Control content visibility and access

Every section, subsection, unit, and component has independent visibility settings. Misconfigure these and learners either see unfinished content or can’t see content you’ve finished — get this mental model right early.

Subsection settings → Visibility. Two control groups: Subsection visibility (show all / hide after due date) and Assessment results visibility (always / never / past-due).

The three layers of visibility

1. Publish state

• Draft — only visible in Studio preview.
• Published, not yet released — locked behind a release date.
• Published and released — live to learners.

2. Release date (subsection-level)

Set under the subsection’s settings. Content with a future release date appears greyed out in the LMS until the date passes.

For self-paced courses you usually leave release dates blank — everything available from enrolment.

3. Staff-only flag (unit-level)

Mark a unit as Staff Only to keep it visible to course staff but hidden from learners. Useful for:

• Internal author notes.
• Content under clinical review.
• Holding pen for next module.

Due dates

Set due dates per subsection for graded assessments. In self-paced courses, due dates are relative to the learner’s enrolment date if Self-paced is enabled — otherwise they’re absolute.

Cohort and group-scoped content

Use Content Groups to show different content to different cohorts. See Offer different content to different groups.

A common mistake

Hitting Publish on a unit doesn’t change anything for learners if the parent subsection is still in draft. Always publish from the highest level you’re ready to release — Studio will cascade.