Publishing Content and Scheduling Availability

Publishing 

Lessons and modules must first be published and made available before students can view and access them.

To publish an individual lesson, select the Publish option within the Lesson card. 

Note: Staff must have a role that allows them to edit course settings to access this option.

A time stamp indicating when you published the lesson appears on the Lesson card.

 This published icon appears next to the lesson name in the Lesson card.

Once a lesson is published, it is added to the schedule view.

Published Notification Badge

Content that is published triggers a badge to appear on the Schedule tab with a number showing how many pieces of content have been published during your session - this badge remains until you go to the schedule view to set or review availability for the newly-added content.

Unpublishing

To unpublish a lesson or module from the Schedule, find the lesson you wish to unpublish, open the lesson menu, and select Unpublish Lesson. The lesson is removed from the schedule. Only published lessons display in the schedule.

If any students have already started or completed the lesson, it’s important to know that you will not be able to view their work in the unpublished state. If you republish that lesson, any student work will be recovered.

You can unpublish a module but not individual lessons within a module.To turn a lesson off within a module you can use the lesson availability toggle. 

When the ordered module feature is enabled (students must complete lessons in order), be aware that lessons toggled off may affect how students can progress through the module.

Grading

The Grade Lesson button appears next to the lesson name when a lesson is committed, or the due date is reached. A lesson that has reached its due date automatically commits all students' work regardless of their progress. You can also manually commit a lesson/section.  

Revisions

Authors can edit published lessons, but the published lesson must be updated to the latest version by an Administrator before students can access the changes. If a lesson has unpublished changes, the published lesson icon is replaced by the update lesson icon on the Lesson card. 

This message will also appear on the Lesson card:

You can view your published lessons in the schedule dashboard. To update a lesson to its latest revision, choose the lesson to be updated and select Update to Latest. 

Note: Only students who have not started the lesson will receive the updated version. If a lesson is in progress, the student will continue working in the version with which they began. To have all students working in the same revision, you will need to reset progress for the students that began an earlier revision. This will delete their previous work.

Your published revisions are listed in the Lesson card. If you edit the lesson, you can choose which of the published revisions is updated by selecting update from your chosen Lesson Revision Card.

Setting Availability 

When a lesson is published, you will need to set its availability for it to be accessible by students. 

You can make the lesson available instantly by selecting the Make Available Now button when you publish. You can set individual availability time for each section in the schedule. You can also set a commit date and time for when the lesson will become read-only.

The following example shows that the lesson is currently available to students in Stream A, and is set to become available to students in Stream B in three days. The Lesson's availability badge will display the availability status for each section.

Modules

If you want your students to work through a group of lessons as a single unit, you can group the lessons together into a module. The module will appear on your student's home page and the student can select it to see the lessons you have included within it. A module is published through the home page modules card. Choose your module and select the Publish button. The module’s availability can be set in the schedule, with the option to unpublish a module in the module menu.

Modules are represented as navy banners which can be expanded to show the lessons within and their corresponding availability. 

Lessons

Stand-alone lessons are represented as white segments. If a course has students divided into sections, these sections can be viewed by expanding the lesson. A summary of section availability is visible within the lesson. These summaries are color-coded with descriptions: 

  • Red: Some of the sections can access this lesson.
  • Blue: All of the sections can access this lesson.

There are two options for setting availability and due dates in each lesson/section:

  • Available from: this is the date/ time your students can access the lesson 
  • Due: this sets the commit date of your lesson. Students' work is automatically committed after the due date.

Setting these dates in the lesson segment will set the date and times for each corresponding section.

Using the Toggle

The toggle switch allows you to turn availability on or off immediately.

Switching the toggle off removes access to the lesson from students immediately; this action will not commit the lesson and student work will be kept. 

Section availability can be toggled individually within a lesson.

Lesson Menu

Each lesson has a menu which contains this functionality: