Controlling Content Visibility and Access

As a member of the course team, you must carefully control which content is available to which learners, and when. Visibility settings, together with publishing states, are used to hide content from learners while still allowing course staff to view it. Access settings are used to specify which learner groups can access particular components or units.

You can control content visibility and access using the following Studio features.

You can also configure LP+ADOPT so that courses or course outlines are visible to anyone, not just registered and enrolled learners

Release Dates

In instructor-paced courses, you can specify release dates and times for sections and subsections. By defining release dates, you ensure that course content is available to learners on a planned schedule, without requiring manual intervention while the course is running.

Notre: Self-paced courses do not have release dates for sections and subsections

By default, a subsection inherits the release date and time of the section it is in. You can change the release date of the subsection to another date.

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

Course team members can access content that has not been released by previewing the course

Note: When you set release times in Studio, times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). You might want to verify that you have specified the times that you intend by using a time zone converter such as Time and Date Time Zone Converter.

Unit Publishing Status

You publish units to make them visible to learners. In both instructor-paced and self-paced courses, units must be published to be visible to learners. Learners see the last published version of a unit if the section and subsection it is in are released.

Learners do not see units that have never been published, and they do not see unpublished changes to units or components within units.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 learner experience.

You can publish all changes in a section or subsection at once, or publish changes to individual units. For more information about publishing units, see Publish Content from the Course Outline.

Visibility Settings

You can use the visibility controls in Studio to hide content from learners in both instructor-paced and self-paced courses.

You might choose to hide a unit from learners, for example, when that unit contains an answer to a problem in another unit in the same subsection. After the problem’s due date, you can make the unit that contains the answer visible. You might also permanently hide a unit from learners if that unit provides instructions or guidance that is intended only for the course team. Only course team members would see that unit in the course.

Content that is hidden by being excluded from the course outline is never available to learners, regardless of the release and publishing status.

Access Settings

In the course outline in Studio, you can use access settings to specify which learner groups can access particular components or units. You can restrict access based on one group type.

Prerequisite Course Subsections

You can lock subsections of your course until learners complete other, prerequisite subsections. If a subsection has a prerequisite, it is displayed in the course outline with a lock icon, and learners cannot view the subsection content until they have earned a minimum score in the prerequisite subsection.

Enable Subsection Prerequisites

To enable prerequisite subsections in a course, follow these steps.

  1. From the Settings menu, select Advanced Settings.
  2. In the Enable Subsection Prerequisites field, enter true.
  3. Select Save Changes.

Create a Prerequisite Subsection

To prevent learners from seeing a subsection of your course until they have earned a minimum score or completed a minimum portion in a prerequisite subsection, follow these steps.

  1. Enable subsection prerequisites for your course (see  the above section).
  2. Select the Configure icon for the subsection that must be completed first. This is the prerequisite subsection.
  3. Select the Advanced tab.
  4. Under Use as a Prerequisite, select Make this subsection available as a prerequisite to other content.
  5. Select Save.
  6. Select the Configure icon for the subsection that will be hidden until the prerequisite is met.
  7. Select the Advanced tab, and then locate the Limit Access section.
  8. In the Prerequisite list, select the name of the subsection you want to specify as the prerequisite
  9. To require that learners achieve a minimum score in the prerequisite subsection before the current subsection opens, enter the percent of the total score that learners must earn in the Minimum Score field. If the prerequisite section is not a problem set, set Minimum Score to 0 and set Minimum Completion Percentage to a value greater than zero. For example, if the prerequisite subsection includes four problems and each problem is worth the same number of points, set the Minimum Score to 75 to require at least three correct answers. To require that learners complete a minimum portion of the prerequisite subsection before the current subsection opens, enter the percent of the prerequisite subsection that learners must complete in the Minimum Completion Percentage field. If you set both the Minimum Score field and the Minimum Completion Percentage field to a value greater than zero, then learners must satisfy both conditions in the prerequisite section before they can view the current subsection. The default value for both the Minimum Score field and the Minimum Completion Percentage field is 100.
  10. Select Save.
  11. In the course outline, if a subsection has a prerequisite, the prerequisite name appears under the subsection name.

Note: Prerequisite course subsection settings are not retained when you export or import a course, or when you re-run a course