News channels and news items

News items are organized within channels to let you target the information that you want to deliver to particular groups, courses, or users of the system. You can restrict who has access to particular news items by assigning a specific group to a channel.

The News asset can be viewed or shared in a domain or a course. When you use the News asset, you add a news section to a slide on the course which serves as a bulletin board for course participants. This lets course providers share relevant notes, news, course changes and other information with their class. You can also use it as an internal way of communicating in the system, for example, if you have updates that you want your course editors to be aware of.

You can also use the News asset to track subscribers to a channel and analyze the data. You can see the statistics on the News Admin page, for each news item. 

Once you have a channel set up, instructors and content creators can create and edit news items from the Light Admin panel. You can configure the news item to display relevant news on a specific date, so you can create items and schedule them for later.

You can customize the news channel to use a specific template to specify the layout of your news items on the page.

Users can subscribe to the news channel via RSS feeds directly on the slide where the news is displayed if this is enabled on the asset.