1.1.1 Locating CGScholar

CGScholar, or Common Ground Scholar, is a social knowledge platform that you can find on the web at cgscholar.com. It has been developed by Common Ground, a not-for-profit public benefit corporation located in the Research Park at the University of Illinois.

Funding for the research and development work behind CGScholar has come both to Common Ground and the University of Illinois from the Institute of Educational Sciences in the US Department of Education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

For more information about the research and development work in the development of CGScholar, visit our research page. The content of this learning module can also be found in the Help area in the top right of the CGScholar screen.

1.1.1 CGScholar Apps

CGScholar consists of six working spaces, or apps.

• Community: A space for discussion between peers and among community members. Community is a cross between a social media feed, a blog, and a personal and community profile page.
• Creator: A place for creating and peer reviewing multimodal works, including text, image, video, audio, dataset, and many other options. Your works can become PDFs or web pages.
• Publisher: This is where you can design and manage peer-reviewed projects, from draft, to feedback, to revision and publication phases.
• Analytics: Data-mining CGScholar, tracking the knowledge creation process and providing rich “learning analytics” data. (This tab won't be visible until you become a member of a community that has enabled this setting.)
• Event: Upcoming academic conferences hosted by Common Ground.
• Bookstore: An area for the publication and distribution of journals, books, and learning modules.

1.1.3 CGScholar Access

Community, Creator, and many Bookstore items are available to any user at no charge—just set up an account. Access to Publisher, Analytics and available at no charge on a trial basis, then for a per-user annual charge. Event and Bookstore are available to conference organizers and publishers for a modest percentage of sales. Please contact us at <support@cgscholar.com> to discuss your licensing needs. Income supports maintenance and ongoing development based on not-for-profit sustainability principles.

1.1.4 Roles in CGScholar

CGScholar helps organize knowledge communities with a number of different roles:

• Peers: People who join together peer to peer to share ideas in the Community space. When a scholar makes an update from their personal profile page, the update goes to their peers.
• Community Members: People who belong to a community. Whenever an update is made in the community, members are notified.
• Community Admins: The person or group of people who coordinate a community.
• Creators: People who create textual or multimodal works in the Creator space.
• Feedback Contributors: People who offer feedback to peers’ works—including reviews, annotations, or publication recommendations.
• Publishing Admins: People who create and manage projects, including deadlines, peer feedback assignments, and publication of the finished work. They can also access detailed assessment data in the Analytics area.
• Organization Admins: People who manage accounts for closed communities, such as schools.

Comment: If you have a question about CGScholar, ask it in the comments box below this update. Another community member is likely to know the answer!