Courses and lessons
Create a course, structure it into lessons, add a landing page and downloadable resources, and understand how learners move through it.
Starting a course
The welcome screen offers three routes:
| Choice | What you get |
|---|---|
| New course | An empty course called Untitled course with one lesson. |
| From a template | A course that already carries a saved design, plus any blocks pinned to the top of its first lesson. |
| Open | An existing .course file. |
With no recent courses, the welcome screen also offers a fully authored sample course — the fastest way to see what finished blocks look like.
Lessons
A lesson is one page for the learner. The Outline tab (Ctrl 1) is where you manage them:
add, rename, reorder and delete.
How learners move through them
Learners see one lesson at a time, with a fixed bar at the bottom of the window: Back, a progress indicator for the current page, and Next.
- Next is gated on required activities only. If a lesson contains a block marked Required that the learner has not completed, Next stays locked until they do.
- Scrolling never unlocks anything. The page progress bar blends how far they have scrolled with how many activities they have finished, but it is a display signal — it has no effect on the gate.
- The sidebar lists every lesson, plus overall course progress.
How progress is calculated
Overall progress is the average across lessons, each weighted equally:
- A lesson that has not been visited counts as 0.
- A visited lesson with no interactive activities counts as complete.
- A visited lesson with activities counts as the fraction of them completed.
So a ten-lesson course with no quizzes shows 50% on lesson five. With quizzes, reaching page one of two and finishing half its quizzes shows 25%.
The course overview page
Course ▸ Welcome page… opens a small editor for the course landing page — the first thing learners see, before lesson one. It holds two things:
- Intro text blocks — a title and body each. Use them for what the course covers, how long it takes, what learners need beforehand.
- Downloadable resources — files a learner can download from the overview: a starter script, a
sample project, a checklist. Each resource has a label and a file, and the file travels inside
the
.courseand the export.
Ordering and grouping blocks
Within a lesson:
Alt↑/Alt↓move the selected blockCtrlDduplicates itDeldeletes it (Compose can ask for confirmation first — Settings ▸ Editing)
Select several blocks and use Edit ▸ Group blocks to make them render as one seamless bordered field for the learner. Edit ▸ Ungroup undoes it. Whether the group draws a visible border is a course-wide setting in the Design tab.
How big should a lesson be?
The sidebar and the progress bar are both driven by the lesson list, so lessons are what learners perceive as progress. Long lessons feel like no progress at all; very short ones feel like clicking Next repeatedly. One idea per lesson, with the activity that checks it at the bottom, is a reliable shape.