How to set-up your courses

Courses are a great way for users to understand how best to engage with the community, as well as to learn new skills from other experts within your community. Here's how to set them up.

This article contains the following sections:

• Create Courses
• Manage Courses
• Edit Courses

To start, head to the cog in the top right-hand corner of the page and click 'Settings'. Here you will find the Courses tab under the Structure header.

Create Courses

Select the green 'New Course' button to begin building your course. You will be asked to provide a course title and short description.

Once you have created your course, you will need to add modules to the course to give it its structure.

There is no upward limit to the number of content items that you can add to each module. This can include post, video and document content. The authors of the content that you select will be displayed as the course 'instructors' on the course view page.

Next, you will be asked to provide some outcomes of the course; this is to give the user a clear understanding of what they will be able to do after completing the course. Again, there is no upward limit to the number of outcomes that you can add to the course.

You can then choose to use a course certificate to award to users who have successfully completed your course. Set the completion threshold to determine how much of the course a user will need to complete in order to receive the certificate.

If you wish to add a certificate footer image, head back to the courses index page (make sure to hit save before you do!) and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Here you will be able to upload a footer image in PNG or JPG format. There are no specific dimensions required for the footer image as it will resize automatically to fit the area, however anything above 1280 x 960 pixels tends to work best.

Once you have added the desired image, head back to the course edit page where you will be able to select it from the dropdown menu provided.

You can also choose to add the course to one or more of the channels on your site. The course will be displayed under the Activity tab, as well as the Courses tab, within each channel that you have selected.

Finally, you will need to configure the access control settings for your course. The different options are as follows:

• Default - Any user in the default group on your site can access the course.
• Registered users - Any user that has registered an account on your site can access the course.
• Group access - Select exactly which user and/or room groups you want to give access to the course.

Once you have finished creating your course, remember to save your changes.

Manage Courses

To access the course management page, head to the course index page and click on the name of the course in question.

From here, you will be able to see an overview of all of the modules within the course. Before publishing, you can also click the 'View' button in the top right-hand corner of the page to see a preview of the course. Once you are happy with the course, you can publish it to make it publicly accessible on your site.

Users with the correct access credentials will be able to access the course from the 'Courses' tab in the left-hand menu.

Edit Courses

To edit the details of the course, head to the course index page and click on the name of the course in question. Then, click the 'Edit Course' button in the top right-hand corner of the page.

You may wish to adjust the order of the modules or outcomes of your course; to do this, simply drag and drop the module/outcome using the sliders provided, and hit save to preserve your changes.

If you wish to increase the completion threshold of your course, note that users who had already reached the original threshold and received their certificate will not lose access to their certificate. The new threshold will only apply to users who had not yet reached the original threshold required to earn a certificate.

To delete a course, head to the courses index page and click the three dots to the right of the course in question.

Any questions? Let us know at support@zapnito.com or drop a comment below this article.