Introducing Jamf Nation education community

[msonntag]

Hello Jamf Nation!

As you may have noticed, we began making some larger-than-normal changes to Jamf Nation, starting with My Assets and Jamf ID.

Jamf Nation is the largest Apple IT admin community on the internet. With that, this community enjoys a highly engaged user base that shares their knowledge, curiosity, best practices and genuine support for each other.

This year, our main focus is to improve the Jamf Nation community experience. Part of this work is introducing additional communities to the site. One of the key communities we’re introducing is an education space where, similar to the IT admin community, people from throughout the education sector can join to share their knowledge, curiosity, ideas, best practices and support for one another.

In light of a pandemic that’s forced schools into a new paradigm of online learning, we’re introducing an early version of this community to Jamf Nation. This will give anyone working with tech in the education sector, from teachers to IT admins, a place to share their knowledge and experiences.

Consider this a beta. As we continue to understand how you use the space, we’ll iterate based on your feedback and engagement. We expect that what we show today may look quite different by the time we lift the beta tag from this community. Thank you for your patience as we work through this.

Here are some key features of this community:
- New links added in the Navigation Drawers
- A new community selector found in newly created Discussions, Knowledge Base articles, and Feature Requests will allow users to select if their post will show up the general community (by selecting “None”) or the new education community.
- Posts sent to the education community will still appear in the general community. This is because we want to keep visibility high to the general community but keep conversations in the education community focused.
- All posts will still show up on the activity feed, no matter which option is selected.
- Tagging will still function as it did prior to this release.
- Users will be able to quickly access Discussions, Feature Requests, and Knowledge Base articles related to the education community using the left-hand navigation.
- Users can join the education community by navigating from the Community Drawer > View Education Discussions. Once on the page, users will see an option to “Join” towards the bottom of the left-hand navigation.

Thank you all!

[bpavlov]

How is an education discussion different from a regular discussion?
Also, do you forsee communities extending to other industries/sectors?

[msonntag]

@bpavlov I think education discussions differ in a few ways that caused us to look at creating a separate space.

First, one of the more common pieces of feedback we receive from new members into Jamf Nation is that there are so many IT experts new users can find themselves quickly overwhelmed. Of course, that is not at all a bad problem to have, but it does warrant a different approach to ensure we account for the experience of new community members.

Second, we hope to include teachers to the audience of education discussions. There are a number of features that are unique to educators with regard to device and classroom management, that we wanted to have a space for discussion on best practices, questions, and anything else that might pertain to their jobs. By creating a space separate from the general community we hope that we can keep these discussions contextual and easier to participate in.

To your second question: Yes, we do intend on extending communities for additional industries or sectors. I can’t say for sure what we will look to next. We will be watching and listening closely to how the education community develops and create a plan based on what woks best.

I hope that helps answer your questions!

[donmontalvo]

Awesome idea, kudos to Edu folks!

Wouldn't mind seeing a space for secure environments like banking/gov too. :)

[Matt_Roy93]

This is awesome!

[don_cochran]

👍

[thomasC]

Thank You Jamf!

[bcampbell]

I hope this doesn't fragment the expertise and lower the overall value of JAMFnation. Speaking strictly from the iPad management side of things, I have received valuable information from both education and non-education IT folks related to iPad management. (I work in K12 education.) Maybe this is a bit different for those focused on Mac admin information. (I'm not very involved with Mac management at my school so don't follow it closely here).

@msonntag said

Posts sent to the education community will still appear in the general community.

Does that mean that I can just stay following/subscribed to things like I have been and continue to see everything on both the education and non-education spaces?

If that's true, then is a primary reason for this new division to allow educational folks to not see stuff posted by non-educators?

Thanks.

[msonntag]

Hey @bcampbell,
You're correct on both of your questions. We want to be very careful to not fragment the experience.The Activity Feed will continue to display ALL posts and activity across Jamf Nation and if you follow or subscribe to something you will see it in both spaces.

You are correct on the second point that the primary reason for the new division is to allow educational folks to see education related topics. While this can sort of be accomplished by our existing tagging system, the education community will be more about serving the most relevant information to a group of people with a common application; rather than a single person trying to browse for specific information.

Thanks for the questions!