Managing Content Visibility and Access

As a member of the course team, you must carefully control which content is available to 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 specify which learner groups can access particular components or pages.  

You can manage content visibility and access in the Authoring Tool using:  

• Release Dates  

• page Publishing Status  

• Visibility Settings  

• Hiding Graded Content  

• Access Settings  

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

Release Dates

In instructor-led courses, you can specify release dates and times for sections and subsections. This ensures content becomes available to learners on a planned schedule, without manual intervention.  

Note: 
Self-paced courses do not use release dates for sections and subsections.  

By default, a subsection inherits the release date and time of its parent section, but you can override this.  

• Published pages are not visible until the scheduled release date and time.  

• If a section and subsection have different schedules, content is hidden until both dates have passed.  

• Course staff can access unreleased content by previewing the course.  

Important:  

• Release times are set in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Verify using a time zone converter if needed. http://www.time.is/compare is a free tool for comparing timezones.

• Learners with a time zone set in their account see dates and times in their chosen zone. Others see course dates in the time zone specified by their browser, while some dates may still display in UTC.

Page Publishing Status

Pages must be published to be visible.  

• Learners see the last published version of a page once its section and subsection are released.  

• Unpublished changes remain hidden, so you can safely make updates without disrupting learners.  

• pages that have never been published are invisible to learners.  

You can publish:  

• All pages in a section  

• All pages in a subsection  

• Individual pages  

Visibility Settings

You can hide content from learners in both instructor-paced and self-paced courses. 

Examples:  

• Hide a page that contains answers to a problem, then reveal it after the due date.  

• Permanently hide a page that provides staff-only guidance.  

Content excluded from the course outline is never available to learners, regardless of release or publishing status.  

Important: 
Content hidden from the course outline is also excluded from grading. Do not hide graded sections, subsections, or pages this way. Instead, use date-based visibility controls.  

Visibility options include:

• Hide a Section from Learners  

• Hide a Subsection from Learners  

• Hide a page from Learners  

• Set Problem Results Visibility  

Note: 
Visibility settings cascade. Making a hidden section visible will also expose child subsections and pages, unless they are explicitly hidden.  

Hiding Graded Content

If you hide graded content by excluding it from the outline, it is excluded from assessment.  

Best practice: 
Do not hide graded content via the outline.  

Instead, you can:  

• In instructor-paced courses, hide subsections based on due date.  

• In self-paced courses, hide subsections based on the course end date.  

If you want learners to see a problem but not its results, use Problem Results Visibility.  

Access Settings

In the course outline, you can control access by learner group.  

• Restrict access to specific content groups (e.g., cohorts).  

• Provide differentiated content based on enrolment track (e.g., practice for all learners, exams only for certificate-track learners).  

Options:

• Modify access settings for a page  

• Modify access settings for a component