Working together to create course materials can save everyone a lot of time and effort. However, no two Linear Algebra or Statistics courses are the same. To make sure that the material fits the course curriculum, small adjustments might be necessary. Think of that one exercise that requires more Calculus knowledge than expected of the students for the course. On the other hand, when someone is reviewing the original exercises, you want your course exercises to be improved, too.

That's where the difference between Grasple's copies and references comes in. In this article, you can find an explanation of the differences between these two types of copying.
In short: exercises can be linked to multiple subjects. This allows the user to easily make a selection out of an existing list of exercises within a subject to create a course specific subject with a subset of the exercises without copying all the exercises.

To see whether an exercise is an original, a copy, or a reference, please read this article.
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Remember, please do not hesitate to contact us for help or advice. You can reach us through the chat function in the bottom right corner of the webpage. We're happy to help!
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To follow the steps in this article, please make sure that you are logged in on app.grasple.com, with the repository menu open. Read here where you can find your repo.
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You might want to make small adjustments in the subjects or exercises for a specific course. For example, using a subset of exercises in a subject instead of using all of them. Or making small changes to some exercises, since you want to use a different approach. In this scenario: use references to exercises.
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To explain this scenario, we will show you screenshots of two different personal accounts: a Material Manager and a Teacher account.
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​The Material Manager
To organise the materials, we have created two repositories: the Main Repository and the Course Repository. All the original material is located in the Main Repository, and the copies that are specific to one course can be altered in the Course Repository. The Material Manager is member of both repositories, see the screenshot below.

This entails that the Material Manager has full edit rights to all materials in the Main Repository, and has the ability to move and copy materials between the two repos.

​The Teacher
​The Teacher is only member of one repo: their Course Repository. This means that the Teacher can only edit the material that is copied and moved to their personal repository. Of course, the Teacher can use the material in the Main Repo in their course, but they do not have editing rights over the material that is not located in their repo.

That's right, both the Material Manager and the Teacher are members of the Course Repository. You can check that in the 'Users' tab.

To create a subject with your own selection of the available exercises on that topic take the following steps:

Step 1. As the Material Manager: open the subject within the Main Repository.

Note: you can see that the Material Manager has edit rights to the original subject because it says 'Editable' in the white taskbar.

Step 2. Copy the subject, without copying the exercises.

The copied subject will now be available in the Main Repository.

Step 3. Move the new copy of the subject to the repository of specific teacher, without checking the box in front of 'Transfer edit rights of linked exercises'. This is to make sure that the original exercises with the edit rights will remain in the Main Repository.

The copied subject is now available in the Course Repository:

This entails that the Teacher can now edit the subject, for example:

To do all of this, the Teacher does not need full edit rights; meaning that references are the preferred type of exercises.

You can see that the exercises are references because of the icons in the tiles in the exercise list. The icon combination for references is the eye and the circle.

This means that you have viewing rights and this exercise is a reference to an original exercise in another repository. Read more about the icons and their meanings in this article.

Remember: edits on the exercises in the Main Repository are reflected in the newly copied subject, such that improvement or spelling mistakes made by the material manager are directly reflected without the teacher having to double review the exercises.

In short: the Material Manager is in control of the content and the Teacher has control over which exercises to use in their specific course.
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If you, as a Teacher, don't have the editing rights, you will see the text "Only copy" in the white taskbar.

If you still want to alter one exercise in the set, you can choose to replace the reference with a copy of that specific exercise. That way you will obtain the full edit rights to the exercise, and edit the question without editing the original question.

Start by clicking on the button 'copy' on the top right corner of the exercise. You will get a pop-up screen with the following message:

If you choose the 'Replace this exercise in this subject' option, the current challenge will be copied, the new challenge will be added to the lesson and the old challenge will be removed from the subject.
You now have full editing rights, and you will see the following icon:

Imagine that you have worked on some material, and now you want to split up the material over two courses, each with their own repository.
You can move one or more subjects, including the editing rights, to another repository with one simple step.
First, select the subject(s) you want to move to another repository by checking the box in front of the subject. The 'move' button has now appeared in the top right corner of the page, click on it. You will get the following pop-up screen:

Choose your destination repository from the drop-down menu.
Seeing as you want to transfer the editing rights, please check the box at the bottom, and click 'Move'.
You have now moved to subjects including the editing rights to another repository!

Do you have any questions or feedback? Please feel free to contact us through the chat function in the bottom right corner of the webpage.