Working with Drafts

Owned by Mirko Vucicevich
Last updated: Nov 22, 2021 by Mirko Vucicevich
2 min read

A Draft is a useful tool in outline for scenarios where:

  • You want to experiment with the outline software

  • You want to make yourself a template to be imported into your other course outlines

  • You want to edit a course outline for a future course you are not yet registered as an instructor for

  • You want to create course outlines for someone else before they grant edit permissions

Note: Drafts can only be created by instructors or admins – if you find yourself on the "My Course Outlines" page when you log in to outline you may need to validate your instructor status. If you require admin status please contact the associate dean UG within your faculty to get approved.

To create a draft, scroll to the bottom of the outline homepage to the Drafts section and select create new. After this you can freely edit, save, and share the draft with other editors as if it was a regular course outline. From the tool's perspective a draft is just a course outline without any courses attached to it.

With the introduction of the Mandatory / Optional content feature, parts of the administrative policy section of course outlines will be updated when courses are eventually added to a course outline.

Using Drafts to author Future Course Outlines

In the case that QUEST does not yet have you registered as an instructor for your course, or the course does not yet exist in Quest, you can create and save a Draft, then attach the courses to the draft once you have access via the "Courses / Sections Included" settings on the Edit page. 

Using Drafts to author Course Outlines for Other People

If you are tasked with authoring course outline on behalf of another person, you can go through the process as normal. Then, by granting the course instructor edit access, they will be able to attach the necessary sections to the outline before saving / publishing.

Using Drafts as a Generic Template

The simplest use case for a draft is to prepare a generic template for subsequent course outlines. Outline already uses a template that block out sections of your course outline, but if you want to, for instance, pre-format some tables for your course schedule or course descriptions, you can easily do this in a draft.

Then, when editing course outlines, you can click the Re-use Existing Outline and navigate to the Drafts tab

Example of above instructions