Course Configuration
Once a course exists — from a course request or from an administrator — Settings at the foot of the course sidebar opens everything you can change about it. The page is one long form in four sections: general information, exercises and grading, additional course features, and student enrollment.
General Information
Title is the course name everywhere it appears — the dashboard, course headers, notifications. Color sets the accent used throughout the course, which is what lets a student tell two courses apart at a glance.
Short Name is the identifier: 3 to 7 letters and digits, used in URLs, repository names and group names.
Course Description is what students read when they enroll and in the course header. Start and End bound the course; exercises and enrollment are expected to fall inside that window, and the end date is also what makes the course archivable.
Test Course marks a course as one used for trying things out. It is kept apart from the real ones rather than hidden: a student enrolled in it sees it on their dashboard under Current test courses, separate from the courses that count, and the same separation is made in their course archive.
Semester groups courses on the student dashboard — WS25, SS26 — so a student's older courses fall away from
the current ones.
Tutorial Group Time Zone is the zone tutorial group sessions are scheduled in and displayed against.
Data Retention
Two settings decide how long Artemis keeps this course's student data, and they exist because the answer is a legal one rather than a preference.
Grade-relevant course marks a course whose results count towards official grades or exam records. Its student data is then kept for the legally required period — five years by default. Turn it off for a course that is not grade-relevant and the data is deleted sooner, a year by default.
Data-retention hold suspends that deletion entirely. Turn it on while an objection or legal proceeding about the course is pending, because a pending proceeding extends the retention period by law: a course on hold is never warned about, and never included in, the automatic deletion of old student data. Turn it off once the matter is settled.
Exercises and Grading
Max. Points for Course is used for the example calculations in the grading key. It does not itself decide anyone's grade — that comes from the exercise points and the key.
Decimal Places for Score Calculations is the precision scores are calculated to, from 0 to 5 places, and defaults to 1.
Default Programming Language pre-selects the language on the programming exercise form. It is a convenience only and can be changed per exercise.
Complaints
Enable Complaints lets students dispute an assessment. It opens five further settings.
| Setting | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Max. Number of Complaints per Student | 3 | How many complaints a student may have open or rejected at once |
| Max. Number of Complaints per Team | 3 | The same limit for a team |
| Complaint Due Date in Days After Result Date | 7 | How long after their result a student may complain |
| Max. Number of Characters per Complaint | 2000 | How much a student may write |
| Max. Number of Characters per Response | 2000 | How much the reviewer may write back |
An accepted complaint stops counting against the limit, so the cap only restrains students whose complaints are not upheld. See Assessment and Grading for how a reviewer answers one.
More Feedback Requests
Enable More Feedback Requests lets a student ask for their marks to be explained rather than changed, with More feedback request due date in days after result date setting the window, again seven days by default.
These requests do not count against the complaint limit and cannot change a score, which makes them the cheaper option for a student who is confused rather than aggrieved. They are also exclusive with complaints — Artemis keeps one or the other per result — so it is worth telling students which one they want before they choose.
Additional Course Features
Learning Paths Enabled builds each student an individual path through the course's competencies and the material linked to them. See Adaptive Learning for defining those competencies.
Communication Enabled turns on course channels: staff create channels per topic, and students ask questions on exercise and lecture pages. Enabling it opens two more settings.
Direct Messages / Group Chats Enabled allows private conversations, one to one or in groups of up to ten. With it off, communication is limited to channels everyone can see.
Code of Conduct is the rules for messaging in the course, written in markdown. A newly created course starts from a template, which is worth reading before you edit it — it is also what the iOS and Android clients show for a course that has none of its own. Every participant sees whatever is in it.
See Communication for managing and moderating channels.
Student Course Enrollment
Student Course Enrollment Enabled lets students join the course themselves while it is active. It opens four further settings.
Enrollment Start and Enrollment End bound the window in which students may join; left empty, they follow the course's own start and end.
Enrollment Confirmation Message is markdown a student must confirm as they enroll — terms of participation, an honor code, anything they should acknowledge before joining.
Student Course Unenrollment Enabled lets students leave again, and Latest Date to Unenroll is the last day they may; left empty, it is the end of the course.
Online Course marks the course as one run through an external platform over LTI, so accounts are created automatically for students arriving that way. It appears only when LTI is enabled on the instance and self-enrollment is off, because the two are mutually exclusive. See LTI Configuration.
Iris
Iris, the AI tutor, has its own settings page rather than a section on this form: Iris in the course management, not Settings. One switch decides whether the whole course has Iris, and a Level of Instructional Support decides how much it gives away.
See Iris for those settings, and Iris for students for what a student meets — including the choice each student makes for themselves about whether to use AI at all.
AI-Assisted Feedback
Athena's AI feedback is not on this form either. Its two switches sit in the Athena AI Feedback panel on the course overview, next to Iris, and each takes effect as soon as you set it — there is nothing to save. The panel appears only where an administrator has configured Athena for the instance. The general step of the course onboarding wizard offers the same two switches.
Formative feedback requests lets students ask Athena for preliminary feedback on a draft before the due date. It is feedback to learn from rather than a mark, and it does not replace the assessment that follows. With it off, students in the course no longer see the button to request AI feedback.
Grading feedback suggestions offers Athena's suggestions to tutors while they mark submissions. A suggestion is a starting point a person accepts, edits or ignores; nothing reaches a student without a reviewer submitting it. For programming and text exercises, turning it on or off also starts or stops Athena's processing of the submissions at each exercise's due date.
Both switches cover text, modeling and programming exercises, but a programming exercise only where it is assessed semi-automatically, with manual assessment enabled alongside the tests. There is no per-exercise switch: every exercise in the course follows these two, as far as its type supports them. See AI-Assisted Feedback for the details.