Frontend Course Creation

Anybody who is an instructor or an admin in RetBranche Academy can create Courses, lessons, quizzes and assignments from the back-end. All tutors will have access to frontend Course Editor which will allow them to create and edit courses right from the frontend. What’s more, the tutor is able to save courses halfway through the creation and finalize them later as they can be saved as Draf

To access the frontend Course Editor, from the frontend Dashboard click on “ADD A NEW COURSE”.

Once you do that, a new window will appear from where you can create a new course. You can also edit an existing course using this editor. To do so, find your desired course from the My Course List and click “Edit”.

Note: Except for the contents in the Course Builder section (which includes, lessons, quizzes, assignments, attachments), all contents you put here in this Course Editor will be shown on the Course landing page.

Setting up fundamentals

The Course Info section helps the tutor set up the fundamental settings of a course. the turor needs to write down the course name on the Course Title field. The course description is a long content which requires rich text formatting, you can put that in the Description field. For a better experience, you need to define the category as well, which can be selected from “Choose a category”. Also, for better engagement and help your students understand the course difficulty, you can define the course level from Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, and All Levels.

Overview visuals

The featured image or the course thumbnail can be uploaded from the Course Thumbnail option. Please be advised, the supported file types are jpg, .jpeg, gif, or .png and no text on the image. Also, it is recommended to use 700×430 px sized image as the thumbnail.

Video section controls the course introduction video settings. You can host the video on multiple sources including YouTube, Vimeo or from an external URL. You can also upload mp4 videos on your site by choosing HTML5 from the list. Embedding video (or any other media source) is possible as well. We provide a Vimeo account to help the new tutors with their video hosting. Please contact team manager for further informations.

There are a couple more options related to course video settings. You can define the course runtime which will add clarity about the video duration to the students and the video poster is there to upload video image which is commonly known as the video thumbnail.

Course Builder (lessons/assignments/quizzes)

The Course Builder section is the core settings. It allows you to create topics inside which you can create either a lesson, an assignment or a quiz. If you consider course builder a textbook then topics are like the chapters. In order to create a lesson/assignment/quiz, you need to create a chapter first (in this case which is a topic).

Once a topic is created, you can create multiple lessons/quizzes/assignments. The process of creating them is similar to backend course creation system.

Assigning Instructors

For now only the admins have the privilege to assign more than one instructor to a course. To assign an instructor to your course click on “ADD MORE INSTRUCTOR”, from the course editor section.

Course Features

There is the Additional Data section which allows the user to write down the highlights of the course. This allows the tutors to let their students know what they can expect from the course. The fields are pretty self-explanatory. Note: Advise the tutors to use one-liners in all these fields. ( Very important)

Making Announcements

The announcements are like the notice boards. All students in the course will see the announcement when the turot makes one. The instructor can take advantage of the available variable {user_display_name} to make it more personalized, like the one shown in the screenshot. Doing so will enable each individual to see their own name on the announcement. Hit the “Add Announcement” button to publish it. Attachments & Prerequisites

Course Attachments: The tutor can upload multiple files (.txt, .pdf. .pp.. .docx, .jpg, .png) to any of your courses which you want to share with your students throughout the course from the Course Attachments section.

Course Prerequisites: If the course is designed for intermediate or advanced level learners, you’d want to make the students have the basics to adopt the course. The course prerequisite section confirms that the courses you define here will have to be completed before starting this particular course.

Course Editor Controls

Once the instructor is done adding all the lessons, quizzes, assignments, and putting the course details. They can either save it as a draft or submit for the admin review right away. The top bar presents the functionality to manually save the current state, preview the course creation progress, submit for review and exit the editor panel. The tutor can find the submit and save options at the bottom as well. Once the tutor created a course using the frontend Course Editor, they’ll be submitting the course for the admin to review. When the review is done, the admin will publish the course from the backend. Note: The frontend course editor automatically keeps saving the edits in every 30 seconds so you don’t need to worry about losing your saved data.