Creating Courses

Information about the process of creating course spaces in Learn.

Looking for Help with Learn?

From the beginning of the 23/24 academic year, all new courses will be delivered using an updated Learn interface. In order to ensure that users can access support materials for current and previous year courses we have kept old support materials on Edweb pages and created a new Sharepoint Learn site full of useful resources for the new interface.

For Learn resources for current courses, please visit the Learn Sharepoint (University of Edinburgh users only).

Here you can access the most up-to-date information such as:

Good practice guidance
Training and support resources
How to guides

To access support material for older courses please use the pages below as usual.

Learn supports automated course creation from EUCLID, or you can request that a course be manually created if you have different requirements.

Essentially there are 2 types of course. Those which have been automatically created and managed via the EUCLID student records management system, and those that are created manually within Learn to meet a more specific approach for course delivery.

Creating Learn Courses

The various courses that can be created, or requested, within Learn.

EUCLID Courses

EUCLID allows Learn to create courses and manage student enrolment within the course based on a "golden-copy" of course information.

Guest Courses

Staff can now choose to allow guest access to courses in Learn. This makes some content elements of a course available publicly, without the need for any authentication.

Shared Courses

In some cases there is a need for students from more than one course instance in EUCLID to be able to use the same Learn course site. We have created a shared course feed to allow for this.

Course Visibility

Generally it is only possible to view course materials if you have been enrolled into the course with one of the specific roles available. When you are developing your courses it is possible to hide the course from students until you are ready to make it available..

For detailed instructions see:

Making a course available or unavailable

You can also hide individual items, such as tools, folders, or single items of content within your course. These can be made available / unavailable, or set for date release, or for other conditions.

Adaptive release

Course Deletion

It is not possible for you to delete your course. If you no longer wish to use your course its visibility can be changed to unavailable.

If you no longer wish to be enrolled on a course that you are an Instructor on, you should ask a fellow instructor on that course to set your availability to "No". You can also choose to hide your course in your course view options.

Historical access to courses

The majority of courses in Learn will be created annually to reflect the academic year structure. Students and Instructors remain enrolled in courses that they were previously enrolled in, and the courses will be accessible via your course list on the My Learn homepage. You can filter and change your preferences for how the courses from previous sessions are displayed.

Please note that the course list displayed on the MyED portal will only display courses available in the current academic session.

Roles and Enrolments

The common roles that are given to people in a course are:

Student
Instructor

A student has the ability to view content that has been made available to them and can take part within the course activities and assignments. Students are the only role that appear in the Grade Centre and are the only roles that course data is collected on.

An instructor has full management controls of the course including the ability to edit course pages and resources. Instructors can also view the Grade Centre, Course Reports, and key course settings for managing how the course is delivered.

There are other roles available in Learn. If you want to know more, please contact us via the IS Helpline.

This article was published on 22 Sep, 2023