This section covers the publishing process for courses in the authoring environment. If you need to publish a new Section for a published course that is already on the production environment, please refer to Maintenance: Publish new Sections.
Author: Publishing Overview
SmartAuthor's authoring environment is where you create and customize your content. Your courseware content is contained in a Project and arranged into Blueprints that represent the contents of a potential course section and the order in which it is presented.
Once your authoring is complete and your Readiness Report has been cleared, your course can be "published" to our live, or production environment.
The content must be published to our production environment in order for instructors and students to use it.
NOTE: The Publishing option
When available, the Publish tool will appear on the left navigation bar under Deliver. Only users with the role of Customer Admin may publish courses. If it is not available to your organization, your Engagement Manager will assist you with publishing.
IMPORTANT: Publishing your project will:
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- Make it available on our live server
- Make it available on the maintenance server for future updates and section/template creation
- Lock the entire project in the authoring environment
Step 1 - Stage for Publishing
In this step, you will stage your project to verify that it publishes properly.
1. Click on the Publish icon on the left navigation bar, found under the heading Deliver.
2. Complete the required information, including course settings and assessment settings.
Course Settings
- Section title: this will be the name of your course once published.
- Select blueprint: you can publish more than one blueprint by using de +Add another section button at the end.
- Preferred section key: this will be the course key for the production course.
- Start Date: course start date
Assessment Settings
- Assessment Attempts: determines the number of attempts students have on course assessments.
- Assessment Scores: determines how assessments are scored if multiple attempts are allowed.
- Assessment Feedback Availability Before/After Deadline: determines if assessment feedback will be available for students after submission, either before or after deadline.
- Score Personal Practice: determine whether Personal Practice assessment are scored or not. If scored, you can choose between being scored on completion or on correctness.
3. Click on Stage. This process could take a while; you and your Engagement Manager will be notified via e-mail once your sections are staged for review.
Step 2 - Review & Publish
Once your project has been staged, you will receive an e-mail with a link to your project on Staging for review. In this step, you will review the settings for each section and the course preview in staging to see how this will look in the live server.
Click on Preview Section on Staging in the top right corner to preview the project and see how it will look on the live server:
NOTE: Key items to review on staging prior to publishing:
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- Review the table of contents.
- Page through the course, looking for missing content or images.
- Check links.
- Use the navigation on the top of the page to move through the course.
Once you have reviewed the settings and the preview on Staging, you can either:
- Reject the publishing plan if further changes need to be done. You can restart the Publishing process after adjustments have been made.
- Publish and approve te publishing plan with the reviewed settings.
Step 3 - Review & Publish
The project will be archived while your sections are waiting to be published to ensure no changes are missed and your Engagement Manager will be notified to provide final approval.
Your Engagement Manager will review the request and publish the course within three business days.
You will receive an e-mail notification when the course has been published to the production server. You will also receive a notification that the project has been copied to maintenance. All changes moving forward will be made on maintenance.
Published Projects
Once your project is published, it will be moved to the production server.
The project will be archived on Author, and a copy will be available on the Maintenance server, where you will make changes if you should need to in the future.
- If you need to create new Sections of an already published course, please refer to Maintenance: Publish new Sections.
- Any changes that need to be made to a published course will have to be scheduled through maintenance batches in the Maintenance environment, please refer to Maintenance Updates.