Potpourri: Additional Redwood Features

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Redwood contains numerous features and feature enhancements that affect quality of life for both authors and learners.

Make Sections available independently of the course outline

Redwood contains a feature enhancement that enables course authors to make a Section of the course available independently of the course outline. This is accomplished by hiding a section from the course outline and enabling sharing of a URL to that section at any time.

This feature unlocks a number of use cases. Course authors can freely circulate evergreen or supplemental course content, without needing to slot it prescriptively into the course structure. It also enables authors to add reference links to material that must be reviewed at different times of the course, and gives learners an easy way to consistently reference parts of the course that may need regular review.

For more details on how to use this feature, see the How-to guide.

For more details on how to turn this feature on, see the Release Notes.

Embed an iframe into the Text Editor

Course authors can now embed iframes into the Text Editor, making it easier to enrich the course experience with third-party content, without having students navigate away from the course.

For more details on how to use this feature, see the How-to Guide.

This feature is turned on by default in the Text Editor.

Connect Teams in a course to Content Groups

Previously, course authors were only able to connect subsets of learners to custom content sets using the Cohorts and Content Groups features. Now, course authors can also use the Teams feature to connect subsets of learners to custom content sets.

For more details on how to use this feature, see the How-to Guide.

For more details on how to turn this feature on, see the Release Notes.

New role in Studio: Limited Staff

There is a new role for course staff, the Limited Staff role. Users in this role have access to the LMS and the Instructor Dashboard, but do not have access to Studio. This role enables course staff to have full sets of permission around running/delivering a course, but restricts access to the course content itself.

There are known issues with this feature in the Redwood Release. When a user in this role lands on a page in Studio, they see a 403 error message. UI improvements will be made in future releases.