Creating a course

A new course starts empty and not visible to anybody. That is deliberate: you build it, look at it, and then let people in.

Making one

1. From the course list, choose New course.
2. Give it a name. You can change this later — the address follows the name only when it is first set, so renaming later does not break links.
3. Create it. You land on the course’s own page, with nothing in it yet.

The order worth building in

Settings last, content first. The temptation is to open the settings and fill in price, dates and enrolment before writing anything, and it tends to waste the effort — what a course costs and when it runs are much easier to decide once you can see how big it is.

1. Modules, as a skeleton. Six empty modules is a syllabus.
2. Lessons inside them.
3. Content in the lessons, and questions where you want them.
4. Settings — who may enrol, the price, the dates, whether it releases in stages.
5. Make it active, which is the moment anybody else can reach it.

Until it is active

An inactive course is visible to you, to anybody you add as staff, and to your site’s administrators. It is not in the course list for anybody else and cannot be reached by address.

That makes it safe to work on a course in public view of nobody for as long as you like.

Three states, not two

The Status pane of the course settings offers:

• Active — in the course list, open to whoever your enrolment setting allows.
• Hidden — not in the list, but reachable by anybody who has the address. This is how you share a course with a few people without advertising it.
• Inactive — not in the list and not reachable. Staff only.

Switching a course off while it is in a bundle leaves the bundle claiming to contain something nobody can take. Grapevine warns you at the moment you do it, because by then somebody may hold an invitation covering that course.