The world’s largest social network Facebook announced private Groups for Schools. Only users with the valid email address of the particular college or university will be able to join them, according to the corporate blog of Facebook.
To join the main group of the college or university, you need to go to the Groups for Schools service page, use the Facebook Groups Search box to find the right school, and then leave a valid email address, which was provided by school.
You’ll get an email to this address with notification about the launch of the main group of the college or university. Then you can browse the directory of its subgroups – for example, courses, specialty etc.
At the moment only users in the U.S. can use such function. However, Facebook plans to extend this function coverage to other countries.
Facebook users can join multiple groups from different colleges and universities, but must have a valid email address for each institution. Thus, access to the main group of a particular institution will get only the students and staff, which is the basic norm of privacy. At the same time, the privacy settings of each subgroup can be configured separately.
By joining the main group of the school, you will be able to get current news on campus, create or join a subgroup, send messages to other students or teachers, even without adding them to your friends list, look for classmates, post files with lectures and attachments up to 25 MB, share your photos and create events pages. The file-sharing function will be monitored by groups administrators and Facebook stuff, to avoid copyright violations.
When user entered the group he can invite classmates and teachers. The automatic transformation of the existing Facebook-group of colleges or universities in to the new format is not available. If the user has left the main group of the school, he is automatically excluded from all subgroups.
