We understand that course content will always need to be updated, but we have some suggestions and things to be aware of when making changes to published courses!
Question
- Can I edit a course after it's published?
- Can I update a live course?
- Can I add lesson after someone already registered?
- Do I need to unpublish my course to make edits?
Solution
You can make changes to your courses even after they have been published. You do not need to unpublish the course in order to make edits.
Editing or Adding Lesson Content
If you're looking to add new lessons, you can set them as a draft first. By doing this, you can take your time to work on the lessons and it won't be visible to students already enrolled in the course. For more information, check out Create Draft Content for your Course.
Once you do publish the draft lessons, they will then be viewable by students enrolled in the course! It is also recommended to then inform students once new content is ready and available for them to see.
Editing Course Pricing
Important Considerations
Please take note of the Recalculate Progress option for students who have already started working on content. Recalculating progress will ensure that their completion percentage is calculated correctly based on the current content within the course. If your students have not yet accessed/viewed the course at all, then they will not be affected and their progress will be calculated accurately as soon as they start viewing the content.
What happens when I edit a course with active enrollments?
Making changes to course content, while students are currently enrolled in the course, will affect what they see within the Course Player. Similar to unpublishing courses, students will only be able to see the content that is published, and will not be able to see content that is in draft. For examples, see the scenarios below:
- Chapter, lesson, or content within a lesson is deleted: The student will lose access to the content that was deleted.
- A chapter or lesson is moved to draft: The student will lose access to the content, and will not be able to see it within the Course Player until it is republished.
- A new chapter, or lesson is published within the course: The student will see the new content within the Course Player.
- Information or details within an existing lesson are changed: The student will see the changes as long as the course and lesson are published.
- Updating a Quiz Lesson with a Passing Grade Requirement: For Quizzes with a Passing Grade Requirement: changing the correct answers on a quiz will mark students' quizzes as failed with the lesson still marked as complete.
- Updating a lesson to a Free Preview: If the lesson has already been completed by the student before the lesson was changed to a Free Preview lesson, it does not impact the student's progress. As the student has already completed the lesson before it was set to Free Preview, it does not affect their course progress.
- Updating a Survey Lesson: If you add new questions to the survey and a student has already started to take the lesson, they will not be able to see those new questions added. If you are editing an existing question or deleting one question that was already answered by a user, the answers will be deleted from the system/reports as well. We recommend for both scenarios, duplicating the lesson and publishing the new updated version on the course, keeping the other "older version" as a draft. So all students complete the new full / edited version of this and for the previous one, you don't lose any data.
If a student is viewing the Course Player while you are making adjustments to the course, they may need to refresh their page before they will be able to see the changes you had made. If you are going to be making changes to your courses, we do suggest publishing and removing course content at the end of the day in order to avoid any disruption or confusion for your students.