Create and Set Up Your Course

This article goes over how to create a course within your Teachable school, and also covers how to add and modify basic course information. If you're looking for information on setting up mini courses, we have a blog post that provides more detail. 

Creating a course

After you create your school, you'll be prompted to create your first course. However, you don’t need to do this right away. You can always come back later to create your first course—or add additional courses—at any time.

To create a course on your school:

1. From your Teachable admin area, click the Courses tab in the admin sidebar. Alternatively, you can press the plus icon (+) next to Products, choose the course option, and skip to step 3.
   
2. Click the New Course button in the top right corner.
3. This will bring you to the new course area where you can input the Course Title and choose a course author using the Select Author drop-down menu. 
   
4. After entering the course's information, click the Create Course button. A pop-up modal will appear confirming the course has been created and added to your Courses tab. Click Continue.
   
5. This will bring you to the Curriculum tab where you can add your course content. You can also navigate away back to the Information tab.

Course outlining tools

If you are looking for a faster way to create your course’s curriculum outline, you can do so by checking the “Help me generate a course outline” box. This will open the AI outline generator tool.

To create an outline with the AI-powered curriculum generator:

1. Check the “Help me generate a course outline” box.
2. Add a description to the text block provided.
   Example: “An introductory course about baking that includes baking tools, recipes, and step-by-step guides.”
3. Click Generate.
4. Once the generated outline is complete, click the Continue with outline button. You can then make changes to the outline and add your lesson content.
   • If you do not like the outline generated, try a new prompt in the description block.
   • If you do not have a specific description in mind, click the Use blank outline button to go directly to the Curriculum tab in your course.

Publish and preview

Within the Information tab of your course, you can publish, unpublish, preview your course sales page and course curriculum page, duplicate, or delete the course at any time.

Publishing determines whether a product can be purchased and enrolled in by new students. Only published products can be purchased or enrolled in.

To publish your course, click the Publish Course button. A popup will appear asking if you would like to publish the course and any unpublished lectures within the Curriculum tab of the course.

• Click Yes, publish all to publish your course - including the sale, checkout, and thank you pages as well as all lecture pages in your Curriculum.
• Click No, just publish course to publish just the course - including the sales, checkout, and thank you pages, while keeping any unpublished lectures unpublished in your Curriculum.
• Click Cancel if you do not wish to publish the course at this time.

Beside the Publish Course button is the More dropdown button for additional actions you can take. These include:

• Preview Sales Page - This allows you to view the course’s sales page as a student would see it when they first land on the page.
• Preview Curriculum - This allows you to view the course’s curriculum as a student would see it after they purchase your course.
• Duplicate Course - duplicate the course within your school to create a copy. Duplication will include all lecture content and media, pages, compliance settings, and author assignments. You can edit any and all of these after duplication.
• Delete Course - delete the course from your school. Please note that this action is permanent. 

Product visibility

Each course has a product visibility toggle.

Visible products are listed directly in your product directory—this way, any user who navigates to your school can choose to purchase and enroll in the product. Hidden products are not available in your product directory—students can still enroll or purchase these products, but only if you provide them with a direct URL to the sales or checkout page.

Learn more about product visibility.  

Branding

In the Branding area, you can set a custom thumbnail logo (available for both 2.0 and 1.0 schools) and/or promo video (available for 1.0 schools only). Similarly, you can set different images to use on the iOS app (as different dimensions are recommended):

• Course Image- A small image that is used to represent your course across your school; it appears to your students in the sidebar of the course curriculum and in the course directory of your school. We recommend using a 2560x1440 JPG or PNG file type.
• Promo Video (1.0 schools only) - A short promotional video that displays in the Course Hero Header block on your course's sales page. We recommend using either 1920x1080 or 3840x2160 (MP4, M4V or AVI) video, no larger than 2 GB. Generally, we also recommend that you compress your videos as much as possible.

To set an image to use on the iOS app for the thumbnail and background images of your course, click on the iOS tab. We recommend that thumbnail images for the iOS app be a 300x300 JPG or PNG file, while background images should ideally be a 1080x607px JPG or PNG file.

To update any images or videos that you’ve uploaded in the Branding section, click the Change button. To remove, click the Reset link.

Details

In the Details section of your course's page, you can modify information that will be displayed across your school. Here, you can modify the following information:

• Course Title - the title of your course as it appears throughout your Teachable school.
• Course Subtitle - You can use this to add additional information about the course content. The subtitle will appear beneath the course name in your course directory.
• Categories - Categories make it easier for students to find the specific type of course they want when they’re looking through your school's All Products page.

Author

In the Author area, you can assign an author in your school as the author of your course. The author’s name will display on your All Products and My Products pages, and within the Featured Products block. Additionally, the author’s name, image, and bio will appear in the My Instructor tab of the course. Read more about creating and managing authors in your school.

In the drop down menu, you will see the option to assign an author or a bio without an author:

• Authors - The bio is already connected to a specific user/author account in your school. This means the connected user can receive a revenue share for sales and can access an author dashboard. Owner bios will also be included in this list, and can be chosen if you choose not to have a separate author account for your product. Owners can not receive author revenue shares.
• Bios without Authors - The bio is not connected to any specific user/author account in your school. This means there is no separate user account to receive a revenue share or manage the course.

Make sure to Save your changes.

Search engine optimization (SEO) (Page Editor 1.0) 

In the SEO area, you can make your course’s sales page more search-engine-friendly by modifying pertinent course details. Please note that this section will only appear if you're using the legacy page editor. If you are using the new page editor, your page's SEO settings will appear inside the page editor.

• Friendly URL - One of the most basic search engine optimization techniques is in using an SEO-friendly URL. A friendly URL is a web address that is easy to read and includes words that describe the content of the webpage.
• Page Title - the title that will appear in search engine results.
• Meta Description - This brief phrase summarizes a webpage's content—think of it as a short sales pitch for your Teachable school. Ideally, a meta description should be no longer than 160 characters.

Course compliance

For schools on the Professional plan and up, the option to set compliance, or requirements that a student must meet in each lecture before moving to the next, can be found within the Information tab of each course. Read more about setting up and managing course compliance.

Default pages

In the Sales Page tab, you can specify the page students will land on after purchasing your course in the Post Purchase Page drop-down menu. For example, you may want your students to be taken immediately to a course’s curriculum, instead of the thank you page, to create more seamless access to the course.

You can choose to redirect your students after the checkout page to one of these three options:

• Thank You Page - After purchasing your course, students will be directed to the thank you page of your course.
• Enrolled Course Curriculum - After purchasing your course, students will be directed to your course curriculum page.
• Custom URL - After purchasing your course, students will be directed to the URL specified in the Custom Post Purchase Redirect URL field.

Layout settings

Limit lecture content width

For schools created before June 2, 2022, check the Limit lecture content width checkbox in order to set the width of content in course lecture pages to 760px. (Schools created on or after June 2, 2022 automatically have lecture content width set to 760px and therefore do not have this setting.)

Setting the content width of your lectures to 760px ensures that your lecture content (such as course videos, text, and other files) doesn’t stretch to the full size of your students’ browser windows—ensuring that your content remains readable on all window sizes.

Hide Progress Bar

In the student view of your course, users can see their course progress bar as they complete each lecture within that course. This can be removed from the student view at any time on an individual course level.

To hide the progress bar from students, check the Hide Progress Bar checkbox. Click Save in the top right corner when you are done.

 

Delete a course

You can delete a course at any time by scrolling to the Publish & Preview section at the top of the Course > Information page:

1. Click the More button next to the publish course button.
2. Choose Delete Course from the dropdown menu. A popup screen will appear asking to confirm the action.
3. Click Delete in the popup.

Next steps

Once your basic course details are set up, you are ready to start building your course content, pages, and pricing options. The following Knowledge Base articles cover these topics in more details:

• Add Lecture Content
• Create/Edit Your Pages
• Product Pricing Plans
• Publish Your Course