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☁️Sync: How to keep your content in sync across multiple cohorts
☁️Sync: How to keep your content in sync across multiple cohorts

Instantly sync edits to your content so everyone receives the best version of your course.

Laurie Garcia avatar
Written by Laurie Garcia
Updated this week

For administrators, editors, and teachers

The best educators are never content with last year's version of their course, but are constantly improving and updating their lessons to keep up with their latest insights and with changes in their field. In other words, the best version of your course is the version you're teaching right now.

We get this, and that's why we've made it easier than ever to save the best version of your course to reuse again in the future.

To define some terms before getting into more details...

  • Source Path: your Source Path for a course is the best version that you want to share with all current and future Cohorts.

  • Cohorts: each Cohort is a version of a path specific to a group of learners going through a course together. New Cohorts inherit and share the latest version of the Source Path. In addition, Teachers of a Cohort can uniquely personalize their path by adding additional steps, lessons, schedules, and discussion prompts, but they are not allowed to edit content that is shared with the Source.

  • Learner Path: under the hood, each learner has their own personal version of the Cohort Path. When you publish or sync updates, learners will receive those changes the next time they load the course. The Learner Path is what you see if you open the Learner Progress screen and select a particular learner.

How to Sync your changes to your Cohort

You can edit your course path anytime. When you have path changes to sync to your Cohort, you'll see a red notification dot beside the "Sync" button at the top of your path when viewing it in Design mode.

When you make changes to your path and hit "Sync," you'll see a complete, itemized list of everything that changed before you share the changes with your learners.

Select "Sync to Cohort" to share your edits and additions with your learners in this Cohort.

💡Tip: you can hover over any change to see a more detailed breakdown of your edits.

How to Sync changes backward from a Cohort to the Source

Have you ever accidentally updated your path in the Cohort and not in the Source? (If you've used Cohorts in the past, we'd guess you almost certainly have!)

Now, admins and editors can instantly sync changes made to a Cohort back to the Source Path so that you can use them in other in-progress and future Cohorts.

View your path in Design mode and select the "Sync" button at the top. Use the drop down menu at the top to select "Sync to Source Path."

With the Source Path selected, you'll now have the option to "Sync to Source." You can review all edits, additions, and deletions before syncing.

FAQs

Q. What can be synced?

A. Changes that trigger an option to "Sync" your edits include:

  • adding, editing, or deleting a path item (a lesson, step, or divider)

  • reordering a path item

  • adding a discussion prompt in the Source.

The following actions do not trigger a "Sync" prompt and are shared immediately with your learners:

  • adding a discussion prompt in the Cohort

  • editing or deleting a discussion prompt

  • scheduling, editing, or deleting a start or end date

Q. Why is some of my content not syncing?

A. Empty lessons (those containing no steps) and empty steps (those containing no Blocks content) will not be included when you sync. Once you add content, you'll be able to sync those lessons and steps. Your sync summary message will indicate which items are being synced.

Q: Why does my Source path say unsynced?

A. The "unsynced" warning message on your Source Path will disappear once you sync your content. If you haven't created a cohort yet, you'll need to create a cohort in order to sync your content for the first time.

Q. Will learners be notified about newly-synced updates?

A. Great question. If learners are viewing the course when you "sync" your edits, they will see a banner message indicating that there are updates to their path, and they can click on the banner to refresh and load the changes. Otherwise, they will receive the updates without a message the next time they open the course.

Q. What's the difference between sync and publish?

A. Changes to the path are synced, while changes to the content inside a particular step are published.

Block content autosaves, and publishing content is handled separately from syncing, so we've retained the "Publish" button for this separate function. When an admin or editor publishes their edits to Blocks content, it updates instantly anywhere that step is used - in the Source, or in other Cohorts - with no path sync required.

Changes that require publishing a step:

  • adding, deleting, reordering, or copy-pasting a Block of content

  • making any edits to any Block of content

See also how to Publish edits to Blocks content to one Cohort or to multiple Cohorts.

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