Grant Course Creation Access in Studio#
When the course creator group is enabled on your site, new authors cannot create courses in Studio until an administrator grants them access. This how-to describes how to review a request and grant (or deny) course creation access using the Studio Django admin.
The most common point of confusion is where this is done: course creation access is managed in the Studio (CMS) Django admin, not the LMS Django admin. The Course Creators admin app does not exist in the LMS, so looking for it there is a dead end.
The author-facing side of this process is described in Request Access to Create Courses in Studio.
Prerequisite#
Course creation access is only requested and granted when the course creator
group is enabled with the ENABLE_CREATOR_GROUP setting (enabled by default
in Studio). When this setting is disabled, any signed-in user can create
courses, and there is nothing to grant.
You must sign in with an account that has staff (is_staff) or
superuser permissions to change records in the Course Creators admin app.
Note
Users who are marked as global staff (is_staff) always have course
creation access and are not added to the Course Creators table. You only need
to grant access to non-staff authors.
Open the Course Creators Admin App#
Confirm that the author has requested access. When an author requests course creation rights from the Studio home page, their status changes to pending and, if email is configured, an email notification is sent to the address in the
STUDIO_REQUEST_EMAILsetting.Sign in to Studio with your staff or superuser account.
Go to the Studio Django admin Course Creators app. This is served by Studio (CMS), so use your Studio domain:
https://<your-studio-domain>/admin/course_creators/coursecreator/
Important
This app lives in the Studio Django admin. It is not available in the LMS Django admin. If you browse the LMS admin (for example,
https://<your-lms-domain>/admin/) you will not find a Course Creators app.The list page shows each author’s username, email, current state, and whether they have access to all organizations. Select the user whose request you want to review.
Grant or Deny Access#
On the author’s record, you control access with the State field and the organization fields.
Set the State field:
granted - the author can create courses.
denied - the author is not allowed to create courses.
pending - the request is awaiting review (this is the state set when the author requests access).
unrequested - the author has not requested access.
When you set the state to granted, choose the scope of access:
To allow the author to create courses under any organization, leave All organizations selected and do not select any specific organizations.
To limit the author to specific organizations, clear the All organizations checkbox and select one or more organizations from the list.
Note
You must choose exactly one of these options. Selecting All organizations and specific organizations at the same time, or clearing All organizations without selecting any specific organization, produces a validation error when you save.
(Optional) Use the Note field to record context about the decision, such as why access was denied.
Select Save.
When you save, the platform updates the author’s roles accordingly and, if email is configured, notifies the author that their course creation access has changed.
Verify the Change#
Ask the author to return to the Studio home page and reload it. If access was granted, they will now see the option to create a new course. If you granted access to specific organizations only, they will be able to create courses under those organizations but not others.
See also
Request Access to Create Courses in Studio (how-to, for authors)
Maintenance chart
Review Date |
Working Group Reviewer |
Release |
Test situation |
2026-08-14 |
Ty Hob |
Verawood |
Pass |