Guide to Creating Cohort-Specific Course Content#
This section provides information about setting up content for specific cohorts.
Overview#
If you have enabled cohorts in your course, you can create different course experiences for learners in different cohorts.
You can design your course so that some learners are given different content than others. You do this by creating content groups in Studio, and restricting access to specific components in your course to one or more content groups. Then, if you associate one or more cohorts with a content group, only the learners in cohorts associated with that content group can see course content that you have designated for it.
For more details about content groups, see About Content Groups. For an example of cohort-specific course content, see Example: Cohort-Specific Course Content.
Complete these steps to create cohort-specific content in your course.
In Studio
In the LMS
Example: Cohort-Specific Course Content#
Suppose that you create two cohorts in your course: University Alumni and Current University Students. Learners who are not in either of these cohorts are automatically placed into a third cohort, the default cohort, when they access the Course or Discussion tabs in the course. For more information about enabling cohorts in your course and assigning students to cohorts, see Manage Course Cohorts.
You intend all learners to have substantially the same course experience, with the exception that only learners in the two university-related cohorts will receive content that is specific to your university and therefore only of interest to them.
At the end of every section, you intend to include a video message from various university officials, including the university president and the dean of your college. These videos will be shown only to learners in the university and alumni cohorts. Also at the end of each section, you intend to include a quiz to test knowledge of the concepts taught in that section. The quiz will be shown to all learners enrolled in the course.
To achieve this, on the Group Configurations page in Studio you create one content group called “University-Specific Content”. In the Instructor Dashboard, on the Cohorts tab, you associate both the “University Alumni” and the “Current University Students” cohorts with the “University-Specific Content” content group.
Then, in your course outline, you change the access settings for the video component at the end of each section so that it is access is available only to the “University-Specific Content” content group. You do not need to edit the access settings of the quiz component, because if no content group is specified in a component’s access settings, that component is available to all learners.
As a final step, you preview the course in the LMS to ensure that learners see the content that is intended for them. You confirm that when you view the course in the role of Student (in other words, any learner not in a content group), you see a quiz at the end of each section, but do not see the university-related videos. When you view the course as a learner in the “University-Specific Content” group, you see a university-related video as well as the quiz at the end of each section.
Specify Content as Available Only to Particular Content Groups#
In Studio, you can modify the settings of units or components to give access only to learners who are in cohorts associated with particular content groups. You cannot specify entire subsections or sections for restricted access by particular content groups.
You do not need to edit the access settings of units or components that are intended for all learners. Units or components that you do not restrict access to are available to all learners enrolled in your course, regardless of the cohort that they belong to.
Note
If a unit has group access restrictions set, all of its child components inherit these group access restrictions unless you explicitly set different group access restrictions for individual child components.
For details about how to modify unit access settings, see Set Access Restrictions For a Unit.
For details about how to modify component access settings, see Restrict Access to a Component.
For details about previewing your course to ensure that learners in a cohort correctly see the content intended for them, see View Usage of a Content Group and View Cohort-Specific Course Content.
Note
In addition to access settings for content groups, a learner’s ability to see a course component also depends on whether it is marked as visible to staff only, whether the unit is published, and the course’s release date. For details about testing course content in general, see Guide to Testing Your Course Content.
See also
Offering Different Content to Different Learner Groups (concept)
About Content Groups (concept)
Manage Content Groups (how-to)
Associate Cohorts with Content Groups (how-to)
View Cohort-Specific Course Content (how-to)
Maintenance chart
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