The way your course looks in Studio is not the way that students will see and experience it when it is live.
It is recommended that you test your content continually as you build your course, so you can interact with your course from a student’s point of view.
To test your content, you can:
Note
If you use content groups in your course to designate content as visible only to particular students, see Preview Cohort-Specific Courseware.
For information about setting up a beta test for your course, see Beta Testing a Course.
You preview course content before you publish it to test how it will look to students.
When you preview course content, you see the latest course content as configured in Studio. You see content in units with the publishing status Draft (Never published), Draft (Unpublished changes), or Visible to Staff Only.
If you use content groups and have designated components in a unit as visible only to particular groups, the visibility status indicates that some content in the unit is visible only to particular groups. For information about previewing course content if you use content groups to designate content as visible only to particular groups, see Preview Cohort-Specific Courseware.
For example, you publish a unit with a video and discussion:
Students see the same content in the LMS:
You later decide to add a multiple choice problem to the unit, before the discussion:
Before you publish this change, you can see what the question will look to students.
When you click Preview Changes, you see the unit in the LMS with the multiple choice question:
This preview shows how students will experience the unit after you publish the change.
In the live course, students continue to see the same content, without the multiple choice question, until you publish the change.
Note
Preview Changes in not available when the unit’s state is Published and Live, because in this case the preview and live version are exactly the same. You can view the live course to see the published content.
When you are working in Studio, you can test your course by viewing it in the LMS. In the LMS, you can see your course as a student sees it. You can see your course in Staff View or Student View. If you are using content groups to designate specific content as visible only to particular content groups, you can see your course as a content group would see it.
While you work in Studio, you can switch to your live course to see how your course appears to students in two ways.
From the outline page, click View Live.
In a unit page, click View Live Version.
You see the course in the Staff View.
In Staff View:
When you view your course in Staff View, you can execute tests to make sure that your course works the way you intend. For example, before the release date of a subsection, members of the course team can work through the problems to verify that the correct answer gets a green check for correct, and that any answer other than the correct one gets a red X for incorrect.
When viewing your course in the LMS, you can use the Student view to see the course with all course content that is intended for all students.
Note
If you have enabled your course for cohorts and have designated some content as visible only to certain content groups, you can select a content group from the View Course As drop down list to see the content exactly as a student in a cohort associated with that content group will see it. For details, see Preview Cohort-Specific Courseware.
To switch to the Student view, click View this course as and select Student from the drop down list.
In Student View:
When you are viewing your course in the LMS as Staff View, you can open Studio directly.
In a unit page, click View Unit in Studio.
The unit page opens in Studio.
In the Instructor Dashboard, click View Course in Studio to open the course outline.
For information about the tasks you can complete on the Instructor Dashboard, see Running Your Course.
In the Course Progress page, click View Grading in Studio to open the Grading page.
For information about checking a student’s progress, see Review How Grading Is Configured for Your Course.