Purpose:

Community is provided to meet the collaborative working and social needs of the campus community and campus-sponsored external communities. The server utilizes Moodle in order to provide options for public or private information dissemination and offers a wide array of collaboration activities. Unlike the academic instruction-based server “Cougar Courses,” Community is not rolled every academic year or archived by semesters. Community assumes on-going activity throughout the year or over multiple years.

Availability:

Community is available upon request by users with a valid campus account/username, but may include participants from the external community as long as containers are maintained/sponsored by one of these valid campus account holders.

Requesting Containers:

Community members may request a new website container from the "Request Container (login first)" link at the bottom of the site. The server administrators will receive these requests and approve or deny requests, based on compliance with the server’s availability guidelines and purpose.

eWPAF Containers

You no longer need to personally request eWPAF containers. The Dean's Office for your college will be sending the requests for containers directly to IDS. If you are a lecturer, please see our process guide for eWPAF container creation for lecturers for more information. If you are a tenure track faculty, please see our process guide for eWPAF container creation for tenure track faculty for more information.

Accounts:

CSUSM Users --

• If you already have an account with CSUSM (i.e. an email account like doe001@cougars.csusm.edu) then just log in with your CSUSM username (ex: doe001) and password to activate your Community account.
• If you are trying to add other CSUSM users to your container and cannot find their name/account, then they might not have activated their Community account yet. Have them log in with their CSUSM username and password to activate their Community account.

Non-CSUSM Users --

• Community allows for external accounts to be created. Use the "Create new account" button once you click Log In in the upper right. From there, you can enter your desired username to use for future logins, your password, and a valid email address that will be used to confirm/complete the process. Submitting the form may allow you into the system temporarily, but it is important to check your email for the confirmation link and complete that process in order to fully activate your Community account.
• Remember that this process just gets your account into the system and does not add you into any containers. The owners of those containers will usually add people directly by searching for the individuals name or email address, so make sure those fields represent your real name to make it easier for them. In some cases, containers allow for a self-enroll option and that can be completed once you have created and confirmed your account.

Roles --

An attempt to offer more multi-purpose roles than typically found in academic settings was applied to the following list of available choices on Community

Owner >> Coordinator >> Designer >> Participant >> Reviewer >> Guest (not assigned, used by any unauthenticated visitor)

• "Owner" | Owners can do anything within a container, including changing the activities and grading participants. They can add people into any lower role. Typically, there is only one owner per container because this is the primary contact in case of administration notification.
• "Coordinator" | Coordinators can do anything within a container, including changing the activities and grading participants. Coordinators essentially have the same abilities that container owners have, except the ability to assign other coordinators to the container. They can add people into any lower role.
• "Designer" | Designers can do anything within a container, except grading participants or viewing participant submissions for individualized activities -- like assignments or quizzes. The designer role is mainly for individuals responsible for creating structure or design for the container.
• "Participant" | Participants generally have fewer privileges within a container.
• "Reviewer" | Reviewers have few privileges within a container besides read-only access. This is like a guest role, but it requires the user to be logged in and known within the container.

All CSUSM faculty, staff, and students should login with their CSUSM username and password.  If you are a community member or potential/transfer student that does not have a CSUSM username and password, you can create an account to access a container that you have been granted permissions to access.

Each of the individual courses may also have a one-time "enrollment key", which you won't need until after you have created your account.  If you don't have that information, contact the person that invited you to the container. This is the process to create the account.  Please use your email address as the username in all lowercase letters.