The institution catalog

For procurement & IT

Alongside the per-course views that educators work in, Alexandria keeps two catalogs that span the whole institution: one of practice exercises and one of lessons. Both are reached from the Questions and Lessons buttons at the top right of the admin dashboard, and both require the Admin role. An educator who opens either address is told that access is restricted to institution administrators.

These catalogs are the only place where you can see practice material across every course at once. They are useful when you need to answer a question about coverage or quality that no single course view can answer.

The exercise catalog

Questions lists every practice exercise at the institution, whichever course it belongs to and however it was created.

The Questions page titled All exercises, listing sixteen exercises across the institution in a table with Course, Exercise, Source, Questions, Status and Open columns; rows show Thermodynamics ME-2140, Benchmark (system) and Test courses, sources reading AI generated or a lecture PDF filename, question counts from 1 to 11, and Unverified and Visible status badges — Every exercise at the institution in one table. The Course column tells you which course an exercise belongs to.

Each row shows:

Column	Meaning
Course	The course the exercise belongs to, with its course code
Exercise	The exercise title
Source	The document the exercise was drawn from, or AI generated where there is no source file
Questions	How many questions the exercise contains
Status	Whether an educator has verified it, and whether students can see it

The filter box above the table matches on exercise title, course name, and course code, so you can narrow to a single course or find one exercise by name.

Open on a row opens that exercise. The Content tab shows the questions as students will meet them, with the answer options, the detailed solution, and the feedback shown on an incorrect answer.

Conditional logic

The Logic tab on an opened exercise holds the exercise’s branching rules. With Enable conditional logic switched on, you draw a flow of question nodes and connecting edges, so that the next question a student sees depends on how they answered the previous one. Auto-layout tidies the diagram, and Preview flow walks the branches without involving a student.

An exercise without conditional logic presents its questions in their fixed order. This is the default, and most exercises use it.

The lesson catalog

A lesson is an ordered sequence of steps that mixes exercises with written info pages, so that reading and practice alternate in the order you choose. Unlike an exercise, a lesson belongs to the institution rather than to one course, and the same lesson can be placed into several courses.

Lessons lists the lessons defined for your institution.

The Lessons page subtitled Author reusable lessons and assign them to courses, with a New lesson title field and a Create lesson button above a table of three lessons, Entropy and the Second Law, First Law and Energy Balances, and Phase Behaviour and Ideal Gas Processes, each with a Courses count of 0 and Edit and Delete actions — The lesson catalog. The Courses count tells you how many courses currently use a lesson.

The Courses column is the number of courses the lesson has been placed into. Read it before you touch anything on that row.

How catalog items reach a course

Neither catalog places material into a course by itself. Placement happens from the course library: open a folder, choose Add, and pick one of

Existing exercise, which offers the exercises already belonging to that course and adds the chosen one to the folder as a learning-path step
Existing lesson, which offers lessons from the institution catalog

A placement is a reference, not a copy. The folder points at the catalog item; it does not take its own duplicate. Two consequences follow.

The practical difference between the two is scope. An exercise belongs to a single course, so its placements stay inside that course. A lesson belongs to the institution, so its placements may be spread across several courses, and the consequences of editing or deleting one are correspondingly wider.