Open edX® Tutorial: How to set course visibility in Advanced Settings
When you have created a new course in Studio, one of the first things you need to do is to decide whether the course is for public consumption or if it is for private consumption. In other words, do you want the course to be visible to the public or not?
By default, when you create a new course, it is public. If you want to hide the course from the public (for example if the course is only for internal learners) then it can be easily hidden by using the Advanced Settings page in Studio.
Note: If you already know how to navigate to the Advanced Settings page of the course, you can go directly to Step 4 below.
Step 1: Navigate to the course Outline from inside Studio.
In order to access the Schedule & Details page, you first need to sign into Studio. From the Studio Home where all your courses are listed, click the course name of the course you want to enter. In the below image the course name is indicated as “Demonstration Course”, just click that to go inside the course to the course Outline.
Image: A screenshot of the Open edX Studio Home page.
When you click the course name, you will immediately be taken to the course Outline, as shown in the below image.
Image: A screenshot of the course Outline in Studio.
Step 2: From the course Outline, open the Settings dropdown menu.
In order to access the Advanced Settings page from the course Outline, first click Settings to display the settings menu, as shown in the below image.
Image: A screenshot of the Settings menu in Studio, with the Advanced Settings page link highlighted in blue.
Step 3: Navigate to the Advanced Settings page from the Settings menu.
Click the last option named Advanced Settings under the Settings menu as per the above image. You will be taken to the Advanced Settings page as depicted in the below image.
Step 4: In alphabetical order, scroll down to the section named Course Visibility in Catalog.
On the Advanced Settings page, scroll down in alphabetical order until you reach the section named Course Visibility in Catalog, as shown in the below image.
Image: A screenshot of the Course Visibility in Catalog section on the Advanced Settings page in Studio.
Step 5: Change the default text to “none”.
By default the Course Visibility in Catalog section is set as “both”. This means the public can view the course card in the course catalog (and on the site’s homepage) and access is also available to the marketing page (also known as the “about” page).
To change the visibility of the course card and its marketing page to be invisible to the public, simply change the text from “both” to “none”, as per the below image. Don’t forget the double quotation marks.
Image: A screenshot of the text as it should be inputted in the Course Visibility in Catalog section.
When you change the text, an orange coloured Save Changes button will pop up on the screen asking you if you would like to save the progress, as shown in the above image. Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button to save the changes.
When you click Save Changes, the page will automatically scroll up to the top of the page and displays a green check mark next to the message Your Changes Have Been Saved, as per the below image.
Image: A screenshot of the green tick and the message Your Changes Have Been Saved.
If you see the message Your Changes Have Been Saved, you are done changing the Course Visibility in Catalog settings. You can confirm the course is not visible to the public anymore by navigating to the homepage to see if the course card is still visible or not.
Note: If you are an admin of the site, you will always be able to see the course card and marketing page. You need to sign out or use a non-admin account (like a regular user for example) to confirm what it looks like to the public. Alternatively you can visit the home page in Incognito mode in Google Chrome, because in Incognito mode it won’t know that you were logged in and will therefore show you the site as if you were a general member of the public.