Publisher Products and Course-Level Publisher Product Selection

Overview

Publisher Products in Atomic Assessments enable schools to access and use publisher-created content without directly editing or altering the publisher’s original materials. With the introduction of Course-Level Publisher Product Selection, administrators can now assign specific publisher question banks (via publisher product tags) to individual courses, providing more flexibility and control over which content is available in each course.

Background

Publishers differ from schools in that they typically author content externally, often directly within Learnosity’s authoring tools, rather than in the LMS through Atomic Assessments. They then use Atomic Assessments to deliver that content to schools. Atomic Assessments integrates with Learnosity to make publisher-authored content visible, discoverable, and usable while maintaining proper content protection and licensing boundaries.

Understanding Publisher Product Tags

Publisher Product Tags are what link publisher content in Learnosity to the appropriate Atomic Assessments configuration. These tags determine which publisher-authored activities and items appear as available for use in an LMS course.

To enable publisher product functionality:

1. Create a tag type named publisher_product in your Learnosity item bank.

2. Create tag values for each activity or bank (e.g., publisher_product: Math 1, publisher_product: Science 2).

3. Apply tags to activities you want schools to create assignments from and to items you want schools to find and add to new activities.

4. Send the tag names to Atomic Jolt Support so they can configure them in the customer’s Atomic Assessments instance.

Once configured, courses using Atomic Assessments can see and use publisher-tagged activities and items depending on their publisher product settings.

How Publisher Products Work in Practice

Creating Assignments from Publisher Activities

When creating a new assignment, selecting “Existing activities” will list both course-created activities and publisher activities (if publisher_products are configured). With course scoping enabled, publisher activities remain visible across courses but cannot be edited directly. Assignments created from publisher-tagged activities allow editing of assignment settings (name, dates, etc.) but do not allow editing of underlying questions or content. To edit content, instructors can duplicate the assignment. This removes the publisher tag and creates an editable copy.

Copying and Editing Publisher Items

When a publisher-tagged item is edited, Atomic Assessments creates a duplicate of the item, applies hidden course-level tags, and adds a parent_reference tag linking back to the original. The original item in the activity is then replaced with the new editable copy.

Adding Publisher Items to Activities

When editing an assignment and choosing “Find items,” publisher-tagged items appear in search results. Once added, they can be referenced as-is or copied for editing. Note: Publisher-tagged content does not appear in the Content Manager—it’s only accessible through Atomic Assessments’ question selection interface.

Course-Level Publisher Product Selection

Administrators can now configure which publisher products (question banks) are active at the course level. This is done through the new Course Settings interface in Atomic Assessments. When multiple publisher banks are available, admins can select one or more banks for a course without affecting global instance settings.

To configure course-level publisher products:

1. Navigate to the Course Settings panel within Atomic Assessments.

2. Expand the Publisher Products section.

3. Select which publisher banks (e.g., “Original Helix Bar item bank,” “Example Second bank”) should be active for the course.

4. Your selections apply only to the current course.

Benefits include granular control (choosing which publisher content each course can access), a cleaner instructor experience (only relevant publisher items and activities appear), improved licensing compliance (restricting access to licensed publisher materials on a per-course basis), and reduced support overhead (allowing admins to self-manage content access without requiring instance-level configuration changes).

Summary