Courses and pathways
Manage Courses
The organisation-wide course list. Everything an instructor sees on their own Manage Courses screen is here, plus every course they are not attached to.
From here you can create a course, edit one, publish or unpublish it, and open its content editor. The authoring screens are identical to the instructor console's, and are documented there:
What is worth an administrator's attention specifically:
Visibility. Open courses appear under Explore Programs and learners can enrol themselves. Closed courses are staff-enrolled only. For a structured programme this should be Closed, and getting it wrong means strangers in your cohort.
Published or draft. A draft is invisible to learners. An unpublished course that a cohort is already enrolled in is a course they cannot get into — which is a perfectly good way to stage a launch, and a confusing way to discover a mistake.
Grading. Each course's Grading tab sets what it marks on and in what proportion, and which grade scale it uses. Setting it before a cohort starts is much easier than changing it mid-run. See Grading scales.
Instructors and managers can be attached to a course itself as well as to each offering. The course-level attachment says who owns the material; the offering-level one says who is teaching this particular run.
Manage Pathways
A pathway is an ordered series of courses that adds up to something: a track, a programme, a qualification.
| Tab | What is on it |
|---|---|
| Pathways | The pathways themselves |
| Enrolments | Who is on which |
| Pathway types | The levels or categories you group pathways into |
Creating one
A pathway has a title, a level or type, and a description. Courses are added to it in order, and each course in a pathway carries:
- an order — where it sits in the sequence
- credits — a weight, if your organisation grades pathways by credit
- prerequisites — courses that should come first
What a pathway does, and does not do
It does give learners a coherent view of a long programme: what they have finished, what they are on, what is ahead. It drives the Pathways tab on their dashboard and the gradebook they can download.
It does not enrol anybody in anything. Course access still arrives through cohort enrolment, usually a stage at a time.
That surprises people, and it is the right way round. A pathway is the map; a cohort is the group actually walking it, with dates and a timetable. Collapsing the two would mean a learner joining a twelve-month pathway gets access to all twelve months of content on day one.
Pathway managers
A pathway can have managers — people responsible for it across its cohorts. They are the right people to ask "how is the September intake doing overall?", because that question spans cohorts and no single cohort page answers it.
Enrolments
The Enrolments tab shows who is on each pathway and their status, with bulk enrol and bulk edit for working at intake scale.
Pathway enrolment statuses are broader than cohort ones, covering things like pending, active, and frozen. Where your organisation uses payment plans, a frozen status is usually tied to that.
Which screen to use
| You want to | Go to |
|---|---|
| Write or edit teaching material | Manage Courses |
| Decide what a course grades on | Manage Courses → the course → Grading |
| Run a course with a group of people | Manage Cohorts |
| Put somebody in a class | Manage Cohorts |
| Lay out a long programme | Manage Pathways |
| See how a whole programme is going | Manage Pathways → Enrolments |