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When to edit, republish or duplicate content
When to edit, republish or duplicate content

As an author, if you want learners currently studying to see the changes to your content, edit and republish it. If you don't, duplicate it.

Michele de Bes avatar
Written by Michele de Bes
Updated over a week ago

Before you make changes

Before you get started it is important to work out what changes you want to make, how big they are, and to consider how your learners will be affected. There are three ways to make changes to course content:

  • Republishing content: Fixing typos or mistakes, adding/removing/changing course content/pages, changing assessed/non-assessed tasks, adding/removing elements such as in-page discussions/videos. These changes affect all class activations.

  • Editing course attributes: Editing overviews, study plans, trailer videos etc. for specific class activations.

  • Duplicating course content: Making significant changes to content e.g. adding/removing/changing entire sections or the number of pages, substantial changes to assessed tasks. Only future class activations from this duplicate course will see these changes.

For a reminder of the difference between course content and class activations check out the video below:

Republishing course content

When you publish changes to content (re-publishing the original content), the changes will flow out to all learners in scheduled, current, and past classes using that content. This includes classes in other environments if that course is part of the Catalogue or has been licensed to another organisation. You can see how many class activations there are on each content row on the Create dashboard.

Screenshot of a content row selected and the number of Activations indicated.

Note: For any republish, always think about whether you (or the facilitator) should let learners know about what changes have been made via the class Talk channels.

Editing class attributes

By comparison, class attributes ought to be edited per class activation. You might want to change a single attribute such as a pdf study guide for one class but not for the other classes, and so the course content shouldn’t be republished to flow out to all the class activations.

A person with manager access can edit a class attribute in a live class activation. For more information see the Knowledgebase article: How to update an activation.

Duplicating course content

If you’re wanting to recreate course content and don’t want the changes made to be passed on to existing learners or to environments who are using the course - duplicate the content. If you are not sure whether to duplicate or republish your content, consider whether the changes you’re wanting to make would essentially result in a different version of the content. As a rough guide, if you are making changes to 10-20% of the content, you should consider duplicating rather than republishing.

Note: When you are finished making changes, remember to add a version number or identifier to the content name of your duplicate, and to archive the old content.

Summary

When you republish changes to content, the changes will flow out to all learners in scheduled, current, and past classes using that content. If you edit a class attribute, only the current or selected course activation will be affected by the change. If content is duplicated, no existing class activations will see the changes until the content is published and new class activations are created from it.

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