Build your first course

This walks the whole path — empty course to a package you can upload to an LMS. Budget twenty minutes.

1. 1
   Open Compose and start a course

   Launch Compose. After signing in you land on the welcome screen. Choose:

   • New course for a blank course, or
   • From a template to start from a saved brand — colours, typefaces and any pinned blocks.

   If you would rather look at a finished example first, the welcome screen offers a sample course when you have no recent files.

2. 2
   Name the course

   Use Course ▸ Rename course…, or click the course title in the title bar. The name becomes the heading learners see, the identifier inside the SCORM manifest, and the default export filename.

3. 3
   Add lessons

   A course is a list of lessons, and a lesson is a vertical stack of blocks. Learners move through one lesson per page.

   Open the Outline tab in the left panel (Ctrl 1) to add, rename, reorder and delete lessons. Aim for one idea per lesson — the sidebar and the progress bar are both driven by the lesson list, so lessons are what learners perceive as progress.

4. 4
   Fill a lesson with blocks

   Open the Blocks tab (Ctrl 2) and click a block to add it to the current lesson, or use the Insert menu. There are 18 block types across three groups:

   • Content — Text, Rich text, Image, Video, Audio, Freeform, 3D model
   • Interactive — Multiple choice, Fill in the blank, Drag & drop, Matching, Hotspots, Flashcards, Branching, Interactive video, Timeline, Accordion
   • Developer — Custom code

   Select a block and its settings appear in the Inspector on the right. Start simple: a Text block for the explanation, an Image for the screenshot, a Multiple choice to check understanding.

   The full block reference →

5. 5
   Make one activity required

   Select your quiz and turn on Required in the Inspector. Learners cannot move to the next lesson until they have completed it, and required activities are also what SCORM completion is reported against.

   Add feedback for right and wrong answers while you are there — it is what turns a quiz from a test into teaching.

6. 6
   Style the course

   Open the Design tab (Ctrl 3). Pick one of the six presets — Daybreak, Nocturne, Slate, Forest, Ember, Paper — or set the accent, page, surface and text colours yourself.

   You can also add a logo for the learner’s top bar, choose heading, body and code typefaces from the bundled library, set corner rounding, and pick a content width.

   Everything in the Design tab →

7. 7
   Save

   Ctrl S. Compose writes a .course file — a container holding your course and every image, video and audio file you added, so the course travels as one file.

   Autosave is on by default and runs a few seconds after you stop typing, but only once the course has been saved somewhere at least once.

8. 8
   Preview as a learner

   Click Preview in the title bar (Ctrl P). This is not an approximation — it is the real exported course running inside the editor, so what you see is what your learners get.

   Use the device toggle to check tablet and mobile widths. Click Back to editor to return.

9. 9
   Clear the warnings

   The status strip along the bottom lists problems Compose found: a text block with no text, an image with no alt text, a quiz with no correct answer marked. None of them block an export, but each is something a learner would notice.

10. 10
    Export

    Course ▸ Export… (Ctrl E) and pick a format:

    Format	Use it when
    SCORM 2004	Your LMS supports it. The default, and the best-tracked option.
    SCORM 1.2	Your LMS is older, or rejects 2004 packages.
    HTML5	There is no LMS. Runs from any web server, or straight from a folder.

    Choose where to save it and Compose writes a .zip — that file is what you upload to your LMS.

    SCORM in detail, and what gets tracked →

What to do next