Choosing when learners can see subsections and assessment results in Open edX

Note: Some parts of this functionality are only available in the Hawthorn release of Open edX, and is available on Tahoe but may not yet be available on other sites.

If your assessments are rigorous and vital, there may be times when you don't want learners to be able to see them ahead of time, and you may not always want to provide immediate feedback on how correct their answers are. You might also want to hide a subsection to store away your notes for staff-only viewing. Regardless of your reasons, with the subsection visibility controls now available to you, you now have far greater control over this.

First things first, you'll want to build out your subsection and its contents. You can find additional guidance on doing this for exams and quizzes in our article Creating exams and quizzes in Open edX and the various articles in the "Problems" and "Grading" categories of our knowledge base. Once it's set up though, you'll want to find the subsection again in the Outline in Studio and click the Settings icon (it looks like a cogwheel).

This will open the Settings window. The big that we want in this case is the Visibility tab. If you can't see the options below on your settings window, you may have opened the settings for your section rather than the subsection we're trying to work with!

You probably don't need our help from here, but let's quickly run through your options to be clear what they're for.

Subsection visibility

• Show entire subsection is your default, everything is visible and usable.
• Hide content after course end date. This is useful for important exams to prevent people from accessing the exam after the course is finished, for example if you're concerned about answers spreading to future learners.
• Hide entire subsection. This is great for staff only content, or content you want to stash away for later.

Assessment results visibility

• Always show assessment results is again, the default. When learners submit answers, they immediately see whether they got it correct.
• Never show assessment results. This setting lets you prevent learners from ever seeing if they got the question correct. This is useful if you want to be extremely opaque in your grading.
• Show assessment results when subsection is past due allows you to limit this visibility on scores and points until "results day". This requires the course end date to be set.

As always, be sure to click Save when you've selected your options.