Courses

Courses hold your content and can have any number of students enrolled, with coaches to guide their path.

Creating courses

To create a new course, head to the Courses menu from the school administration interface's navigation bar, and click the Add New Course button at the top of the page.

The form that pops up will ask you for a few details:

Course name: The name of the course, that will publicly displayed.

Course description: This short description will be displayed on the course's public page.

Course end date: If set, your course will go into a read-only mode after this date, and students will be shown a message that the course has ended. This effectively closes the course, preventing students from making further submissions, but does not remove student's access to the content, or to the work that they submitted as a part of the course.

About: This is a markdown field - you can use this to add descriptive text about your course. This will be displayed on the on the course's public page.

Progression Behavior: This setting controls how students are allowed to level up in your course. This setting only applies if your course contains milestone targets that require your students to submit work for review. There are three possible options, which are described in detail below.

Feature course in school homepage?: If enabled, the course will be displayed on the list of featured courses on your school's homepage, along with a link to the course's details page (which includes the content of the about field).

Enable public signup for this course?: If enabled, members of the public will be able to sign up for your course.

Do you want to process applicant information before enrolling them?: If enabled, applicants will be redirected to a URL of your choice for further processing, after verifying their email address. This URL can be customized to include information about the applicant.

You can use this processing feature to onboard students after approval!

Applicants will not be added as a students until you manually approve them from the Applicants page. This feature could be used for setting up a payments flow for the course.

Course Highlights: If set, a highlights section will be shown on the course's public page. You can use this session to highlight the core features of the course.

Allow public to view course curriculum?: If enabled, members of the public will be able to view the course curriculum without signing in. This will not let them interact with the course in any way.

Customizing the processing URL

You can add properties related to applicants to the processing URL that the they are redirected to after email verification. The properties that can be added are:

• The unique ID of the course - course_id
• The unique ID of the applicant - applicant_id
• The name of the applicant - name
• The email address of the applicant - email

When used in the processing URL, Dalasa LMS will replace these special keywords with their actual values when the applicant clicks the link in the verification email.

Here's an example URL that includes all the available properties:

https://paymentgateway.com/process?name=${name}&email=${email}&course_id=${course_id}&applicant_id=${applicant_id}

Editing courses

To edit a course's details, simply click on the course in the Courses menu. The form for editing a course is identical to the one that you used to create it.

To edit the contents of a course, you'll want to use the curriculum editor, which is documented separately.

Progression Behaviour

The way students progress in a course can be configured in three ways:

1. Limited (default): This setting allows students to submit work on milestone targets and then level-up immediately without waiting for a coach to review their submissions. You can configure this setting to allow students to level up once, twice, or up to three times while waiting for their submissions to be reviewed.

   This is the recommended setting, as it allows coaches a bit of time to go through submissions while also not blocking students from working on the content for the next level. When students hit the configured limit, they'll need to wait until they receive a passing grade in the earliest applicable level to proceed; this prevents students from levelling up indiscriminately.

2. Unlimited: This setting allows students to level-up all the way to the end of the course, without waiting for coaches to review their submissions.

3. Strict: This setting prevents students from levelling-up without getting their submissions reviewed. Students will need to wait for a coach to review their submission, and get a passing grade to be able to submit work on reviewed targets in the next level.

Course Images

You can customize how the course looks to the student by editing two images:

Thumbnail

This image will be displayed in the user's dashboard page, when listing the courses that the student has access to.

The image should have an aspect ratio of 2:1, with a suggested resolution of 768x384 (WxH).

Cover

This image will be displayed in all pages within a course. It's the large header image that appears at the top of every course page. It'll also be used as the header image in a few emails that are directly related to the course.

Because this image fits with the width of the page, it should be created following a few guidelines:

1. The aspect ratio of the image should be 4:1. The suggested resolution is 1920x480 (WxH).
2. Text within the cover image should be restricted to the center portion of the image. This is because the image width will be considerably smaller on mobile screens, and its height is restricted on larger screens.
3. We suggest using an image with a dark background for improved contrast with the site's header and the rest of the page's content.

Here's an example image that shows where you should place text in a cover image:

Course Actions

Archive Course

Archiving a course will hide the course from the platform. All the students will be marked as access ended and they will no longer be able to access the course.

Unarchive Course

Unarchiving a course will bring back the course to an ended state. You can move it to live state by clearing the Course end date.

When unarchiving a course, all students attached to the course will continue to be in the access ended state.

States for a course

A course will always be in one of the 3 states mentioned below. You can see the courses in each state changing the filter.

Active

A course that is not ended or archived.

Ended

Courses that have passed the course end date. Such courses will be hidden form all the navigation menus in school administration interface. The links to school administration pages for the course can only be accessed from the courses page.

Archived

In addition to being hidden, such courses cannot be accessed or modified.