Courses

A course is a syllabus with a gradebook. It holds material a member works through at their own pace — explanations to read and problems to solve — and every task they solve feeds a grade. Where a contest is a timed event that ends in a scoreboard, a course stays open as long as you leave it open, and what it produces is a grade per student.

Courses live in the Courses section of the console, which appears when you have permission to read courses. How many courses a space may hold is set by your plan; creating one past that number fails with a quota error. See Why a section is missing.

How a course is built

Three levels, each of them ordered and individually publishable:

Alongside the structure sit the people: students are the members enrolled in the course, and a group can be enrolled as a whole so that everyone in it becomes a student. An assignment is what makes one module available to one student or group, optionally on a schedule. See Enrol students and Assignments.

Creating a course

Add course on the Courses screen creates an empty course and opens it. It asks for a Name, a Description shown on the course landing page, an Image used in the course list and on that landing page, a Visibility, a Duration as an estimate of how long the course takes, and the Language it is written in.

Courses are normally created Private and opened up once their modules are ready.

Two oddities worth knowing before you fill the form. The Duration is entered here in seconds, while the Settings tab later shows the same value in hours. And the description is set here and only here — the Settings tab does not edit it.

Visibility

Visibility decides who can see the course exists and who may join it on their own:

Seeing a course is not the same as being able to read it. Opening a module still requires being an active student with that module assigned. The two coincide for people who join by themselves, because joining enrols them with every module assigned.

The tabs of a course

Opening a course puts you on its Modules tab. The others are Students, Groups, Gradebook, Submissions and Settings.

Groups lists the members groups enrolled in the course. Add group enrols every member of the group as a student, and removing the group takes away the assignments it granted while leaving the students' records and grades in place. Deleting the group itself in Members has the same effect on every course it was enrolled in.

Submissions shows every submission made against a task material of this course, with the material name, the member, the runtime and the verdict. Rows open the submission in Submissions, and the row menu can rejudge one — the new verdict flows straight back into the student's grade.

A course submission is an ordinary judged submission, so it also appears in the space-wide submissions list. What differs is the context: only the best result counts and it counts permanently, there is no penalty for retrying, no attempt limit and no freeze, and a student can only submit while the module is Active for them.

Settings holds the cover image, name, visibility, language and duration, each field saving on its own. Topics, which the course list can filter on, have no editor in the console.

Deleting a course

Delete in the row menu on the Courses screen asks you to confirm by naming the course, then removes the course together with its modules, materials, enrolments and grades. There is no way back.

Where the detail lives

• Modules — chapters, their order, draft and published, and the grading coefficient.

• Materials — documents and tasks, and what a task is worth.

• Assignments — making a module available, on a schedule or not.

• Enrol students — the four ways someone becomes a student, and the permissions it takes.

• Grades — how every number in the gradebook is calculated.