What are communities on Fermion?
To give a great learning experience to your students, it is important to bring your community under your platform. Fermion offers you a sweet spot - one where you can host your community in a slack-like interface under your domain. Real-time communities on Fermion are your own private space where you can interact with your online audience. The community experience at Fermion is very similar to how Slack works. It comes with tons of features to give your audience a rich experience.
What's special?
These features which give your audience a rich experience make the community so special. It's a unique blend with your platform and Slack, bringing a native white-labeled community inside your platform.
How does it work?
Step 1: Head over to the community section from your instructor dashboard at Fermion.
Step 2: Once you reach your school's community, this is what it will look like.
Step 3: Create your first channel by clicking on "Create a channel".
Step 4: You can choose to create a private channel or a public channel depending upon the kind of audience you'd like to cater to. Fill the basic metadata about your channel, like the channel name and description.
Voila! Your first channel is now ready. Share messages, and files and interact with your students in the best way!
What can I do inside the Fermion community?
There's a lot you can do. Fermion allows you to host communities in the way you want, which means, more customizations, features, and controls for you.
Let's dig in and understand the different features.
Choose from private or public channels
If you've ever used Slack, you can already relate to this feature
At Fermion, you can choose between creating public channels or private channels, inside the same community, and all under your platform.
Students' privacy
One of the most important concerns people have while participating in communities is their personal information being revealed. To battle this, Fermion doesn't allow users to see any data, whether email or phone number, to be visible to other users. Only the user's name and profile picture are shown in the community.
Although as an instructor, you will be able to see all student's registered email.
Message Reactions
Communicating is more fun with emojis - that's a fact, isn't it?
Add emojis as reactions to any message in the community and interact with your students. It works exactly how reactions work on any other social media platform - Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord.
If you want to step up your community game, you can also add custom emojis specific to your community, apart from the basic emojis available.
Conduct polls
You can also conduct quick polls within your community, to make decisions quickly and smoothly.
Simply head to the poll option in the options tray, write your question and provide the options.
You can end the poll manually once you get the satisfactory number of responses.
Tag and mention people
Tag people in the community, add mentions in messages and communicate in a better way.
Every time you tag someone, they will receive a browser notification, or an in-app notification, depending on their device.
Add voice notes
Ditch long text messages and share quick audio notes with your community - it's like a norm in close knit communities now, isn't it?
Dispatch emails from within the community
Feel like you're sharing an important message and want to make sure people pay more attention to it?
You can share it as an email too!
Threads
With threads, you can create organized and detailed discussions around specific messages without adding clutter to a channel.
Personally, threads are a great way to continue conversations on relevant topics.
On Fermion, you can use threads within your community to organise conversations better. You can also send messages inside a thread to the main channel - just how slack works!
Channel settings
This feature brings to one of the most important area inside your community - the channel settings.
When you click on the channel name, a new modal like shown in the above picture opens up.
It gives you more controls to manage your channel settings. If you need to change your channel name, description, this is the place to do it.
Other than this, you can also make your public channel private and vice versa, manage your notifications and banned users.
More admin controls
As an admin of your community, you have important controls like banning users, and deleting messages to maintain the peace and order of your communities.
At times, it gets imperative to strictly moderate your communities against any sort of spam or abuse. At times like these, you can use admin controls to resolve any issue.
When you hover over a user's message, you will see three dots. Upon clicking those three dots, you get options to ban the user or delete their message.
Conclusion
It is extremely important to provide a seamless and beautiful experience to your students via a powerful community. Fermion allows you to provide exactly such a premium experience with rich tooling and infrastructure.
If you're looking to host your next technical course online or simply want to host an online community under your own platform, let's speak.