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 they get invited to. 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 host 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.
To Invite Community Guests:
- Click on Feed in the left-hand menu.
- Click on the Invite button just below the left-hand menu.
- 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 a Network Administrator) a Network Member. In general, however, if someone is not a matriculated or employed member of an organization, he or she should not be promoted to Member or Administrator status within that organization's Network. For example, if Doogie Howser, M.D. guest lectures for your Human Anatomy course at TV Drama Medical School (TDMS), he should be invited to your Yellowdig Community as a Guest. But since he is neither employed by TDMS nor a student of TDMS, he should not be promoted to Member status, and he certainly shouldn't become a TDMS Network Administrator. This is to ensure that external guests have tightly proscribed access to an institution's Yellowdig resources and cannot access Posts and Comments from other Communities in your Network.