Visibility of Assignments

Instructors can now set the visibility state for assignment submission folders in Content and Assignments. When items are in a draft or hidden state, they are not visible to learners in BOLT.




IMPORTANT: When instructors create new assignment submission folders, they will default to the draft state- just like in Quizzes, Surveys, and Discussions. To make them available to learners, instructors will need to modify the visibility status on the Restrictions tab. If you have copied your course and want the folders available, check the status of the folders and modify them as needed.

When instructors set the visibility to "draft", a hidden icon appears beside the assignment submission folder in the instructor's view of the Assignments tool

For more information on this, read on.

To set the visibility state of an assignment submission folder, instructors can select or de-select "Hidden from users" on the Restrictions tab of the folder when creating or editing it. There is also an option in the folder's context menu (accessed by clicking the drop down arrow beside it).

Changing the visibility on the submission folder is done on the Restrictions tab of the folder by selecting or de-selecting the Hidden from users option

The context menu for assignment submission folders offers a Hide from Users option that can be selected.

In Content, when an instructor chooses to add existing assignments as topics, the visibility state of the topic is pulled from the visibility state of the assignment. When an instructor updates a visibility setting for a topic in Assignments, it is automatically updated in the associated Content topic.




The visibility status of an assignment submission folder can also be affected by other things:

• The visibility status of a topic now also reflects the visibility status of the folder in which the topic resides.
• If multiple assignment content topic links are associated with the same submission folder but have different visibility states, the visibility state of the assignment content topic link created or modified most recently becomes the state of all associated topic links. If the visibility state has not been modified, the state is set to draft.
• When importing a course, if the content topics and assignment folders contain a mix of visibility states, all topics are changed to the draft visibility state.
• Export now contains visibility state for assignment content. The visibility state comes from the setting on the Assignment folder.

The Import and Course Copy process for assignment and assignment content topic links follows this logic:

• If the Import package contains a visibility state on the assignment folder, use that state.
• If the package contains Assignment folders with no state and no associated content topics, the visibility state is to show the imported content.
• If the import package contains both content and assignment folders, use the visibility state on the folders. If no visibility state exists on the folder, use the visibility state from the content.
• If multiple content topics with the same visibility state point to an assignment folder without a visibility state, set the assignment folder to the same state as the topics.
• If multiple content topics with different visibility states point to an assignment folder without a visibility state, set the assignment folder to draft, and change all the topics to draft.