Public Course Discussion Participation

[holimoch]

I created a public course for a presentation.  I want participants (outside institution) to easily access the course and participate in Discussions in the course. What are the admin/course settings required to achieve this?

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @holimoch 

Viewers can't participate in a Canvas course discussion unless they are logged into Canvas and are enrolled in the course.

It is possible to set a course up so that existing Canvas users on the server can self-enroll (see https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-enable-self-enrollment-in-an-account-and-all... for the admin side and https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-enable-course-self-enrollment-with-a-jo... for the instructor side).

However, to allow the "general public" to participate in the discussion, you would need to allow self-registration, which is basically allowing users to create their own accounts on your Canvas server (see https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/What-user-enrollment-and-registration-options-are-ava... ).  You will need to assess whether that is something you want to do in order to facilitate one public discussion, or if you'd rather host the discussion on some external tool/site that doesn't require a Canvas user account.