Managing courses – teacher's guide

1 The Courses view and the course page

Buttons in the Courses view

At the top of the Courses view there is a row of action buttons. Below them are your own courses as cards, and at the very bottom the expandable Active students panel.

Add New Course – opens an empty course form (see Creating a new course).
Course Bank – browse and import courses shared by others (section 4).
Manage Quiz Tasks – opens the Quiz tasks tab of the Task banks view, where the tasks of automatic practice quizzes are listed by category (see Practice quiz).
Import participants (PDF) – read students' names from a group list (section 5).
Presentation window – opens presentation mode (see Presentation window).
Mass publish – publish several courses at once (section 2).

The course page

You manage the whole course from its own page. The buttons at the top cover the most important actions, and the ⋮ menu holds the less frequently needed and dangerous actions.

Edit Course – opens the course editor (basic info, topics, tasks, calendar, forums).
Preview as student – opens the course in its own window as students see it (see below).
Progress – course analytics and students' results.
Publish to Course Bank – shares the course in the course bank (see section 4).
Re-publish course – publishes your changes to students (see section 2).
⋮ – archiving, resetting, deactivating and deleting (sections 6–7).

👁 Preview as student

The preview opens in a separate window that shows the course in the student app's course view. Next to the window title there is a yellow PREVIEW badge. You close the preview by closing the window (the window's own × button).

The preview shows the last saved version of the course on this computer – not the published version. So you can check your changes before publishing them to students. Save the course before previewing so that your latest changes are shown.
It includes topics, materials, videos, links, course tasks, essay and video tasks, graded quizzes and the topics’ Alaia tasks, which you can also try out. Graded quizzes are also shown as drafts, in which case (luonnos) (draft) appears after the name.
In the preview nothing is saved or sent: you cannot submit a quiz, and the preview does not appear in the students' results. Attempts made at an Alaia task in the preview are not shown in its results.
Discussion forums and peer reviews are not shown in the preview, because they need real participants.

2 Publishing, mass publishing and versions

A course has a version number. When you edit the course, the local version increases, and the changes only reach students when you publish. The text of the publish button changes depending on the situation.

Activate course – puts the course into use (publishes it for the first time).
Update published course – when the local version is newer than the published one, this brings the changes to students.
Re-publish course – publishes the course again when the versions are the same.
Deactivate course (⋮) – makes the course unavailable to students.
Import published version (⋮) – fetches the published version back into the editor if the local version has fallen behind.

The course page shows the Course version, the Published version and the latest publication time, so you can see at a glance whether there are unpublished changes.

☁ Mass publish: several courses at once

If you have edited many courses, you can publish them all at once with the “Mass publish” button in the Courses view.

Press Mass publish. The course cards become selectable, and a bar appears at the bottom of the screen.
Choose the courses to publish by clicking their cards, or press Select all. The bar shows how many are selected (e.g. 3 selected); Clear clears the selection.
Press Publish selected and confirm the question “Publish 3 courses to the cloud?”.
Finally you see the summary Mass publish finished, which shows for each course, for example, Activated (version 1), Updated to version 12 or the reason for an error.

Unpublished courses are activated.
If the published version is the same as the local one, the version number is increased by one and the publication is updated.
If the local version is already newer, it is published as it is.

You can leave mass publishing with the Cancel button in the bar.

3 Finding the course: search, password and description

Students join a course by looking for it in the student app's course search. Three settings in the course's basic info affect how the course can be found and who can join it.

The course description, password and search visibility are on the Basic Info tab of the course editor.

Setting	What students experience	When it takes effect
Description	The description is shown with the course in the course search results.	At the next publication
Course password	New students joining have to enter the password. Students who have already joined are not asked.	At the next publication
Search visibility	A hidden course does not appear in the search. Students who have already joined continue as usual.	Immediately (published courses only)

The password and the description travel with the published course, so remember to re-publish the course after changing them. The search visibility option, on the other hand, is saved as soon as you click the checkbox.

The course password prevents random students from joining, but it is not a security feature. Use a password you can safely tell the whole group.

📘 A more detailed description of the fields: Creating a new course → Basic Info

4 Course bank: share and import

The course bank is a library of shared courses. You can share your own course for others to use and import ready-made courses into your own library.

Publish to Course Bank

The “Publish to Course Bank” button on the course page opens a window where you give search details for the shared course: Subject, Author (pre-filled with the course teacher) and Extra info. At least one field must be filled in. After you confirm, you see the notification “Course published to the bank.”

The course content (topics, tasks, quizzes) is shared in the bank. Other teachers get their own copy of it – their changes do not affect your course.

Browse and import (Course Bank)

The “Course Bank” button (Browse ready-made) in the Courses view opens the Shared courses view, where courses shared by colleagues are shown as cards. The number of courses and subjects is shown at the top.

Search field – search by course name, subject, author or extra info; the list updates as you type.
Sort – newest or oldest first, by name or by subject.
Advanced search – opens separate fields Course name, Subject, Author and Extra info.
Subject buttons (All, Mathematics, Physics …) – show only one subject's courses. If you have shared courses yourself, there is also Shared by me.

The course bank (Shared courses): search, sort, advanced search opened, subject buttons and course cards.

Preview (or clicking the card) – shows the course description and the number of topics, tasks and exams. You can import the course directly from the preview.
Import course – copies the course into your own library. A successful import shows the notification “Course imported to your local library.”

The imported course goes into your own library, where you can edit it and publish it to your own students.

Removing a shared course from the bank: your own publications have a Mine badge and a bin button (Remove from bank); the same button is also in the preview. Removing takes the course out of the bank for all teachers, but your own course and copies already imported are kept. Only the teacher who shared a course can remove it – old courses shared before owner information was recorded are removed by the administrators (contact Symma support).

5 Participant names (PDF and by hand)

In the teacher app, students are at first shown as student numbers. You can attach real names to the numbers in two ways: by importing them all at once from a group list (PDF) or by adding them one by one.

Import participants (PDF)

With the “Import participants (PDF)” button (Read the list from a PDF) in the Courses view you choose one or more PDF files. The import reads Wilma's grading list, so you can import participants directly from a PDF printed/saved from Wilma. The app reads the files and shows the recognised students as a preview before saving.

Where to get the PDF: print or save the group's grading list from Wilma as a PDF and choose it in the import. The app picks out the students' names and numbers from the list.

PDF import: summary, recognised students and status. Names that are already saved are shown in grey and are not changed.

Choose PDF files – you can choose several lists at once; overlapping rows are removed and counted under Duplicates.
Preview – new students are selected in advance. You can untick a row you do not want to import, or correct a name before importing.
Import new – saves the selected names. Finally you see a notification, e.g. “Added 18, skipped 2”.

Add names one by one: the “No name” filter NEW

The Active students panel at the bottom of the Courses view has a “No name” filter. The yellow number next to it shows how many loaded students still have no name. The filter shows only these students, so it is easy to fill in the names one by one.

The “No name” filter shows the students whose name is missing. ✏️ opens the name entry.

Open the Active students panel and choose the No name filter.
On the student's row, press ✏️ (Add name), type the name in the field and save.
The name is updated immediately on all rows of the same student, and the student disappears from the list. The filter and the scroll position are kept, so you can go straight on to the next one.

When everyone has a name, the list says “All loaded students have a name.” A name is also treated as missing when only the student number is shown as the name.

Names make it easier to recognise students – for example, in discussion forums and in the progress data the real name is shown in addition to the number.

Privacy: imported and manually added names are saved only locally on your own computer – they are not sent to the cloud. In the cloud and between students the student number is used; the real name is only visible to you as the teacher on this computer.

6 Archiving and resetting submissions

From the course's ⋮ menu you can archive or reset students' submissions. Archiving keeps the data as a readable copy on your computer; resetting deletes it permanently.

The ⋮ menu of a published course: Deactivate course, 💾 Archive data, Archive submissions…, Reset submissions… and Delete Course. Import published version appears only when the published version is newer than the local one. — The ⋮ menu of a published course: Deactivate course, 💾 Archive data, Archive submissions…, Reset submissions… and Delete Course. *Import published version* appears only when the published version is newer than the local one.

💾 Archive data (keeping analytics)

This is an on/off switch, not a one-time action. When it is on, the button reads “💾 Archiving ON”; when it is off, it reads “💾 Archive data”. While it is on, it keeps the course's progress data for analytics: even if submissions are later archived (and deleted from the cloud), they stay included in the statistics of the Progress view. This way you can see the course's trend and task statistics even after a long time.

In short: 💾 Archive data = ON keeps progress data in the analytics even after archiving. If you want to follow statistics over a longer period, keep this on.

🗄 Archive submissions

Archiving: old submissions are saved as a readable archive on your computer and deleted from the cloud.

The archive is saved on your computer in readable form (a browsing page + data + videos).
Cloud storage is freed when the submissions are deleted from the cloud.
You can limit archiving by date – without a date, everything is archived.

♻ Reset submissions

Resetting: deletes submissions permanently from the cloud and from your computer. This cannot be undone.

Warning: resetting deletes submissions permanently and cannot be undone. If you want to keep the data, archive it first. Without a date, the whole course is reset, including the participants' progress rows.

7 Deleting a course

At the bottom of the ⋮ menu there is “Delete Course”. This deletes the whole course. Unlike archiving/resetting submissions, it also deletes the course structure (topics, tasks, settings).

Note: deletion is final. If you want to keep the course for later use, consider sharing it in the course bank or exporting it before deleting (export is the ⇩ Export button at the top of the course editor).