What happens when a synopsis is too cluttered or lacking in detail? What’s seen cannot be unseen, so scribbles should be saved as a draft to be finished and sent at a later time once reviewed and perfected. 🔏 And if you still must edit after publishing, updates will certainly benefit from the protection of a timestamped change history to ensure data integrity.

Thus, it’s possible to save synopsis as drafts and automatically save changes as new versions to control when content is ready to go public and obtain a chronological audit trail. 🤓

➜ What's a synopsis?

➜ How do I publish or save a synopsis as a draft?

➜ How do I access the change history and why is this useful?

So, first things first: a synopsis is a written and descriptive digest of the major points of a session. Expectedly, the content is written by either staff or lecturers and shared with students. Within the synopsis, one may include a rundown of what was done and discussed in class, pivotal takeaways, suggested or compulsory readings for the next session, guidelines for a specific assignment, and more. Synopses can also be made available before a session so that students know what to expect in advance and come prepared with relevant questions and talking points. ✍️
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Having a synopsis helps students remind, review and reflect on what they learned, distinguish between essential and supplementary information and organize their studies, while also serving as reliable evidence of the lecturer's work.

When you go into Academics ➝ Calendar and enter a particular course, the course content (consisting of the synopses for the sessions and a list of shared resources) is to be found under Syllabus. In the past, it was only possible to SAVE and content had to be published immediately, but currently you can save a draft to give it a few more reads, make amends and post later. 😃

To do so:

     1) Click Academics on the sidebar and then Calendar
     2) Enter a course
​     3) Navigate to the tab Syllabus
​     4) Scroll to a session, press ADD SYNOPSIS and write something
​     5) When you’re done for the moment, SAVE DRAFT

Alternatively, click CANCEL to abort the operation and exit the compositor (which retains any text that was previously saved), Discard Draft to reset, or PUBLISH to make the synopsis available.

You can always return to an unpublished draft by clicking EDIT DRAFT.

Suppose a student flunks a graded assignment and blames the school for not providing enough information to successfully complete it. How can you confirm that the student had the correct information in time to do the assignment? Through an audit trail! 👍
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Therefore, at present, for every time you submit modifications to a published synopsis, the changes will be saved as new versions and stored up, like V.01, V.02, V.03, and so forth. Students only get to see the latest iteration, but staff will be able to view all of the earlier versions stacked vertically from oldest to newest to check edits, ascertain the author and date of a particular change and locate lost content.

If you want to create a new version:

     1) Access the Syllabus
​     2) Under the appropriate session, press CREATE NEW VERSION, apply the changes and hit PUBLISH

But if you want to refer back to a previous version:

     1) Click inside the dropdown menu Version to display the full list
​     2) Select a version to open

You have reached the end of this article. Thanks for reading! 🤓 If you have any questions or comments on the topic at hand, or if you enjoy reads like this and have article requests, let us know. Also, please leave a rating below. Your feedback is highly appreciated! 💖

PUBLISHED: November 29, 2018
LAST UPDATED: October 5, 2021 at 5:58 p.m.