Publishing
Ilios has a built in publishing workflow for curricular material. The publishing workflow serves the purpose of allowing the review of data prior to release, and to provide for the option of release in both interim (“Not Published” or “Scheduled”) and final (“Published”) modes. This is made possible by providing a summary checklist to the user for review. The checklist takes one of three different forms, depending on the workflow chosen: Course Level, Single Session, or All Sessions.
There are two places in Ilios where the concept of "Publishing" applies ...
Workflow Options
The action of publishing a number of sessions at once or single sessions after publishing the course itself among other options are explored below.
Course Level
If a course gets published as shown in the "Publish a Course" section below, all sessions that have been published will be pushed out to the student calendar and feed as soon as the course publication process is completed. This can be helpful if all sessions are ready.
Session Level
Following the "Publish a Session" process detailed below, if a session gets published, the course must also be published for the offering or ILM to appear on student calendars. This can be helpful if you want to release the offerings one session at a time rather than in one big calendar push.
All Sessions
This process does require that the course publication process be handled separately; but it can be used to publish any and all sessions that have reached the minimum of required fields. You can exclude some sessions from being published. This process can be repeated in the future if more sessions become ready to publish (they have offerings and / or due date if ILM).
Publish a Course
In the example below, all of the required fields have been entered and the Sessions have been entered and are ready to be published as well. Publishing a Course is in effect, finalizing it. If the Sessions for a Course are also published and there are Offerings or ILM's to display, these events will be displayed on a Student's calendar and will be included in the .ics Calendar Feed.
Both Course and Session must be published in order to have the attached Offerings displayed on Student Calendars.
IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Instructors and other Ilios users with advanced non-learner permissions such as Course or Session Directors and Administrators, will see all of their Offerings, even if the Course or Session has NOT been published; whereas Students will not. The "not published" icon will appear on the calendar and on event detail to assist with identifying sessions which have not been published.
After performing the step indicated above, the publication status drop-down now reflects the updated Course status as "Published".
Publish with Missing Item(s)
There are 2 different types of data attributes available for checking in the workflow: required fields, which must be present for publishing, and if unavailable will make the publish button in the checklist inactive; and desired fields, which may be overridden after review, or left as-is without override. If overridden, the course object publishes normally. Alternatively, the course object can be published as “TBD”, or “Scheduled” – which reserves space on the calendar for users to see, but does not provide details of the session. Re-publishing a course or session at any time will update the information contained in it to its most recent state. Courses and sessions are independent of one another in the workflow, and can be published individually. A course, as the parent container of its sessions, may also be published together with all of its associated sessions.
In the Course Level Only workflow, the top-level (“course-level”) attributes in a course are checked to verify required information. Course level attributes which are checked are:
Required Fields
Start Date (required)
End Date (required)
Associated Cohort (required)
Optional Fields
Vocabulary Terms
Objectives
The required fields for publishing a Course are indicated in the top section above. The others are desired fields and are listed here as optional. The absence of one or more of the required fields will disallow publishing or override. The absence of one or more of the desired fields will activate the display of a “Review X Items” value on the Publish drop-down menu. If you choose to review the missing items, the Publish option will be available on the review screen. You are required to review the items before publishing the Course or select "Publish As Is".
Publication Options explained
Using the screen shot above as a guide, here are the options described.
(1) publish the course with one or more missing items - completes the publishing action of the course without requiring review
(2) review missing data and decide to publish or not - brings you to review and decide as shown below - follow link as shown to publish course - on course detail screen
(3) set the publication status of the course to "scheduled" - sets the course in a "to be determined" state - students will see "TBD" on calendar (if session is published or if session also has a status of "scheduled") with details to be revealed when the course itself gets published. This is only available on Calendar not Week at a Glance.
Publish a Session
Single Session
In the Single Session Only workflow, a single session is checked to verify data. Session level attributes checked are:
Title (required)
Offering (required for non-ILM) / Due Date (required if ILM is set to "true")
Vocabulary Terms - one or more
Objectives - one or more
The fields required to create a Session are indicated above. The others are desired fields. The absence of one or more of the required fields will disallow publishing or override. The absence of one or more of the desired fields will activate the display of a “Review X Missing Items” value on the drop-down menu. If all fields are completed, then clicking the “Publish” button will immediately publish the Session, without a review check. If you choose to review the missing items, the Publish option will be available on the review screen. You can choose Publish As Is if you choose not to review the items before publishing the Session.
Publish with Missing Item(s)
Publishing Options
Review Missing Items
Upon clicking Option #2 (Review 1 Missing Items - see above), the screen will display what data from among the desired fields is missing. In this case, no Vocabulary terms have been associated with this session. You can ignore this and publish anyway or add one or more Vocabulary terms.
In the Publish Full Course with All Sessions workflow, a display of the course level info and every associated session is made available. The course level info and each session function independently as above, allowing override individually. If an associated session was previously in published state, it will still be displayed in the list and allow for republishing following the rules above. Any changes to a previously published session will overwrite its previous status. A course may be in Not Published state, yet have sessions which are Published or Scheduled. The Published/Scheduled sessions will not display on the public calendar until the parent course is in published or Scheduled state. Sessions in a "Not Published" state are never displayed on the school calendar ("Show All Events").
When a course is in Scheduled state and has sessions in Published and/or Scheduled state, those Published and Scheduled sessions will display as TBD until the course is published. A published course will display any Scheduled or Published sessions as their state indicates accordingly.
Publication Review
After clicking as shown above on the "Publication Review" button, there will be an opportunity to review all of the sessions before taking action on publication on any or all of the associated sessions. Some of the session may have been published already.
After clicking as shown above, the screen appears similar to the image in the screenshot below. Initially, "Sessions Requiring Review" is expanded while the other two sections "Sessions Incomplete" and "Sessions Complete" are contracted. Clicking the triangle arrows to the right of the captions will expand the selected section. In "Sessions Requiring Review", clicking the buttons labeled "Publish As-Is" or "Mark as Scheduled" will apply that setting to the entire list of Sessions below in any given review section. They can be edited individually using the provided check boxes. This same principle applies to "Sessions Complete: ready to publish".
It is important to note that the sessions in "Sessions Incomplete: cannot publish" can only be reviewed - a listing of missing required items (generally offerings) will be displayed advising why these sessions cannot be published at this time.
Review Sessions to Publish
The screen shot below shows the review screen for the publication review workflow. "Sessions Requiring Review" appears in expanded mode. The other two areas are in contracted mode but can be expanded using the provided arrow expanders.
After scrolling to the bottom of the list of sessions requiring review, the following action button appears. Clicking "Go" will perform the indicated action. A link to the course objective visualization appears when one or more of the course objective(s) have not been mapped to their parent objectives - program year objectives.
Sessions Complete: ready to pubish
Expanding this section will review a handy list (with sticky column headers upon scroll down) to review all of the sessions that have satisfied all of the "required" attributes and are ready to be published. In many cases, they may already have been published.
This is shown below.
This next screen shot is provided to show several occasional output values which may appear on this screen. It is true that offerings (one or more) are required for a session that is not set to be an ILM (Independent Learning Module). But an ILM without one or more offerings is certainly complete. The other output item which appears when specified conditions are met is a link provided in case you want to fix up or review sessions objectives that have not been mapped / linked to any parent (course) objectives. See below for reference.
Take Action - "Go"
As shown above, a link is provided to route the user back to the course objectives listing when there are one or more course objectives which are not linked to parent (program year) objectives. There is no required action here. It's there to allow for review.
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