Your students will automatically gain access to Yellowdig through the LMS course site if they are enrolled in a class, but you can also invite followers from outside of your School's LMS. One reason to do this is to make the course discussion more interesting by introducing outside perspectives to your learning community. For example, you can bring in:
- Industry or functional experts
- Alumni members
- Outside faculty
- Institutional collaborations
A few important points:
1. Members invited following the instructions below become Community Guests, not Community Members. They will only have access to the Yellowdig Communities to which they're invited. They will not have access to any other Communities in your Organization; they will be unable to find other Communities via the Discover page; and they will not be allowed to create new Communities within the Organization.
2. If you are using LMS gradebook integration, members invited as instructed below will not sync with the LMS gradebook because their credentials do not exist in the LMS. Other students' grades will continue to sync. If passback is essential, the member will need to be enrolled in the course through your LMS.
Invite Community Guests
- In the second-to-leftmost navigation panel, go to Members→Member List
- Click on the Invite button in the upper right-hand corner of the page.
- Under "Emails", enter the email address of the Guest you're inviting.
- You may also enter multiple email addresses separated by commas.
- Ensure that "Invite as Admins" is turned off.
- x = off; ✓ = on
- Click the SEND INVITATIONS button.
Invited Guests will receive an email with a link to connect to your Yellowdig Community. Once a user has joined your Community, the Community Owner can choose to make them a Community Facilitator and (if the Community Owner is also an Organization Administrator) an Organization Member. In general, however, if someone is not a matriculated or employed member of an organization, you should not promote them to Community Facilitator or Organization Member status. This is to ensure that external guests have tightly proscribed access to an institution's Yellowdig resources and cannot access sensitive information.