EdgeEX — Customizing courses: In-flight customization and impacts on student progress

July 02, 2026 17:06

You can customize courses throughout the semester even after students have already begun working. The changes made to an existing section are applied to all enrollments in that section.

Types of customization:

Hidden content: Customizations made at the section level apply to all enrollments, preserving any individualizations that have already been made. For example, if a teacher has customized a course at the enrollment level to hide activities for concepts the student has already mastered, those activities will remain hidden for the enrollment when changes are made to the course at the section level.
Reordered content: Section-level changes are applied to all enrollments, preserving any individualizations that have already been made.
Added content: Section-level changes are applied to all enrollments. An added lesson can only be deleted at the level it was added to; lower levels can only hide the added lesson. For example, if a teacher adds a lesson to a course but does not want a specific student to use the lesson, the teacher can hide the added lesson for that enrollment, but they cannot but they cannot delete it from the enrollment.

Note

If a student has already started working on an activity that is being updated or has already completed the activity, they will not see the change.

Impacts of in-flight customization

Impacts of in-flight customization can include:

The appearance of missing work.
Adjusted grades and progress.
Conflicting information on the Course Report and Session Log.

The following are some examples:

Action	Example	Impacts
Adding units and lessons	At the section level, a new lesson is added to the course in a unit the student has already completed.	The next time the student accesses the course, the student is directed to complete the new lesson from a previous unit, which causes the student to appear to have moved backwards in their progress.
Removing units and lessons	At the section level, units and lessons that the student has already completed are removed.	The student's work appears to be gone, although it isn't. If the lesson is ever added back in, then it will show as completed. The student's grade and progress in the section are adjusted to reflect the removed content (fewer grades and less progress than the student has actually made). The Session Log shows larger numbers of completed assignments than the Course Report, because we want the Session Log to accurately report what a student actually did, (even though it no longer counts in the course), and we want the Course Report to accurately report the student's course progress and grade.
Moving units from one semester to another	You have a section that was created for Semester A of a course. Then, you move a unit to Semester B. Because the section is only for Semester A, the unit that was moved looks like it has disappeared.	The student's work appears to be gone, although it isn't. The student's completed work now sits in Semester B. The student's grade and progress in the section are adjusted to reflect a missing unit (fewer grades and less progress than the student has actually made). The Session Log shows larger numbers of completed assignments than the Course Report, because we want the Session Log to accurately report what a student actually did, (even though it no longer counts in the course), and we want the Course Report to accurately report the student's course progress and grade.

Impacts of in-flight customization

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