6.7. Controlling Content Visibility

As course staff, you must carefully control which content is visible to students and when.

You control content visibility through these features in Studio:

These features work together to control content visibility for students.

6.7.1. Release Dates

You schedule release dates for sections and subsections. By default, a subsection inherits the release date of the section it is in, though you can change it to another date.

By defining release dates, you can ensure that content is available to students as planned without requiring manual intervention at that future time.

Published units are not visible to students until the scheduled release date. When the section and subsection have different release dates, published units are not visible until both dates have passed.

Prior to the release date, content is visible to course staff previewing the course or viewing the live course as staff.

See:

6.7.2. Unit Publishing Status

You publish units to make them visible to students. Students see the last published version of a unit if the section and subsection it is in are released.

Students do not see units that have never been published, and they do not see unpublished changes to units or components within units. Therefore, you can make changes to units in released subsections without disrupting the student experience.

For more information, see Unit Publishing Status.

You can publish all changes in a section or subsection at once, or publish changes to individual units. See:

6.7.3. Content Hidden from Students

You can hide content from students. Such content is never visible to students, regardless of the release and publishing status.

You might hide a unit from students, for example, when that unit contains an answer to a problem in another unit of that subsection. After the problem’s due date, you could make the unit with the answer visible.

You could also hide a unit from students if you wanted to use that unit to provide instructions or guidance meant only for course staff. Only course staff would see that unit in the course.

You can hide content at different levels:

Warning

When you make a previously hidden section or subsection visible to students, not all content in the section or subsection is necessarily made visible to students. If you also explicitly set a child subsection or unit to be hidden from students, it remains hidden from students. Unpublished units remain unpublished, and changes to published units remain unpublished.

6.7.4. Content Groups

If you have cohorts enabled in your course, you can use content groups to designate particular components in your course as visible only to specific groups of students.

For details, see Content Groups and Creating Cohort-Specific Courseware.