Create an Organization for your courses
An Organization on Benchling collectively groups individual users to make it easier to share files and access research data. You can lump your students in an Organization for the course that you’re teaching and share assignments, protocols, or datasets. We recommend Organizations for large classes (greater than 15 students) as it will save a lot of time from individually sharing files with your students. Follow the instructions below to create your organization:
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Login to your Benchling account and navigate to your home screen. (If you don't have an account yet, sign up for a free here)
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Once you're logged in, click on your avatar icon in the bottom left corner, and choose “Join Organization”. Begin typing until organizations start populating and then choose “Create one now”
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Give your organization a name related to your course. We recommend using the name of your institution, course name, and year (ex. Benchling University_BIOL 3100_2020)
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Create an organization handle (a unique name that users can easily search for), and add an avatar to represent your organization. You can also invite students or TAs directly to your organization when you’re creating one.
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Click on the “Next:Share Projects” button. If there are existing Projects you have on Benchling that you want to share with your organization, you can choose to share them. Otherwise, ignore this and complete your organization’s setup.
If you teach different courses, we recommend that you create a different Organization for each one. There’s no limit to how many Organizations a Benchling user can be a part of.
Get your students onto your course’s organization
Method 1: Ask students to sign up and join your organization when doing so
Send your students this link to sign up for Benchling after you’ve created your Organization. When your students finish signing up, they can immediately find and send a request to your course’s organization as part of getting started on Benchling.
If students already have an account, ask them to login and navigate to “Join Organization’ in their avatar menu. They can search for your course’s organization from here and select ”Request to "Join".
Please note that in both cases, you will need to approve your students’ request to officially join the Organization you created. Join requests should appear at the bottom-left corner of your screen and can require you to reload the page to view recent ones.
Method 2: Invite students to join from your Organization page
For small classes or students who enroll late, you can manually invite them to sign up and join your organization directly through their email address. Access your organization page by clicking on your avatar and choosing your organization. Navigate to the “Members” tab where you can see/edit your current class roster and invite new students or TAs. You can invite multiple email addresses by comma-separating each one (ex. “student1@benchling.com, student2@benchling.com”).
While you’re at your Organization’s page, you can also go into the “Settings” tab to add or edit information about your Organization. You can change the name of your Organization to make it easier for students to search for it.