A theme component could, say, change the icon and make it go to the course home page rather than the global one.
I started using discourse to teach instructional technology courses when I was an education professor.
I used a category for the course materials and had students reply-as-linked-topic to turn in their work (in public categories). In a semester-level topic, a syllabus would refer to the canonical course materials with when to do what thing. I then used a set of tags for them to indicate which topics were to be graded and wrote a script that would see if i liked a topic to indicate whether I’d approved the work.
I wrote a script that would update a csv from the university lms to facilitate uploading the grades there.
The thing that I think I liked most, and might have written about if I had been a better academic (and hadn’t left that job) was that i would update the assignments during the course to fix stuff that was unclear, rather than waiting until next year to make improvements. And since all edits were available on the history, students were free to do whatever version of the assignment they wanted (or did before I made the edit). I still think that improving the course on the fly rather than waiting a year and hoping to remember what the issues were was a great idea.