How to decide whether to invite students as members, guests, or visitors
Learn about members
You should invite your students as members if you want them to have full access to MURAL. As a member, students can access all open rooms and create their own rooms and murals. Students will also be asked to sign in and create an account. This will give them the ability to revisit the workspace whenever they want. We suggest making everyone on your teaching team a member even if you decide not to invite your students as members.
Why choose members?
Learn about guests
Invite your students as guests if you have created a specific room for your class or for a particular team, and you would like the students in that class or team to have access to all the murals in that room. As a guest, students will be asked to sign in and create an account so they can revisit the room or rooms they were invited to whenever they would like.
Why choose guests?
Learn about visitors
Use the visitor link if you anticipate using MURAL for specific exercises in class or using one mural per class session. As visitors, students will not have to sign in or create an account. They can participate anonymously or enter their name before collaborating. With the visitor link, students can't sign in on their own, but they can revisit the mural using the same visitor link. You can send the visitor link via your video conferencing tool, email, or your LMS prior to class.
Additionally, a view-only visitor link is available if you would like your students to follow along in MURAL but not collaborate themselves.
Why choose visitors?
Hi there, my name is Emma, and I'm going to discuss how to invite your students to collaborate in MURAL, either as members, guests, or visitors. The reason I say discuss is because it's not an easy answer. It really depends on your class and how you'd like your students to collaborate in your class. The good thing is that no matter what you choose, everyone can collaborate. So let's dive into the different options. If you are thinking of inviting your students as members, these are some things to consider. If you'd like your students to have a high level of collaboration and autonomy, then member might be the right choice. As a member, the students would be able to access multiple rooms and they actually would be able to create their own rooms and murals as well. This is probably best if your class is a small class or a studio class because then the students can have more access and collaborate further. One thing to note is that when you invite your students as a member, it will ask the students to sign in and create an account. So one benefit to inviting students as a member is that the students can access the workspace on their own. You don't need to send them a link every time you want them to collaborate.
You could also invite your students as guests. Guests are what you should choose if you want your students to have access to a multiple murals in a single room. So you can invite guests to specific rooms, but they won't have access to the entire workspace. One thing to note here is that it will also ask students to sign in and create an account. So again, students would be able to revisit the specific room and go into the multiple murals in that room and collaborate in those murals without you having to send them the link each time. Again, this is probably best for smaller classes or studio classes, where you are going to be collaborating a lot in mural and wanting your students to come in and out of mural.
Okay. Now the last option is visitors. So this is great for larger classes. When you want to use MURAL either for specific exercises in your class, or when you're using one mural for your specific class session. This is because you can just send the visitor link in the chat of the zoom, or you can include it in your LMS for the specific class session. And with the visitor link, your students don't need to go through a sign on process or create an account. They could either enter anonymously or they can enter their name in and just start collaborating right away in the mural. One thing to note here is that the visitors won't have access to the entire backend of your workspace. You will have to invite them to each individual mural. The other thing to note is that with visitors, you can send a view only link. So, if you, for some reason, do not want the students to be collaborating in MURAL, but instead just watching you and your teaching team, adding things to the mural, you can send the view only link instead. So those are all the different options for how you can invite your students. I hope that it might be more clear for you, which option you can choose that will work best for your class and how you would like your students to collaborate.
