Creating a course

A course in Zunderwork is a series of lessons that a learner works through in order. You build it once, decide who it is for, and it keeps reaching new people as they join.

#Starting a course

Open Courses and choose Create course. All you give it at the start is a name; everything else can be filled in later.

A new course is a Draft. Drafts are invisible to learners no matter what else you set, so there is no risk in leaving one half-finished for a week.

#The course itself

Open the course and you get its overview: a cover image, the name, and a description. The description is what a learner reads before deciding to start, so it is worth writing properly. Say what the course covers and roughly how long it takes.

Under the course settings you will find four sections.

• General: the name, description and cover image.
• Assignment: who the course is for, which is covered on its own page.
• Conditions: rules someone must meet before they can start, also on its own page.
• Notifications: the emails this course sends.

#Adding lessons

A course is built from lessons, and you add them one at a time with Add new lesson. Each lesson is either a normal Lesson or a Test. A test is scored and can block progress until it is passed; a lesson is read and completed.

Lessons run in the order they appear in the sidebar, and you can drag them into a different order at any time. Reordering is safe while people are working through a course: progress is tracked per lesson, not by position, so nobody is thrown back or skipped ahead.

Give lessons names that mean something on their own. Learners see the list before they start, and "Working at height, part 2" tells them more than "Lesson 4".

#Previewing before you publish

Preview course runs the course exactly as a learner would see it, without recording anything. Your progress is not tracked, nothing counts towards analytics, and you can throw the preview away when you are done.

Preview after every substantial change. It is the only way to catch a video that does not play or a test with an impossible question.

#Publishing

Publish makes the course real. You can publish immediately, or schedule it for a date and time, which is useful when training has to start on the first of the month.

If the course has no audience yet, publishing asks who it is for first. A published course with no tags reaches nobody.

#Changing a published course

You can keep editing after publishing. Changes appear straight away, including for people who are halfway through, which is usually what you want for a correction or a better explanation.

Take more care when you remove or reorder lessons in a course people are actively taking, and when you change a test that some have already passed. Neither is forbidden, but both change the course under someone's feet.

#Archiving

Archive takes a course out of circulation. It disappears from the lists of everyone it was assigned to, and it stops appearing in your analytics.

Nothing is deleted. All lessons and content are preserved, completions stay on record, and you can bring the course back at any time.