Tag Archives | registration

Getting Started With the Commons

Registration
To register an account on the CUNY Academic Commons, follow this link or just click on the “Create an Account” link on the CUNY Academic Commons home page, under “Getting Started”:

createAnAccount

The Commons is only open to CUNY faculty, staff, and graduate students. An active CUNY e-mail address is required to proceed. We cannot support undergraduate students or classes.

Five fields are required for initial registration. Others are optional, and can be entered at registration time, or later, by editing your user profile. Minimally, your need to provide:

User Name – must not have spaces – example: JaneDoe
email address – must be an active CUNY e-mail address
Full Name – can always be changed later
CUNY College – pick from drop-down list. You can choose more than one college.
Role – faculty, grad student, alumnus/a, postdoc, other …

Please read our Terms of Service and if you agree, continue on to register.

Optional Fields
It’s not necessary to enter any other fields, but it may be convenient to enter more about yourself and starting building your Commons profile. Optional input fields include: Title, Academic Interests, Phone, e-Mail, Website Address, Blog Address, as well as various social media links. If you don’t enter anything, the fields will not appear on your profile.

Profile Field Visibility
Phone Many fields may be configured to be visible to the public, or to logged on members of the Commons, or to only your friends on the Commons. The “Visibility” hyperlink lets you configure what you want to show, and to whom. For example, if you want to make your phone number only visible to logged in members of the Commons, your would choose this setting pictured on the right.

Do I want a WordPress site?
If you know that you want a WordPress site, provide a subdomain name and a title. The title of your blog can be changed later, but the URL will remain constant. All sites on the commons adhere to the following URL pattern: http://xxxx.cunyac.reclaimhosting.dev – where “xxxx” is the subdomain name that you provide here. Try to keep your subdomain name a manageable length to help people find your site and read your stuff.

You can always set up a site later if you can’t decide. (You can have as many sites as you want.)

If you do choose to have a site, you might want to make it private until you are happy with it, and then make it public. For more on this, see How to Adjust Site Privacy.

Completing your Registration
Once you have filled out the fields above, you click on “Registration Complete” and if you have filled out the required fields correctly, you should see this page:

You may browse your computer for a suitable avatar and upload the image now, or later, or change it whenever you want.

Activating your Account
The Commons will send you an email to activate your account. Click on the URL provided to finalize your registration.

Yeah!

You are now a member of the Commons! Confirmation email sometimes end up going to your junk email folder, so if you do not receive your confirmation, please check there.

Invitations to the Commons, to Groups, and to Group Sites

When you invite colleagues or students to join the Commons, there are a number of options that can save you a bunch of time. Listed below are the basic scenarios, and how you can combine what you want to do into one process.

Inviting Someone to Join the Commons
This is the basic scenario – you want to invite a CUNY colleague to join the Commons. Any member of the Commons can send a customized email invitation, and the recipient can simply click on a hyperlink to begin the registration process. (The person you invite needs to have an email that ends in “cuny.edu” or “cuny.tv”. )

Go to your Commons Profile page and click on “Send Invites” circled in red on the right. You can also simply hover over your avatar in the top right corner of your browser screen, and scroll down to the “Send Invites” option.

When you click on Send Invites, you’ll see a screen like below. Fill in your colleague’s email addresses, one per line, in the box highlighted in red. You can customize the subject line and the text of the invitation.

Inviting Someone to Join the Commons and Your Group(s)
If you want to invite someone to join the Commons, and to join one or more of your groups, follow the same procedure as above, but in the optional section 4, click on one of the checkboxes of the groups you’d like the new member to consider joining. When he or she completes the registration process, an invitation to the group(s) will be waiting for acceptance.

This is particularly effective if you are using the Commons to teach a graduate class. Make sure you create your class group first, and then, when you send out invitations to class members, check your class group’s box. Then your students will receive an invitation to join the Commons, and once they registered, will automatically receive a request to join the class group.

Inviting Someone to Join the Commons, Your Group, and Your Group Blog
The final scenario pertains if you have a group blog. (For more information about group blogs and their uses, see Groups and Group Blogs, and Bringing Content Together.) If you don’t have a group blog and want to create one, click on the tab circled below to get the process going:

If you already have a group blog, go to the Group Admin screen and click on the “Group Blog” hyperlink to configure the privileges new members of your group will be automatically assigned. For this, scroll down to Member Options, circled in red. Make sure that the “Enable Member Blog Posting” is checked. Then assign the appropriate role under the “Default Member Role.” Every new member of your group will be granted this role.

For more information about WordPress member roles, see:

How to Add New Users to a Site

A site can be configured to have one or many contributors, and WordPress allows granularity in the permissions users are assigned. Listed below are roles and their permissions:

Administrator – has access to all the administrative duties
Editor – can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts
Author – can publish and manage their own posts
Contributor – can write and manage their posts but not publish post
Subscriber – can read comments, and receive comment and news letters

To add a user to an existing site, follow these five steps…

1. Log into the Dashboard of your site.

2. Navigate to the Users tab located in the left navigation bar of your Dashboard and select ‘Add New’. (The Users tab is located between the Plugins and Tools tabs).

3. Enter the member’s member’s email address, username, or display name(this information can be found on their profile page).

Please note- Only Commons members can be added to a blog.

4. Set the role of the new user to: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor or Subscriber.

5. That person will be sent an email asking them to click a link confirming the invite.

New users will not need a new username or password to log into the blog — once they log into the Commons they will have access to the blog under ‘My Blogs’ on the top navigation bar.

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