What do the ‘Publish’ and ‘Republish’ buttons mean in Kira?
When you are working on a Kira resource, be that a full course, a single lesson, or a standalone activity, before you assign you will first need to press the Publish button shown in purple in the top right corner.
Publishing a resource tells Kira that it’s in a state that is ready to go to students, and makes sure to save this state so its reflected in the assignment. Once you click Publish, you’ll notice the Assign button will become clickable. Republishing pushes updates to all assignments associated with that course, even if assigned to multiple classes.
If you make changes to the resource, no matter how big or how small, you’ll notice that the Publish button turns into ‘Republish.’ You will want to hit republish if you have made changes that you would like to be reflected for students.
If your work has already been assigned to students, you’ll see a pop up like this one:
This message does not mean you shouldn’t proceed, but is instead a warning to make sure you are aware that students will now see the updated version of the work. If you’re okay with this, you can check the necessary box and click Publish Update. The publish dialog also provides additional information: a large "Active Assignments" number reflects the total reach of the original course across the platform and is informational only. A smaller number (e.g., 65) represents the students in your course who could be affected by your updates. Only your students are impacted, and only if the updates involve content they have already completed.
Will republishing impact student work?
That all depends on the changes you made.
If you made basic changes, like changing the wording of text, adding an image, dragging and dropping something to a new location: no, there will be no impact on student work. Adding standards to a course is another example of a basic change that does not impact student grades or work.
If you added a new question: there will be no updates to work students previously completed, but they will now see a new question to complete. If you add an interactive component to something students have previously completed, they may be confused why they are now asked to go back and complete a question that wasn’t there previously. Altering questions or content in interactive activities may also prompt students who completed the original version to redo the updated activity.
If you delete a question: yes, this will impact student work. If they have answered this question but it no longer exists in the lesson, we can expect their work to be impacted. Additionally, if you update a rubric and republish, students who have already completed assignments tied to that rubric may need to resubmit their work under the updated criteria. Previously completed submissions may no longer appear until resubmitted.
An important note is that Kira views each new question separately. Let’s say you have a free response question that says “Tell me about your summer.” If you delete this question, but then re-add a new question that says “Tell me about the last month of your summer”, even though the question is similar, Kira will view it as a brand new question. It will then impact student work.
When you make large changes with the Ask Kira AI, it can sometimes delete existing questions and add in new ones instead of editing in place and simply changing the text of the question. We recommend any question-based changes you need to make you make manually, or give clear instructions in a prompt like:
Make [list of necessary changes] to all questions in this lesson, but you must edit them in place. You may not delete or re-add any new question components as this work is already assigned to students.
You can safely make change and republish whenever you want, just be conscious of the types of changes you are making and exercise caution when making any changes that touch activities students may have already been working on!