Enabling Social Sharing of Courses and Certificates

Enabling Social Sharing of Courses and Certificates#

Tags: site operator

This section describes how to configure Open edX so that learners can share their certificates, and so course teams can enable learners to share their courses on social media.

Overview#

You can enable learners to share courses and certificates that they earn on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

To use this feature on your instance of Open edX, you must configure social sharing settings.

Optionally, you can also enable course teams to set custom URLs for social sharing. If a course team sets a custom course URL, posts to the social sharing site can include a link back to that URL. If you do not enable custom course URLS, a link to the course About page in the LMS is used.

Note

Before proceeding, review Guidelines for Updating the Open edX Platform.

Configure Social Sharing#

To enable social sharing icons for courses, you modify the lms.yml file, which is located one level above the edx-platform directory.

  1. In the lms.yml file, modify the SOCIAL_SHARING_SETTINGS dictionary as needed.

    SOCIAL_SHARING_SETTINGS = {
    'CUSTOM_COURSE_URLS': True,
    'DASHBOARD_FACEBOOK': True,
    'CERTIFICATE_FACEBOOK': True,
    'CERTIFICATE_FACEBOOK_TEXT': None,
    'CERTIFICATE_TWITTER': True,
    'CERTIFICATE_TWITTER_TEXT': None,
    'DASHBOARD_TWITTER': True,
    'DASHBOARD_TWITTER_TEXT': None
}

    1. For each social sharing icon that you want to enable, set the value of the setting to True.

    2. If you set DASHBOARD_TWITTER or CERTIFICATE_TWITTER to True, you can also specify default text that learners will see in the Twitter sharing dialog and that can be included in their tweet. Set the default text in the DASHBOARD_TWITTER_TEXT and CERTIFICATE_TWITTER_TEXT values. Learners can edit this text before they select the Share with Twitter button in the LMS.

    3. If you set CUSTOM_COURSE_URLS to True, you must Enable Custom Course URLs.

  2. Configure the SOCIAL_MEDIA_FOOTER_NAMES array in the lms.yml file to set the order of links you want learners to see in the footer.

    SOCIAL_MEDIA_FOOTER_NAMES = [
    "facebook",
    "twitter",
    "youtube",
    "linkedin",
    "google_plus",
    "reddit",
]

  3. Configure the SOCIAL_MEDIA_FOOTER_DISPLAY dictionary in the lms.yml file to define how you want social media icons to be displayed. For each social media icon you enable, you define a title, icon, and action.

       "facebook": {
       "title": _("Facebook"),
       "icon": "fa-facebook-square",
       "action": _("Like {platform_name} on Facebook")
   },
   "twitter": {
       "title": _("Twitter"),
       "icon": "fa-twitter",
       "action": _("Follow {platform_name} on Twitter")
   },
   "linkedin": {
       "title": _("LinkedIn"),
       "icon": "fa-linkedin-square",
       "action": _("Follow {platform_name} on LinkedIn")
   }
}

  4. Save the lms.yml file.

Enable Custom Course URLs#

In addition to enabling the social sharing icons, you can allow course teams to provide a custom URL for social sharing sites to link back to.

You must set the CUSTOM_COURSE_URLS parameter to True in both the lms.yml and studio.yml files. In the studio.yml file, this parameter is the only social sharing setting.

SOCIAL_SHARING_SETTINGS = {
    'CUSTOM_COURSE_URLS': True
}

When finished, save the lms.yml and studio.yml files.

Set a Custom URL for a Course#

When you enable custom course URLs in your instance of Open edX, course teams can then set custom URLs for their courses.

In Studio Advanced Settings, the course team specifies the custom course URL in the Social Media Sharing URL setting.

This URL is provided to the social sharing site for linking back to a course location. This URL is used only if you have enabled custom URLs in your instance of Open edX.

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