Using Kumu in the classroom

We see lots of people using Kumu in the classroom to teach systems thinking, stakeholder mapping, and data visualization. But deciding on the best account structure within Kumu can be a challenge. Let’s walk through some of the decisions you’ll need to make.

Individual personal accounts or an organization account for the class?

Everyone who logs into Kumu needs to have their own personal account. This represents their individual identity and should not be shared. You can have students create their own personal accounts for free by visiting: https://kumu.io/join.

One option is to have students create projects in their own personal account. Each student would email support@kumu.io to request our educational discount (make sure to include the username in that email request). This allows students to create up to 3 private projects for free under this personal account.

Students can still invite others to collaborate by opening their project, clicking the project settings menu in the upper left, choosing “members” and then adding the email or username of whoever they want to collaborate on the project with.

Another option is to create an organization account for the class. If you’re working with explicit teams and want to make it easy for anyone in the class to view the projects of other teams, an organization account is likely the right choice. You can create an organization by logging in through your personal account, going to your dashboard and then clicking the “organizations” tab and then choosing “create new organization”.

The rest of this article will cover decisions you need to make when following the organization account path. If you’re using individual personal accounts for each student, you can stop reading here and go email your students and tell them to sign up by visiting https://kumu.io/join.

Guest, member or owner?

Once you’ve created a classroom organization account, you’ll need to start adding the students to that account. You can do this whether students have a personal Kumu account yet or not. Here’s the difference in the three roles:

• Owners. Can view and edit all projects, invite and manage organization members, and manage team structure.
• Members. Can view the names of all projects but can’t access them unless explicitly granted access.
• Guest. Can only view the projects they have explicitly been granted access to based on the teams they are on.

You’ll likely want the teacher and any TAs set up as owners. Some classes may also want to empower students by adding everyone as an owner. This empowers students to make whatever changes they need, but also means more nefarious (or comedic) students can edit any project under that organization.

Most classes will set up students as members. This means they’ll be able to see the names of all projects that exist across the class without necessarily being able to view them. It also means students can create their own projects, but they have to use a special link to do so (they need to go to the organization settings page to be able to add a project under the org account).

Guests are good options for when you don’t want students to know the names of the different projects that exist within the organization.

What’s the right team structure?

Once you’ve added students to your organization, the next step is to organize them into teams. If you have explicit teams in your class, use those as the team names and add each student to the relevant team. Once you do that, you can then grant the team access (either view, edit or admin access) to each project.

Say you have 5 teams working across 6 different projects (1 example project and 1 for each team). You’d likely grant each team edit access to their respective project and then view access to the example project.

How to submit assignments?

Ultimately you’re probably going to have students submit Kumu maps as part of an assignment. If you’re an owner of an organization account you already have access to all projects so they can just send you the URL of their project (or to a specific map/view combination within that project). They can also send you a share link which allows anyone to view the link even without a Kumu account (great if the grading team might be slightly more removed and not part of the organization account) or a screenshot if you’re just interested in the visual (make sure to watch our video on how to get the perfect screenshot).

That should be enough to get you started! Reach out with any questions by sending an email to support@kumu.io.