Looking for a way to grant access to your students to a special activity or resource without having it be visible on the course page? Maybe you want to reduce scrolling or require students to complete a particular item in your course before they can access the special item. That's now easy to do by making the item "Available but not shown" on the course page.

Why would you want to hide something and still make it available? Let's look at an actual use case for this new feature. (This 6-minute video describes this process.)

We've crafted a book resource with orientation materials for online students. We want to be sure that they: a) read the book and b) do some practice activities. "Available but not shown on course page" enables us to link to these activities from the book while at the same time preventing students from skipping the book and going straight to the practice activities. Providing a link back to the book from the practice activity makes going from the book to the activity and back to the book a seamless transition.

Step 1 is to create the special item that you want to share without making it immediately visible to students. In the Common module settings options area, in the Availability field, select Make available but not shown on course page. Save and return to course.

[If you have already created the special item, click on the Edit link, and Hide. Click on Edit again, then click on Make available, as shown below.]

Step 2 consists of returning to the main course page, opening the special item and copying the URL as shown below (or right click on the item name on the main course page and select Copy link location).

Next (Step 3), open the course element that you want to use as the access point for the special item (in this case, it's a page in a book). Type in some meaningful text, then select it and click on the Insert/edit link icon. Paste in the URL of the special item.

Step 4 — Save changes. Test the link that you just created to ensure that the special item opens as desired. The illustrations below detail how this might look.

Note: If you've selected Make available by mistake, open the item in edit view and open the Common module settings options area. In the Availability field, select Show on course page and Save. Contact the CIS for assistance with this new feature!