Lessons and blocks

A lesson is built out of blocks. You add a block, fill it in, and drag it into place. There is no page layout to fight with: blocks stack in the order you put them, and the result is readable on a phone as well as a desktop.

Choose Add block to open the library. It is searchable, which is faster than scrolling once you know what things are called.

#The kinds of block

Basic blocks are the backbone of most lessons: headings, rich text, images, video, files to download, a line or timeline, and separators.

Rich blocks add structure and emphasis: a column layout for putting two things side by side, tables, info callouts, buttons that link somewhere, and code blocks.

Interactive blocks are the ones the learner operates: accordions, tabs, flashcards and checklists. Accordions and tabs are useful for reference material that would otherwise make a lesson twice as long.

Input blocks ask the learner something without scoring it: a dropdown, a toggle, a selector. They are how you make a lesson interactive rather than a wall of text, and they feed the conditional content described below.

Gamify blocks are two small games, guess the word and hangman. Used sparingly they break up a long course; used everywhere they become tiring.

Test blocks are the scored ones: multiple choice, true or false, text and numeric answers, fill in the blanks, matching pairs, ordering, sorting into buckets, and hotspots on an image. They only appear in a lesson whose type is Test, and they are covered on their own page.

#Media in a lesson

Images, video and files come from your organization's document library, or you upload them while building the lesson. Either way they end up in Documents and can be reused in another course.

Every image asks for alt text, a short description of what the image shows. This is not bureaucracy: it is what a learner using a screen reader gets instead of the picture, and a lesson that relies on an undescribed diagram is unusable for them. If an image is purely decorative, mark it as such and it will be skipped.

Video can be uploaded or pulled in from a URL such as YouTube or Vimeo. A linked video costs you no storage.

#Personalising the text

Text blocks can include placeholders that fill themselves in when the lesson is shown: the learner's first name, the course name, your organization's name, today's date. It is a small touch that makes a course feel written for the person taking it rather than posted at them.

#Showing a block only sometimes

Every block has a Visibility setting. Leave it on Always visible and it behaves normally. Set it to Conditional and the block appears only when an earlier input block was answered in a particular way.

That is how you build a lesson that adapts: ask whether someone works in the warehouse or the office, and show them the part that applies. The learner sees one coherent lesson instead of a page of "if this applies to you, skip to section four".

#Keeping lessons workable

A few things that hold up over time.

• One idea per lesson. Short lessons give people a natural place to stop, and the lesson breakdown in analytics tells you more when lessons are small.
• Lead with the point. People skim training material. A heading and a first sentence that say what this is about are worth more than a warm-up paragraph.
• Use the structure blocks. Headings make a lesson navigable for everyone, and they are what a screen reader user relies on to move around.