Hidden Courses

This article will be most useful for Concourse system admins, domain admins, and domain editors.

Overview

In Concourse, hidden courses are courses that are not discoverable by searching. No user, even system administrators, is able to locate courses that have been hidden by searching for or attempting to report upon them. Your institution may choose to hide courses that are in development, in wind-down stages, or are involved in another process that necessitates limited access. To learn more about hidden courses, continue reading or watch the video below.

Domain administrators and editors may hide individual courses in their assigned domains by selecting the Hide from Search option in Course Settings. To make hidden courses discoverable by search, uncheck the Hide from Search option. System admins may hide–or unhide–large sets of courses simultaneously with a course feed. To complete this operation, generate a course feed file that contains all the existing metadata about a set of courses that exist in your system; the final data field of each row of the feed file indicates whether a course is HIDDEN_FROM_SEARCH. For courses that should be hidden from search, enter 1 for this field; for courses that should be discoverable by searching, enter 0 (see image below). For more information about course feeds, see Construct and Process System Data Feeds.

Courses that are hidden from search may still be accessed individually in the following ways:

1. A user has access to the course’s public URL or direct link to the course’s location in Concourse.
2. A hidden course is linked in an LMS shell that instructors and students can access.
3. A user is registered for a hidden course in Concourse; the hidden course is accessible from the user’s Concourse homepage.
   

The Hidden Courses Report

The only way to find a full listing of hidden courses in your Concourse system is to generate a Hidden Courses Report. The Hidden Courses Report is only available to system administrators. To access the Hidden Courses Report, a system admin should enter the Report Center and select View in the Hidden Courses block (under System Reports). 

This report lists the course title (formatted as a link to the course), course identifier (external ID), designation (prefix and number), session, and year. This information can also be downloaded as a CSV spreadsheet. If other individuals at your institution need access to the data in this report but do not have administer system permission in Concourse, you should download the CSV and share it with them externally.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Your institution should use the hidden courses feature however it best suits your processes and needs. The following recommendations are meant to optimize the use of this feature in your system and workflow.

1. Don’t hide courses as a substitute for adjusting group permissions. Hidden courses are not visible to the majority of your users, which could result in issues with copying or reporting on content. If a course should not be viewed by selected user groups, it would be more efficient to update group permissions en masse.
2. Keep in mind that if hidden courses haven’t been purged from your system, there is a chance you will need to collect data about them eventually. It can be easy to forget about hidden courses, so make sure to create reminders or checkpoints in your processes so that these courses don’t fall through the cracks.
3. Hide courses judiciously. The more hidden courses in your system, the more challenging it is to locate and report on specific courses.
   

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