Approving and Unapproving Items and Sections

Items and sections in a course can be approved and unapproved. This article walks you through how that works, and highlights some key points to be kept in mind.

What does it mean to approve and unapprove items and sections?

Approving an item or a section means making it visible on the app and website for users to see. Unless approved, it won't be visible to users. Similarly, unapproving items and sections means making them "invisible" for users. This is done using the same button:

How to know if an item or section is currently approved or not

It's easy! A blue tick next to an item or a section indicates that it is approved - as we see here, the item "Articles Quiz" is approved while "Article or No article" is not.

Similarly the entire section 'Articles Quizzes' isn't approved yet.

Approving a section

In order to approve a section, it must contain at least one approved item.

Let's take a look at the cases where a section cannot be approved. When this happens, you'll see an error message asking you to fix some problems after which you'll be able to approve the section.

Cases when a section cannot be approved

1. When a section has no items in it. 

Let's try to approve the Section 'Articles Quizzes' which does not have any items in it

This will give us an error message as the section needs at least one approved item in order to be published

2. When a section has no approved items in it

Let's try to approve such a section. This section has two items in it, but none of them is approved yet. This means the section cannot be approved, as we now know what it needs - at least one approved item!

Criteria for approving sections:

Once you approve even one of the items, the section can be approved.

This section is now ready to be approved:

That was about approving sections. Now let's explore how approving items works.

Approving an item

To approve an item, you need to add content to it. If it doesn't have any content in it, then you'll see a message asking you to fix the problem.

Approving of items works similarly for different types of items.

Let's look at the criteria for approving different types of items:

1. Text items 

2. PDFs 

3. Images 

4. Image Galleries

5. Questions 

6. Quizzes

Unapproving sections and items:

To unapprove content means making it invisible to the users without deleting it. Only the one creating a course can see unapproved items.  Unapproved items are the ones without a blue tick next to them:

Whether you just want to keep a framework of items ready without adding content to them or if you want to stop the users from viewing a particular item that is incomplete, you can keep it unapproved.

This way you can approve what works for you, and unapprove the rest :)