Creating Your First Course

This article walks you through the basics of getting a course created and published.

Note: The Company Admin and any Additional Instructors are able to create and publish courses. The Company Admin is able to edit all courses on their site, while additional Instructors can only edit courses they have created.

What is a 'Course'?

'Courses' are how you will deliver your knowledge and teaching materials to your learners on your ClickLMS site. They can be as simple as a 5-minute video or a 12 week program mixing static resources and live lessons. However big or small your teaching offering is, creating courses with ClickLMS is super easy. At their core a course needs just three elements:

A course title
Some learning content; these can be evergreen video and text resources, a one-time live lesson or an externally hosted event
Outline course objectives that populate a course completion certificate

Once these three core elements are in place you will be ready to publish your course.

We will cover the basics in this article, but beyond these there are lots of powerful features that help you and your students get the most out of your learning materials:

Add course catalogue imagery to help showcase your course offering
Add an intro video to help 'sell' the benefits of your course offering
Add supplementary reading materials and resources to your courses
Schedule your course publishing and removal from sale dates
Drip release course content to your learners
Set differential pricing for different membership products
Hide courses from certain membership products

See the 'Related Articles' section at the end of this article for more information on these features and more.

Creating your first course

1. Navigate to the 'Content' page and click the 'Create New' button

2. Enter a 'Course Title' and click ' Save'.

Your first course has now been created! If you return to the 'All Courses' page you would see it in the 'Latest Items' carousel' as well as in your list of courses.

The 'About Course' page is where you can add additional information to promote your course to your Learners.

This information will be visible to Learners before they enrol to your course. As you can see in the image below, you are able to customise the following elements:

'Course Image': Add an optional course image that will appear in your course catalogue, square images (1:1 aspect ratio) are recommended here
'Categories' and 'Tags': You may want to add 'Categories' and 'Tags' to help Learners search for your course - this will come in handy once you have a large catalogue of learning content
'Intro Video': You can add an introductory video to provide an overview of the course for prospective learners - they will be able to view this before enrolling to the course
'Course Summary': You can use this section to provide an introduction to what will be covered on the course or perhaps use it to add a 'speaker profile'

3. Add Learning Content to your Course

Learning content on ClickLMS is delivered through 'Modules' - think of a module like a lesson or a chapter that contain one or more learning resources. They can also contain an an assignment, a questionnaire and/or additional resources to help aid your learners with further learning.

Note: As a minimum you require one module in order to publish the course. And within the module you need at least one learning resource OR an assignment OR a questionnaire.

Modules

Step 1: First enter your 'Module Title' and click 'Save'. This will load an expanded view to enable you to add your learning content.

Step 2: Upload your learning content - make sure you click 'Save' after making changes.

Learning Resources: Upload videos, images, PDFs, URLs to external web pages, or embed links from YouTube videos. You can even schedule live lessons if this feature is enabled on your site.
Add Webinar: If this feature is enabled you can schedule a live lesson for Learners to attend.
Add Face to Face: You can schedule an externally hosted event (e.g. a residential day or zoom meeting).
Assignment: Set an assignment for your Learners to complete before being able to complete the course. This could be an offline project or question that you could set your Learners.
Questionnaire: Test your Learners knowledge with multiple choice questions.
Additional Resources: Upload additional reading materials for your Learners.

For details on the type of learning content you can upload check out our article What content can be uploaded into courses

4. 'Payments' - Decide how much to charge for your course

By default your course will be ' Free' for all registered learners. When a course is 'Free', your learners will need to self-enrol to the course from the Catalogue to access the learning content.

You can change the default access settings on the 'Payments' page with the following options:

'Auto-Enrol Learners' - This will automatically enrol your existing learners to the course when you publish it and all new learners who register will get automatically enrolled.
'Paid' - If you have connected your Stripe account to your site you can charge a one-off fee for the course. Take a look at our article on How to connect your Stripe account
If you have membership products enabled you can even choose to tailor the access rule or price for different membership products.

5. 'Certificate' - Customise your Course Certificate

All learners will receive a certificate upon completion of the course.

On the 'Certificate' page you'll need to add and save the following information which will be displayed on your course certificate:

Learning Content (mandatory field) - a short overview of the topics covered on the course
Aims and Objectives (mandatory field) - a short list of expected benefits or goals that learners might expect to achieve on completion of the course
Development Outcomes - this is only required on sites aligned to the GDC or NMC

Once you've added your learning content, set your course payment terms and configured your certificate you are all set to publish the course!

You can preview what your learners will see by clicking the 'Preview' button at the top right of the page.

If you are happy with how the course looks, click 'Publish'.

By default the course will be published immediately and will remain in your catalogue indefinitely (until you remove it from sale).
Learners will be able to work through the modules in any order (if you have more than one module)

If you want to change any of these rules you can do so on the 'Settings' page before publishing.