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1343

What are the different subscription options in Study Direct?

Study Direct has now been discontinued.  Please log in to Canvas for more information.

Study Direct offers various options for allowing other users to view or participate in your site. To begin with, it is important to understand the difference between subscribed and guest users.

Users that are subscribed to your site can contribute to any activity in the site. As a tutor, you can see who is subscribed to your site by clicking the green Dashboard button at the top right of your site and then clicking People in the menu down the left hand side.

Users that are guests on your site can only access read-only resources and activities. They can read, but not contribute to forum discussions. Guests might be other users with Study Direct accounts that are not subscribed to your site, or any user from the internet that has logged into the system using the Sign in as a guest button on the front page.

There are three ways a user can be subscribed to a site:

Automatic subscriptions

Subscriptions for the majority of sites are managed by an automatic nightly process. Everyone who has a formal association with a university module on the administration database is automatically subscribed onto the associated Study Direct site, and so can access the site with no intervention from tutors.

Manual subscriptions

Sometimes you may need to subscribe a user who does not have a formal association with a module (e.g. a student auditing your module, or an interested colleague).

See FAQ 1273 - How do I add people to a site?

Informal subscriptions

For some sites, it may make more sense to allow users to choose to subscribe/unsubscribe themselves (e.g. clubs or societies, or if you are carrying out a consultation). If informal subscriptions are enabled, any user visiting your site will be asked if they want to subscribe as a student. When new sites are created, they are set up with informal subscriptions switched off.

See FAQ 1245 - How do I set up informal subscriptions on a site?

Subscription key

If you set up a subscription key, manual subscribers and/or guests will need to enter a code chosen by you the first time they access the site.

See FAQ 1261 - How do I set up a subscription key?

Guest access

You can choose whether to permit or deny guest access to your site (guests do not have to be members of the University).

See FAQ 1344 - How do I enable/disable guest access for my site?