New: Draft courses

[TomNaessens]

Setting up a course in Dodona takes some preparation: adding series, arranging exercises and trying things out before students get to see it. Until now a course was a regular course from the moment you created it, tied to an academic year and ready to be found and registered for. There was no proper "still working on it" state.

To make preparing a course easier, we have added draft courses.

A draft course is a course you are still preparing. It is hidden from students, is not tied to an academic year, and is never archived automatically. When the course is ready, you convert it to a regular course to publish it.

What you can use it for

The main purpose of a draft course is to prepare a course before publishing it. You can build and arrange your series, add and test exercises, and get everything right without students being able to see or register for the course. When it is ready, converting it to a regular course publishes it like any other course.

A draft course also works well as a personal sandbox for experimenting with exercises and judges in series.

And because a draft course is not tied to an academic year and is never archived, it can stay a draft for as long as you like. As a side effect, that makes it a handy place to keep a library of series you copy into other courses (see #157 for copying series between courses).

How a draft course behaves

Marking a course as a draft has a few consequences:

• Not tied to an academic year. A draft course is therefore never archived automatically.
• Hidden from students. A draft course does not appear in the public course overview, and the secret link does not give students access either. Only its course administrators can see it.
• No student registrations. Students cannot register for or submit to a draft course, and since there are no students, there are also no student questions.
• Inapplicable settings are locked. While a course is a draft, the academic year, access-rights, questions and archiving settings are disabled in the course form, each with a short explanation.
• Fully usable by you. As an administrator you can add series and exercises and submit solutions, so you can prepare and test the whole course before publishing it.

When you are ready, you convert the draft course to a regular course. At that point you pick its academic year and review the access-rights and questions settings, and the course is published like any other.

Creating a draft course

When you create a course, tick "Make this a draft course". Any teacher can do this.

Finding your draft courses

Draft courses are kept separate from the courses you teach, so they do not clutter your "My courses" list. Instead, the draft courses you administer are collected in a "Draft courses" card on your home page:

As always, let us know in the comments if you have any questions or feedback!