Develop: Prepare your Content and Create your Course

Modified on Fri, 28 Aug at 12:47 PM

Develop

Your course is built from the files you upload and the context you add into the four questions you use during course creation (more on that here), so the files you pick matter more than anything else you do. Here is how to choose them and get your course started.

Why your files decide everything

Develop reads the documents you upload and builds a course out of them. It does not go looking for outside information to fill in the gaps. If a concept is not in your files, it will not be in your course.

That is also true once learners are in the course. Develop keeps referring back to your material as it talks with them. So your files are not a rough starting point that gets rewritten. They are the thing people are actually being taught from, which is why it is worth a few minutes of thought before you upload.

Picking material that works

Your content does not need to have been built for training. Process guides, product manuals, policy documents, and case studies all work well, often better than material written to be training. Four things make the biggest difference:

Depth beats breadth

A more in-depth, well-written source document on your topic produces better results than four loosely related ones that only skim the surface of your topics.

Practical beats abstract

Real examples and step by step processes give Develop something concrete to build activities around. Conceptual material still works, but one real example goes a long way.

Scope it to the course

Uploading a long manual when your course covers one chapter will not break anything, but the closer the match, the more focused the result. You can also point Develop at the relevant part in the setup questions.

Video works better than you would expect

Develop takes in both the picture and the audio, so a narrated presentation is understood as a whole. If your best explanation lives in a recorded session, upload the recording. That is a real choice, not a fallback.

What Develop accepts

Documents: PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, HTML
Presentations: PPT, PPTX
Video: MP4, WEBM, AVI, MOV

Files can be up to 50 megabytes each. If something is too big, splitting out the sections that actually relate to your course usually beats compressing it, because it improves the course at the same time.

Worth knowing

Only upload content you own or have a license to use. And because anything in a file can end up in front of a learner, read or watch each one all the way through first. Recorded meetings are the usual culprit for names, faces, and screen shares you did not mean to share.

Create the course and upload your files

Once you have your material, this part takes about a minute. You can add all your files at once.

In the platform navigation bar, click Develop.
Click + Create Course.
Enter a course name and description.
Drag and drop your files into the upload area, or click Select File to browse for them.
Decide what to do with the Make Source File(s) Downloadable by Participants toggle. More on that below.
Click Next to move on to the course details questions.

Should learners be able to download your files?

The download toggle is on by default, which means learners can open your original files as a reference. That is usually a good thing. Turn it off if the material is proprietary, or if you would rather people learn it through the conversation than skim the source.

One thing this toggle does not do

Turning downloads off does not hide the content. Develop still teaches from the file either way, and can still quote or describe what is in it. The toggle only controls whether learners can grab the file itself.

What's next

Answering the Course Details Questions