.. _Testing Your Course:

###########################
Testing Your Course
###########################

The way your course looks in Studio is not the way students see and experience your course.

Therefore, as and after you develop course content, you must view and test your course from a students' point of view.

From within Studio, you can test your course in two ways:

* :ref:`Preview Your Course`
* :ref:`View Your Live Course`

For information about setting up a beta test for your course, see :ref:`Beta_Testing`.

.. _Preview Your Course:

***********************
Preview Your Course
***********************
 
When you view your course through Preview mode, you see all the
units of your course, regardless of whether they are set to Public or
Private and regardless of whether the release dates have passed.
 
 
Using Preview mode is the only way to see content that is set to Private
**as a student would see it.**
 
 
You can enter Preview mode in two ways.
 
* On any subsection page, click **Preview Drafts**.

  .. image:: Images/preview_draft.png
   :width: 800
   :alt: Image of a subsection with the Preview Drafts button circled
 
* On any Unit page, click **Preview**.
 
  The following example shows the **Preview** button for a unit that
  is set to Public.
 
  .. image:: Images/preview_public.png
   :width: 800
   :alt: Image of a public unit with the Preview button circled
 
 
  The following example shows the **Preview** button for a unit that
  is set to Private.
 
  .. image:: Images/preview_private.png
   :width: 800
   :alt: Image of a private unit with the Preview button circled
 
.. _View Your Live Course:

***********************
View Your Live Course
***********************

When you view your course as a course team member (that is, using the same account you use to build the course in Studio),
you see all the units of your course that are set to **Public**, regardless of the release dates of the containing section or subsection.
 
You do not see units that are set to **Private**. To see Private units, you must use Preview mode as described above.
 
When you view your live course, you can execute tests to make sure your course works the way you intend. For example, the course team can work through all of the problems to verify that the correct answer gets a green check for correct, and that any answer other than the correct one gets a red X for incorrect. 

You can view the live course from three different places in Studio:
 
* The **Course Outline** page.

  .. image:: Images/course_outline_view_live.png
   :width: 800
   :alt: Image of the course outline with the View Live button circled
 
* Any Subsection page.
 
  .. image:: Images/subsection_view_live.png
    :width: 800
    :alt: Image of a subsection with the View Live button circled
 
* The Unit page, if the Unit is Public.
 
  .. image:: Images/unit_view_live.png
     :width: 800
     :alt: Image of a unit with the View Live button circled

