Publishing a Unit

Publishing is the final step before a unit becomes available for delivery. It signals that the unit's content and structure have been reviewed and are ready for students. And from this point, the unit is locked to protect the integrity of active enrolments and assessment records.

What's Covered in This Article

This article walks through what is required before publishing, what happens during the publishing process, and what becomes locked once a unit is live.

Pre-Publishing Requirements: Mandatory conditions that must be met before a unit can be published.
The Publishing Workflow: Step-by-step process for pushing a unit live.
What Gets Locked: The structural elements that become read-only after publishing.
Impact on Courses and Classes: How publishing affects where and how a unit is delivered.

Pre-Publishing Requirements

Before Nimbu allows a unit to be published, the following conditions must be met to ensure the unit is functionally valid:

Mandatory Identification: You must have provided a National Code and National Title.

Content Minimums: A unit cannot be empty. It must contain at least one of the following:
- An Assessment or Practical Observation task.
- At least one Learning Resource where the "Completion Required" toggle (lightning bolt icon) is enabled.

The Publishing Workflow

When you are ready to push your unit live:

Review your structure in the Preview tab.
Click the Publish button in the top-right corner. A warning modal will appear, confirming the finality of the action: "Please note that once you have published this unit you won't be able to add or remove items".
Click Yes, publish! to confirm.

What Gets Locked After Publishing

To preserve the "evidence trail" for your students, the following elements are locked once a version is published:

Content Structure: You cannot add or remove content items or sections from that version.
Prerequisite Settings: Access rules configured on sections and content items are fixed and cannot be edited.

Pro Tip: If you need to make changes to a published unit, you need to create a new Draft Version. See the Unit Versioning article for more detail.

Impact on Courses

Publishing a unit has a direct effect on how your RTO's courses are delivered:

Course Mapping: Only Published units appear in the selection list when mapping units to a course. Draft units are not available for assignment.
Existing Classes: Publishing a new version of a unit does not affect classes already running on a previous version. Students in those classes will continue through the original content until they complete the unit.
New Classes: Any class created after a new version is published will use the most recent published version of that unit.

Unit Versioning
Creating a Course (Happy Path)