The "Communities" button in the top horizontal grey toolbar is for creating groups of interest to invite your friends, classmates, professors, instructors, and students in general to participate in learning with you. This is your off-campus area for learning, kind of like a coffee shop, pub, or library.

Professor Cram has created some subject-specific communities that are chocked full of Cramlets™ (learning modules), study sheets, tutorials, and articles that you can already access. The communities can be found on Professor Cram's home page. If you don't see a community that works for you, create one!

The Communities page has a toolbar of textlinks that include:

• Communities - communities you have joined.
• Owned Communities - communities you have created
  
• Friends - listing of all the friends you have linked to
• Friend of - listing of all the friends who have recipricated a link back to you.
  
• Friendship requests - listing of all friendship requests if you have designated Friendship moderation to "Moderation: friendships must be approved by you" in Account settings.
• FOAF - "Friend of a Friend" is an xml file you can copy from your other social networks and apply to college-cram.com
• Access controls - this allows you to control exactly who sees everything you upload to College-Cram, including files, blog posts and profile items.
• Invite a friend - an invitation to friends outside college-cram.com

When you click on the "Owned Communities" textlink in the toolbar it will take you to a list of all the communties that you have created with the ability to creat new communities. If you have already created a community it will be listed at the top under the toolbar menu with the approprate community icon. The community icon allows for easy navigation to your commuity's page.

To create a new community fill in the "Community name:" input box with your choosen name for the community. Then create a username for the community in the "Username for community" input field. Then click the "Create" button. After clicking the "Create" button it will take you to the "Edit community profile" page.

This screen allows you to edit your profile. Blank fields will not show up on your profile screen in any view; you can change the access level for each piece of information in order to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. For example, we strongly recommend you keep your address to yourself or a few trusted parties.

"Edit community profile"

The  page has five tabs for different types of information.

1. Basic details -  You can load up a profile photo, give an introduction about the group, breif description, interest, likes, etc. Each section has it's own "Access Restirction:" (Public, Logged in users, or Community)
2. Location - This might be more helpful for when creating a on campus study group. You could list the actual location the group meets and keep it private to the group with the "Access Restirction:" controls. The location section includes street, town, state / region, postal code, and country. Please do not list any personal locations here in this section! Each section has it's own "Access Restirction:" (Public, Logged in users, or Community)
3. Contact - As the adminsitrator you can choose to share contact information with the members of your group or the contact information for the group at large. Contact includes email, work, home, mobile, official website, ICQ number, MSN chat, AIM screenname, Skype username, and Jabber username. Each section has it's own "Access Restirction:" (Public, Logged in users, or Community)
4. Employment - If you would like to share information about your employment this is the section. Each section has it's own "Access Restirction:" (Public, Logged in users, or Community)
5. Education - This allows you to list any school affiliation you would like to have with the group, especially if this is a community for a class or university. You can include level of education, high school, university / college, and degree. Each section has it's own "Access Restirction:" (Public, Logged in users, or Community)

You are the one creating the community so fill out as much or as little as you want to describe your community to others. Once you have completed adding information or editing the commuity profile don't forget to click the "Save your profile" button at the bottom of the form.

"Membership restriction"

As in all areas of College-Cram you have complete control of your content, profiles, and commnities you created to be accessed by others. The access right for a community is set in the "edit community details" under the "Membership restriction" A community can be set to:

• Public - for all to see with no restrictions
• Logged in users - only for logged in members of College-Cram to have access
• Community - "Name of Community" - access is restricted to only the members of the community.