Assignments use a publishing workflow to give you control over when changes are visible to students, collaborators, and member courses. This allows you to edit an assignment without immediately affecting others who may also be using that assignment.
Each assignment has a working version that only you (and those with whom you've granted edit access) can see. When you make changes to your assignment, these changes are made to the working version. To make those changes visible to others, you have to publish the assignment.
When you create a new assignment or create a copy of an existing assignment (e.g., when using a course in the Edfinity catalog), the assignment is not yet published. When you make an assignment visible to students, the assignment will be auto-published if it has not already been published. Any changes made to the assignment after this time will need to be published in order to be visible to students.
To publish an assignment, go to the assignment and select Publish. You will see a summary of the changes to be made. After you publish an assignment, any affected student assignments will be rescored as needed. Please note that this can take some time.
Immediate vs. publishable changes
Many changes to an assignment take effect immediately. Examples of immediate changes include:
- Availability dates, visibility, and release method
- Instructions
- Name
The following changes to an assignment, however, are publishable changes, meaning that they require that the assignment is published in order for those changes to be visible.
- Adding or removing a problem
- Editing a problem's content
- Re-ordering problems
- Changing or editing the environment
- Setting points for a problem
When there are publishable changes for an assignment, the Publish button will show a count of the number of changes.