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Course outline: sections, subsection and units
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Creating the course structure
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Courses in the open edX platform have their content organized in sections, subsections, and units. This structure is called the course outline and will be used by learners to find their way into the course contents.

This is a key part of designing and structuring a course.

.. image:: ../_assets/course_structure.jpg
    :width: 500px
    :align: center
    :alt: Course structure

.. seealso:: The detailed information about the course outline and how to create sections, subsections, and units in a course and the rules on how to publish and release these components will be found in  |open_edX_Docs_link1| of the Open edX official Documentation.

  .. |open_edX_Docs_link1| raw:: html

     <a href="https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/open-edx-building-and-running-a-course/en/open-release-lilac.master/developing_course/workflow.html#getting-started-with-course-content-development" target="_blank">This section</a>



Publishing Status of a section, subsection, or unit
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The containers for course contents (sections, subsections, and units) can have 5 different Publishing statuses and they will control the visibility of that specific component for learners.

.. seealso::  All the details for the 5 publishing statuses are described in depth in |open_edX_Docs_link2| of the Open edX official Documentation.

  .. |open_edX_Docs_link2| raw:: html

     <a href="https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/open-edx-building-and-running-a-course/en/open-release-lilac.master/developing_course/workflow.html#getting-started-with-course-content-development" target="_blank">This section</a>