opens its space. Community never appears inside a course — it links out, so a course page stays a course page.
What it deliberately does not do
Section titled “What it deliberately does not do”Stated plainly, because each of these is a question people ask:
- No public spaces. Everything requires a sign-in.
- No guardian↔child messaging. A platform sitting between a parent and their own child is surveillance, not a feature. It is switched off at the database and is not configurable.
- Learner↔learner messaging is permanently off for schools. For other kinds of organization it’s a setting. For K‑12 it is locked, not defaulted.
- Community isn’t embedded in a course. A course links to its space; the space doesn’t live inside the course.
Reference
Section titled “Reference”| Thing | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Access | Signed-in only, everywhere |
| Module switch | Org settings → Community → Enable community |
| Presets | Per kind of organization; set the defaults you then adjust |
| Sub-organizations | Inherit until they save their own; then they stop following the parent |
| Course integration | A Discussion button that links out |
| Retention | Posts older than your retention setting are redacted, not deleted |
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”Nobody in my organization has Community. The module is off. Turn it on in Org settings → Community.
I can see Community and a colleague can’t. That’s permission, not the module — the module is all-or-nothing for the organization.
A sub-organization’s settings won’t change from the parent. It saved its own copy at some point and stopped inheriting. Edit that organization’s own settings.
I changed the preset and my customizations went. A preset sets the whole policy. Adjust individual settings after picking one, not before.