Courses
Create, manage, and publish courses for your learners.
Courses are the core building blocks of your TechClass platform. Unlike Playbooks (which act as reference guides), Courses are designed for active learning—complete with progress tracking, video lessons, assignments, and quizzes.
To manage your organization's course catalog, navigate to Learning > Courses in the Admin Portal sidebar.
1. The Courses Dashboard
The main dashboard is divided into two primary tabs:
- Organization Courses: This tab houses all the custom, proprietary training you and your team have built specifically for your company.
- Course Library: This tab acts as a premium content marketplace. Here, you can browse and enable expert-built, ready-to-use courses from the global TechClass Course Library.
2. Creating a New Course
To build a new training module, click the blue + New Course button in the top right corner.
First, you must choose your Course Type:
- Express Course: A simple, top-to-bottom scrollable feed of videos, text, and tasks. Best for short, highly focused, single-topic content.
- Structured Course: A comprehensive builder that allows you to nest content into Chapters and Sections. Best for deep, multi-module training.
Next, fill in the foundational metadata:
- Course Name: The title visible to learners.
- Category: Group the course under a specific topic (e.g., "Cybersecurity" or "General") to help learners find it in the Explore catalog.
- Language: Specify the primary language of the instruction.
- Description: A brief overview of the course objectives.
Click Create Course to generate the shell.
3. Course Overview
Clicking into any course opens its dedicated management dashboard. The Overview tab gives you an instant pulse on the course's performance.
- Top Metric Cards: Quickly view Active Enrollments, Completed Enrollments, the number of Learning Paths this course is attached to, and the number of Assigned Instructors.
- Charts: A donut chart showing the current enrollment status distribution, alongside a line graph mapping new enrollments over the past 12 months.
4. Building the Curriculum (Content Tab)
The Content tab is where you outline your course syllabus. If you chose a "Structured Course", you will organize your curriculum by adding Chapters and breaking them down into digestible Sections.
You can easily reorder content by dragging and dropping the grip icons on the left side of each row.
Writing the Lesson (Section Editor)
Clicking into a specific Section takes you to the lesson editor. This is where the actual teaching happens.
- Tutorial Video: Upload an MP4 directly or embed a video from YouTube/Vimeo to act as the primary lesson anchor.
- Section Content: Click Edit Content to open the rich-text editor to add context, reading materials, and formatting.
- Supplementary Materials: Attach downloadable resources like PDF worksheets or slide decks.
- Tasks: Add interactive elements like assignments, knowledge checks, or graded quizzes to test learner comprehension.
- Project: Place a step of the course's Project here, so learners meet it at the right moment in the syllabus.
The Course Project
A Project is a single, cumulative assignment that runs across the whole course, rather than one exercise inside a section. You define it once for a Structured course and break it into ordered milestones — for example Research brief, First draft, Final submission — each with its own instructions.
Learners work each milestone in their own rich-text workspace, attaching images and files as they go, and hand it in when they are ready. Instructors review that learner's portfolio on their enrollment page, one milestone at a time, and can either approve a milestone or request a revision with a note explaining what to change — which notifies the learner. When the work is done you can record one final grade and final feedback for the Project as a whole.
Building a Project
The Project lives in its own pill inside the course's Content tab, beside Outline, Tasks and Resources. It is always there on a Structured course, whether or not you have created a Project yet, because it is the only place a Project is created.
Once a Project exists, the pill is laid out in three parts, top to bottom:
- A header band with the Project's title and a Draft or Published chip, how many milestones and how many pieces of learner work it holds, which ordering rule it enforces and when it last changed. The two settings you reach for most — the ordering rule and the Published switch — sit here as single controls; everything else is behind the ⋯ button, which opens Project settings.
- The project brief, shown as you wrote it but shortened to a few lines with a Show more link, and an Edit brief button beside it.
- The facilitation guide, directly under the brief and laid out the same way — your own notes on running and marking the Project, with an Add facilitation guide or Edit facilitation guide button beside it. It is optional, and most Projects will not have one.
- The milestone list, which is the main working area: one row per milestone, with its number, title, where it is placed, how many submissions it has, the opening words of its instructions so you can tell the rows apart at a glance, and a small Guide tag on any milestone that carries a facilitation guide of its own.
Everything you write — the brief, the facilitation guide, the project's details, a new or existing milestone — opens in one wide side panel on the right of the screen (the left, in right-to-left languages). The list stays visible behind it, the panel scrolls, and Save stays pinned at the bottom no matter how long the document gets.
- Create it. Open Content > Project and click New Project — the one button that creates a Project, on every state of the pill. Give it a title, an optional brief, and pick how strictly milestones are ordered. A new Project starts as a Draft — learners cannot see it yet. (The facilitation guide is not part of this form; you add it afterwards, from its own card.)
- Add milestones. Click Add milestone, name it, write the instructions learners will read, and optionally choose the section it should appear in. Each new milestone lands at the bottom of the list.
- Write the brief and the instructions. Both use the same editor your learners write their answers in — and so does the facilitation guide, if you write one: headings, bullet and numbered lists, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and inline code, links, images and file attachments — images and files you add are uploaded to the course. Beside the editor a JSON menu offers Export JSON (take the document away as a file) and Import JSON (paste a document, or choose a
.jsonfile, and replace what is in the editor). An import that the editor cannot accept is refused with the reason, and nothing you had is touched — so a bad paste can never destroy a brief. Briefs written before this editor arrived still open: their text is kept and their bold and italic are dropped, once, the first time you open them — and only if you actually open them, so renaming a Project never rewrites its brief behind your back. - Reorder them. Drag a row by its grip, or use the up and down buttons on the row — both do exactly the same thing, so a mouse is never required. The order you see is the order learners work through.
- Publish it. Flip the Published switch in the header band when the Project is ready. The switch stays off until there is at least one milestone, and the note beside it says so. Publishing is what makes the Project tab appear for learners. Un-publishing hides it again and deletes nothing — it asks you to confirm, and tells you how many learners already have work on it.
- Edit or remove. The pencil and bin icons on each row edit or delete that milestone. The ⋯ button opens Project settings, where you rename the Project and where Delete project lives; Edit brief opens the brief on its own. Deleting from inside a panel closes it first and then asks you to confirm — both delete dialogs tell you how many pieces of learner work will go with it, and ask you to type the name to confirm.
The Facilitation Guide
A facilitation guide is a place to write down how the work is meant to be run and marked — the warm-up you open the session with, the rule of thumb you use when grading, the thing last year's cohort always got stuck on. It is for you and your colleagues, not for the class.
Only instructors and admins can see a facilitation guide. Learners never see it — not in the Project tab, not in a placed milestone's card, not anywhere else in the product. Every screen that shows a guide says so on the screen itself, so nobody has to remember.
There are two kinds, and you can use either, both or neither:
- The Project's guide sits under the brief in the Project pill. Use it for the things that are true of the whole Project — how you run it, how you weigh it, what "good" looks like overall.
- A milestone's guide is written inside that milestone, under its instructions, and folds away when you are not using it. Use it for the step in front of you: what to demonstrate, what to watch for, what a weak submission usually looks like.
Both are written in the same editor as the brief and the instructions, with the same formatting, the same images and files, and the same JSON import and export. A guide is optional and starts empty; writing nothing leaves the Project exactly as it was, and clearing one removes it. On a milestone, the guide saves together with the instructions — one Save for the whole milestone.
Where they turn up: instructors reviewing a learner's work see them on the enrollment page (below), which is the point — the notes reach the person marking the work, at the moment they are marking it.
Project Ordering Rules
When you create or edit a Project you choose one rule for the whole thing:
- No order required — learners can work on any milestone at any time.
- Submit the previous one first — a milestone opens once the one before it has been handed in. A milestone that was sent back for revision does not count as handed in.
- Get the previous one approved first — the strictest option: a milestone opens once the one before it has been approved.
Changing the rule affects what learners do next; it never reaches back into work already started. If a milestone is reopened after later work has begun, that later draft stays editable — only handing it in is held until the earlier one is settled again, and the learner is told why in plain words.
Placing a Milestone in a Section
A milestone can point at one section of the course. Placing it adds a small card in that section — the milestone's title, its current state, and a link that opens the Project — so learners meet it at the right moment in the syllabus. Placement is set on the milestone itself, in the Project pill; the section editor shows a read-only Project milestone list so you can see what lands there while you write the lesson.
A placement is only a link. Removing the section or the chapter un-places the milestone and destroys nothing, and the same milestone can be moved to another section, or back to Not placed, at any time. Several milestones may share one section.
What Learners See in a Project
Learners get a Project tab on the course, next to Tasks, laid out in three parts.
At the top, a header band carries the Project's title, one sentence saying how strictly the milestones are ordered, and a progress bar labelled Project milestones submitted, with the count beside it. That bar counts what the learner has handed in, not what you have approved, so it moves when they finish a piece of work rather than when you get round to reviewing it; small chips beside it break the same figure down into approved, under review and returned. About this project opens the brief in a panel over the page, so it is always one click away without sitting on top of the work. Your final grade and feedback, once you record them, appear here too.
Down the side (or across the top on a phone) is the milestone list, one numbered step each, coloured by its state, with the date it reached that state — or, for a milestone that is not open yet, the reason and what has to happen first.
The rest of the tab is the milestone the learner is working on: its title, which one it is of how many, and how many times it has been handed in; then a single coloured notice saying where it stands — returned with your feedback, under review, approved, or locked — so they meet that before the editor rather than after it. The instructions sit under the notice, shortened to a few lines with Show full instructions. Then the editor: headings, bullet and numbered lists, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and inline code, links, images and file attachments.
Nothing saves by itself: they press Save draft, and Submit when they are ready, behind a short confirmation. Pressing Submit with unsaved writing saves it first, so the two buttons are a real choice rather than a trap. A submitted milestone is read-only until you review it, so the version you read cannot change underneath you — but until you review it, the Withdraw submission button inside the Under review notice takes it back so they can keep working. Withdrawing re-locks any later milestone that hand-in had opened, and the confirmation says so. Once you have approved a milestone or sent it back, it can no longer be withdrawn. A finished milestone is read by selecting it in the milestone list, which shows the whole thing.
What Instructors See in a Project
Open a learner's enrollment and choose the Project tab. It is laid out in three parts, like the learner's own.
At the top, a header band names the Project and the learner, says which ordering rule is in force and when they last handed something in, and carries a progress bar labelled Milestones submitted. That bar counts what the learner has handed in, not what you have approved, so it measures their progress rather than your review queue; small chips beside it break the same figure into approved, to review and returned. View brief opens the project brief in a panel over the page, and View facilitation guide opens the Project's guide beside it when there is one. The final grade and feedback for the Project as a whole live here too — as the grade itself with an Edit beside it once you have recorded one, and as Add final evaluation until then.
Down the side (or across the top on a narrow screen) is the milestone list: one numbered step each, coloured by its state, with the date it reached that state — Submitted 17 Sep · awaiting your review, Returned 16 Sep · the learner is revising — and a dot beside anything waiting on you. Every step opens whatever the ordering rule says: the rule holds the learner back, never you. The tab opens on the first milestone waiting for a verdict, so the reason you came is usually already on screen.
The rest of the tab is the milestone you are reviewing: its title, which one it is of how many, and when it arrived; the instructions, shortened to a couple of lines with Show full instructions; that milestone's facilitation guide under them, if one was written, behind its own Show the facilitation guide link; then the learner's submission, read-only and shown in the language they wrote it in. Under it sits the review. Write feedback and choose Keep as is, Request revision or Approve — only the choices that milestone actually allows are offered, and a milestone you have already sent back offers none until the learner hands it in again. Your previous feedback stays visible above the box, so you can read new work against what you asked for last time. Requesting a revision needs a reason, and sends the learner a notification that links straight to that milestone. Approving is reversible; re-opening an approved milestone asks you to confirm first. A milestone with nothing handed in shows what the learner is still waiting on instead of a review form. Everything you write in the review is visible to the learner as soon as you save it.
Before You Plan a Project
- The Project never blocks course completion. A learner can finish the course while a milestone is still awaiting review, so nobody is stuck waiting on a reviewer.
- Milestones are not tasks. They do not appear in the Tasks tab, do not count towards task progress, and never gate moving to the next section.
- There is one copy of each submission. Saving overwrites it; there is no version history, so a deleted milestone takes every learner's work on it with it.
- Projects are for Structured courses, and are not available on Express courses or on Course Library courses shared with other workspaces.
- The learner app does not show Projects. They are worked on the web.
5. Managing Enrollments
The Enrollments tab acts as a localized ledger for this specific course, allowing you to track exactly who is taking it and how far along they are.
You can use the sub-tabs (Active, Completed, Cancelled) to filter the list.
Need to manually enroll an employee? Click the + Add Learner button, search for the user by name or email, and click Enroll. The course will instantly appear on their dashboard.
6. Delegating to Instructors
Administrators do not need to manage every course manually. The Instructors tab allows you to assign Subject Matter Experts to teach, edit, and grade the course.
When you click + Add Instructor, you can get highly granular with their permissions:
- Content: Allows the instructor to edit modules, upload videos, and change text.
- Enrollments: Allows the instructor to manage student progress, grade assignments, and extend deadlines.
- Help Desk: Routes student questions from this course directly to the instructor's inbox.
7. Linked Paths & Learner Feedback
As your catalog grows, it helps to see how courses are interconnected and received by your audience.
- Learning Paths Tab: Displays a list of all multi-course curricula (Learning Paths) that currently include this specific course. This ensures you know the broader impact before making drastic content changes!
- Feedback Tab: Once learners complete a course, they are prompted to leave a star rating and a review. This tab aggregates those scores so you can measure course quality.
8. Settings & Publishing
Before a course goes live, navigate to the Settings tab to polish its presentation in the learner catalog.
- Course Details & Thumbnail: Update the name, category, and upload an engaging cover image.
- Brochure & Intro Video: Upload a PDF syllabus or a short "trailer" video to pitch the course to learners before they click enroll.
- Course Status: Courses default to Draft. Once your curriculum is built, change this to Published to make it available to learners. If a course becomes obsolete, change it to Archived to hide it without losing historical completion data.
- Danger Zone: If you need to permanently purge the course and all associated data, click Delete Course. This action cannot be undone.