Building a course

Manage Courses lists the courses you teach, with an All courses tab for everything in the organisation you are allowed to see.

There are two ways to build one: in the browser, a piece at a time, or as a folder of files imported in one go. This page covers the first. For the second, see Importing a course — it is much the faster route for a course that already exists as written material.

Creating the course

Create course opens a form. The fields, and what each one actually does:

Field	Required	Notes
Course title	Yes	What learners see everywhere
Course summary	Yes	Up to 400 characters. Used on cards and in listings
Course description	Yes	The full page: rich text, tables, code, images, mathematics
Course thumbnail	No	The picture on the course card
Price	No	Only meaningful if your organisation sells courses
Associated pathways	No	Which longer tracks this course belongs to
Instructors	No	Who teaches it
Managers	No	Who oversees it without teaching
Difficulty	Yes	Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced
Course visibility	Yes	Open or Closed

Open vs Closed is the one to get right. Open means learners can find the course under Explore Programs and enrol themselves. Closed means enrolment happens through a cohort, by staff. Most structured programmes are Closed.

Summary and description do different jobs. The summary is the one-paragraph pitch that appears on a card; the description is the page somebody reads when deciding whether the course is for them. Writing the same text into both is a missed opportunity — and 400 characters of description is a thin page.

New courses are created as drafts. Nobody can see them until you publish.

Structuring it

A course is a list of topics, and each topic holds lessons, quizzes and assignments.

Course
└── Topic 1
    ├── Lesson 1
    ├── Lesson 2
    ├── Quiz
    └── Assignment
└── Topic 2
    └── ...

Open the course and go to Curriculum. Add topic creates one; the menu on each topic adds a lesson, quiz or assignment inside it.

Advice on topics

A topic should be a sitting. Something a learner can finish in one session and feel they have completed. Twelve lessons under one topic is a topic nobody finishes; one lesson under each of twelve topics is a contents list pretending to be a structure.

Put the assessment at the end of the topic it assesses. Learners work top-to-bottom. A quiz stranded at the end of the course tests memory rather than understanding.

Order is set by the order field, and you can reorder within a topic. The numbering learners see follows it.

Editing content

Clicking a lesson, quiz or assignment opens the content editor, with the curriculum in a sidebar so you can move between items without going back.

The editors are covered separately:

• Writing lessons
• Quizzes and assignments

Previewing

Student preview shows a lesson exactly as a learner will see it. Use it before publishing, particularly for anything with images, tables, code blocks or mathematics — those are the four that look fine in an editor and wrong on the page.

Publishing

The course menu has Publish course.

You cannot publish an empty course. At least one lesson, quiz or assignment has to exist. The error says so rather than publishing something with nothing in it.

Unpublishing is available at any time and puts the course back to draft. Learners already enrolled lose access to the content while it is unpublished, so this is a decision to take deliberately rather than as a quick way to hide an edit in progress.

A published course still needs a cohort. Publishing makes it real; an offering — a cohort running it — is what puts it in front of people. If you do not hold an admin or manager role, that is the point where you ask one.

The course tabs

Once a course exists, its page has these:

Tab	What is on it
Overview	The course details, editable
Curriculum	The structure, and where you author
Students	Who is enrolled, and their progress
Submissions	Work handed in on this course
Grading	Categories, weights and the grade scale
Announcements	Messages sent to this course
Reviews	Learner ratings and comments

Grading is the one people find late. It decides what the course marks on and in what proportion, and it is worth setting before the first assignment is graded rather than after. See Grading submissions.

Editing a course that is running

Editing a course changes it for every cohort currently running it. Usually that is the point — a fixed typo should be fixed everywhere.

Two changes deserve more care while a cohort is in flight:

Deleting a lesson or assignment removes it from the curriculum. Work already submitted against it does not vanish, but the item learners submitted to does.

Changing the grading scheme re-weights marks that have already been given. Do it at the start of a run, not in week ten.