How to Set Student Progression Through a Resource

When you assign a resource (course, lesson, or activity) to a class, you will have some control over how students move through the resource.
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It can be a little bit of a learning curve to figure out what works best for your classroom setting, student behaviors, and preferred teaching styles, and we hope that this article will help you to make informed decisions.
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When assigning a lesson or course, you can set the date materials become available and the dates they are due. Note that due dates are for tracking purposes and do not lock students out of a resource - rather, this is what will show on the student calendar and is also what will determine when completed work begins showing as 'late' in your gradebook.

Release Dates determine when a work becomes available to students. They are a great way to ensure that students don't see work until you want them to; for example, if you're worried about students working ahead at home or on the weekends, you might adjust your release dates so things only release at the start of your class period.

Lessons and stand alone activities have one release and due date as they only represent a single resource. Courses, on the other hand, are made up of many lessons and courses, all of which can have their own release and due date.

To help with this, there are a few extra options that come into play with Courses.

Auto-Sequence Resources: When this toggle is turned on, Kira will autofill release dates based on the previous due date. If you make a change to one resource, the dates on those following will waterfall change accordingly. You can turn this feature off to make manual changes to the dates and turn it back on to preserve the waterfall change feature.

Lock Unscheduled Resources: When this toggle is turned on, any resources (lessons, activities) in a course that do not have a release date will be automatically unreleased until a date is scheduled. If you have a particularly lengthy course, we recommend keeping this on so you do not need to set dates for everything at once at time of assignment to keep things locked.

After setting the availability and due dates, there is an option to set progression settings under 'Advanced settings' (the last step of assigning a course, lesson, or activity).

Require submission to progress: when this toggle is turned on, students must submit all activities in a step before the next step will unlock. This is great when you want students to work linearly through a lesson.

[COURSES ONLY] Require resource completion to progress: when this toggle is turned on, students must complete a resource (lesson or activity) in its entirety before the next resource unlocks. This is ideal for courses where you might be batch releasing a series of lessons - for example, you might release Lessons 1 - 3 in a week and ask students to complete them all at their own pace, but you still them to complete the lessons in order. This is not an ideal setting if you plan to have students move freely through the course in a non-linear pattern.

In addition to the release dates and progression settings, teachers can also set a hard lock that students will not be able to move beyond, regardless of what content is available or not. To do this, use the 'Access' button when viewing a course as a teacher.

You can set an access lock between steps in a lesson, between lessons, or between units. This is a great feature to use if you are having students work through a course synchronously and want to set stopping points to allow for classroom discussion or other pacing purposes. This lock can be removed or moved at any time.

Coming Soon: In the near future, you will be able to set different locks for different students or groups of students to allow for even more varied work styles!

Starting a Live Session (click the play button in the top right when viewing a course as a teacher and select 'Live Session') will have invited students keeping pace with the teacher's screen.

The teacher in charge can move students through steps with a few clicks of a button, and can also pause the live instruction to bring students together for in person or synchronous activities. If you're planning for Tier 1 instruction, Live Session is a powerful tool to assist your pedagogy!