To update class information for a class session in Forum, you must make those changes to the corresponding lesson plan in Course Builder and publish the lesson plan. Any edits made and published to the lesson plan will be visible to all users who have access to that class.

Note that viewing, editing and publishing lesson plans in Course Builder is dependent on your course role. For more information on roles, see this article.

Course Builder's Lesson Plan Editor shows the most common settings for a lesson plan—things like activity titles and durations, poll questions, and breakout prompts—in a form-like interface.

More complex configuration options, such as Forum stage layouts and the specific elements that appear there, are hidden by default. These can be accessed at any time by toggling the "View All Settings" switch in the top right.

The rest of this section is about the view when the View All Settings switch is turned OFF. Visit Editing All Settings below for more information.

On the left side of the editor window is the Outline View of the lesson plan. Click on any of the blue links to display the corresponding step in the main editing area on the right side of the window. A blue triangle appears next to the currently displayed step.

To add or remove learning outcomes attached to a single lesson plan, use the Outcomes field in the "Basic Class Info" section at the top of the lesson plan. Begin typing the name of a learning outcome and the field will autocomplete with any that are attached to the syllabus.

Note: This interface will not allow you to attach new learning outcomes to the syllabus overall. To do that, return to the Syllabus Editor.

To edit the title of an activity or a step, hover over it and click the pencil icon that appears. Type your changes and press Enter on your keyboard to save them.

Some fields have a white background and others have a light purple background as pictured below.

Some fields require content before the lesson plan can be published to Forum. Incomplete fields are marked with an orange dot in the Outline View (left side of the screen) and a red border around the content field in the main editing area (right side of the screen).

Click the caret icon to the left of an activity to collapse or expand the view.

Tip: Collapse activities that you’ve finished editing to help focus your attention and scroll more quickly between activities.

If you create a lesson plan from a template, your lesson plan will usually be populated with slides for the Lesson Introduction, Activity Learning Goals, and a Session Summary.

These slides will be automatically populated based on the data you provide in the lesson plan. Below is an example of an automatically generated slide for a Lesson Introduction.

The content is automatically generated based on the slide type:

Note: Automatic updating on a slide is disabled if you ever manually edit that slide.

To avoid editing conflicts, Course Builder only allows one user to make edits to a page at a time. It also will try to ensure that there are no conflicting edits made by the same user. Lesson plans are "locked" in order to avoid these editing conflicts.

If you have a lesson plan open in one tab and try to work on the same one in another, you'll see the below message. Before you choose Open, make sure you have not made any changes you'd like to save on the other tab. Otherwise, those changes will be lost.

You'll see a similar modal if someone else has the same lesson plan open. In this case, the modal will display the name of the person who has the lesson plan open. Be sure to reach out to the person listed before stealing the lock from them. Otherwise, the changes they are working on will be lost.

Changes to a lesson plan are automatically saved. There is no need to explicitly save any changes. You'll see Saving... text at the top left of the page to signify that changes are being saved. If there are any issues with saving, the page will display an alert.

Publishing changes on a lesson plan will push those changes to all corresponding sections in Forum. To learn more about the relationship between Forum and Course Builder, see this article.

Only reviewers (and admins) can publish a lesson plan to Forum. If you do not see the button to publish, make sure you have the correct role.

Make sure you do not publish a lesson plan close to the start time of any class, across all sections, that use this lesson plan. Lesson plans can take up to 4+ hours to publish, and publishing changes during a class can cause severe issues for participants.

To publish a lesson plan:

Click on the cloud icon in the top right of the lesson plan page and click Publish

Publishing Best Practices

Some best practices for smoothly publishing syllabi, lesson plans, and assignments include:

Most errors in publishing will be caught before you publish by the “verify” step. Other times, the lesson plan or assignment will verify, but you receive an error message that it did not publish.

Some parts of a lesson plan or assignment to check:

Know when to call for help! Steps to take after examining your lesson plan or assignment for the above:

To edit settings that are not visible using the Lesson Plan Editor, simply toggle the "View All Settings" switch in the top right corner to ON.

The lesson plan page has a few key navigational elements. The below numbers correspond to the numbers displayed in the above screenshot.

Editing lesson plans will mainly consist of adding or updating Activities and Steps. As an instructor in the Forum Classroom, you'll progress one step at a time. The Activity is just a grouping to help organize many steps. For example, an Activity called "Class Introduction" could consist of Steps such as a round of introductions, a course overview slide, and a slide introducing the learning objectives of the class. See screenshot below of this Activity page with different Steps.

To add an Activity, click the Add an Activity button at the bottom of the lesson plan timeline. To add a step, click the Add a Step green button at the bottom of the Activity page:

From there, you can choose which pre-made Activity or Step to add to the lesson plan.

In the resources tab of the lesson plan editor, you can edit existing resources or add new resources for use in the class. Uses in class include as breakout notes or featured on the main stage.

To edit an existing resource, select that resource from the current list of resources in the left-hand menu.

To add or create a new resource, open the drop down menu Choose resource type under Create a new Resource. You can create new resources that are listed in this dropdown menu (e.g., Google Documents, Whiteboard, Forum Code Workbooks), link secure urls (i.e., “https”) to show in class, or upload a resource from your computer. File types allowed for upload include pdf, jpg, png.

Only authors, reviewers and admins can leave comments on a lesson plan in Course Builder.

To add a comment, hover over the right margins of the lesson plan until you see a comment bubble appear. Click on the comment bubble, type in your comment and save. You can also view comments from your colleagues by clicking on existing comment bubbles. The numbers in the existing comment bubbles represent how many comments are in the thread.
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