---
title: "Learning about Publishing Groups"
slug: "what-is-publishing-group"
tags: ["NFR"]
updated: 2024-09-25T21:55:40Z
published: 2024-09-25T21:55:40Z
canonical: "docs.skillable.com/what-is-publishing-group"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.skillable.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Learning about Publishing Groups

Publishing Groups are a means to grant access to a set of Courses to be used by your own Organization or other organizations for Classes and Course Assignments. You may only have one publishing group, which can be used exclusively for all your courses within your own organization, or you can have multiple publishing groups, each for a different purpose, audience or organization. A course must be added to a publishing group to be available to add to classes or Self-Paced training. A single publishing group named after your organization is created for you to use when your company is added into the TMS, you may create more if you need them.

There are two types of access to publishing groups that can be granted:

1. **Availability** - allows your sub-organizations to make their courses available through your publishing group for other organizations to use.
2. **Published Organizations** - allows these organizations to consume the courses through their classes and course assignments. This is handled through your sales person with an authorization form in the same manner as was done for content providers. Organizations with this access are called Published Organizations.

Published organizations are only able to have access to a course through one publishing group at a time. Therefore, the Best Practice steps for creating a publishing group are as follows:

1. Create the publishing group (see [Creating a Publishing Group](/v1/docs/create-publishing-group)).
  1. An internal Publishing Group will automatically be created for your organization if you are creating proprietary content.
2. Add the ability for sub-organizations to add their content.
3. Add courses (see [Adding Courses to a Publishing Group](/v1/docs/add-courses-to-publishing-group)).
4. Add organizations you manage as Published Organizations (see [Adding Organizations to a Publishing Group](/v1/docs/add-published-orgs-to-publishing-group)).
5. For those organizations you do not manage, an authorization form needs to be completed with your sales person for the organization, and our Skillable TMS Operations team will add them as a Published Organization.

Publishing groups are applied to courses to create different catalogs of content which you can make available exclusively to specific customers by publishing to organizations. A publishing group must be added to make the course available to schedule. Organizations can have one or multiple publishing groups to operate.

Bundles together content to then be set up for training through classes, subscriptions, and course assignments. Courses can include labs, videos, SCORM, LTI, external links, assessments, and documents. Courses must be assigned to a Content Provider and a Publishing Group to be available to set up for training.

An organization is assigned to each entity in the TMS, such as, users, classes, subscriptions, and courses. The organization is a basis to determine access given based on roles within the organization and management over the organization.

A class is a scheduled instructor-led event with a start and end time/date. Typically, these include lectures and hands on activities such as labs.

A course assignment delivers self-paced access to a course. A course is assigned to a student giving immediate access to the student. It can be accessed at any time for the duration of the assignment. The assignment duration begins and is billed when it is created.

Self-Paced or On-demand training is associated with course assignments or subscriptions. Users are assigned training which can be accessed at any time by the learner at their leisure. Outside guidance or mentorship is often not provided with this type of training.