Writing a course: modules, lessons and labs

The day-to-day of building a course in your Training Center — what each screen does, and what each setting changes for your learners.

Not registered as a training provider yet? Start with Teach on Academy.

How a course is put together

Three levels, and they nest:

A course is the whole thing a learner buys or enrols in.
A module is a chapter. It holds lessons, and it can end with a quiz.
A lesson is one sitting: something to read, usually something to watch or do beside it.

Open Training Center → Courses, pick a course, and you're looking at its modules. Open a module and you're looking at its lessons. You can reorder both, and the order is the order learners meet them in.

Course settings

Title, Subtitle, Summary — what the catalog shows. The summary is the pitch; write it for someone deciding whether to spend their evening on you.
Cover image — 16:9 works best. Anything you upload is cropped and optimised automatically. Courses with covers stand out in the catalog.
Level and Tags — how learners filter the catalog to find you.
Price (₦) — leave it empty for a free course. The price includes VAT and the box shows what reaches you. See Getting paid for your courses.
How modules open — either everything is open once a learner enrols, or the course is paced by the workspace, where one module opens per day attended. The second is explained in Unlocking modules with a workspace booking.
Capstone brief and Capstone rubric — the final piece of work and how it's judged, if your course ends in one.

Modules

A module needs a title and a summary, and carries one setting that matters to learners:

Quiz pass mark (%) — the score needed to pass this module's quiz. It's 70% unless you change it. Set it for what the module actually is: a module that teaches judgement deserves a different bar from one that teaches a procedure.

A module with no questions has no quiz, and learners move straight on.

Lessons

Lesson title is what a learner sees in their course card and in the bar across the top of the lesson screen. Keep it short enough to read at a glance.

Lesson content is the editor — see below.

Video — either upload a file (up to 2 GB) or paste a YouTube or Vimeo watch URL. There's more on both in Teach on Academy, including why the link must be Unlisted rather than Private.

Duration (minutes) — your estimate, shown to learners so they know whether they have time for it now.

Hands-on lab — attach one of your labs. A lab with no lesson attached to it is a lab nobody can reach.

Free preview — this lesson is readable by anyone, enrolled or not. Treat these as your shop window: make the first one genuinely useful rather than an introduction to an introduction.

Published — unpublished lessons are invisible to learners. Write in the open; publish when it's ready.

The editor

The lesson editor is a normal rich-text editor. Use the toolbar — headings, bold, italic, lists, links, quotes, code, tables — and don't think about the format underneath.

One thing is worth knowing: everything on the toolbar is kept exactly as you leave it. Pasting from Word or from a web page brings the text, the headings and the links across. Colours, fonts, spacing and page layout are not part of a lesson and won't survive the save. That isn't a limitation to work around — a lesson is styled by the Academy so that every course reads consistently, and so that your words look right on a phone as well as a laptop.

Headings are sections, and sections matter

Use headings to break a lesson into sections. They're not only for looks:

They give learners something to navigate by.
They're what the pictures attach to — see the next part.

Pictures beside the text

On a lesson with no video, the space to the right of the text is for pictures, and they follow the reader down the page.

The rule is simple: put a picture on its own line under the heading it belongs to. As a learner scrolls into that section, that picture appears beside them and stays while they read it.

A few things that follow from that:

A section with no picture keeps showing the previous one. The space never goes blank, so you only need a picture where one actually helps.
One picture per section. If you put a second one under the same heading it stays in the text where you wrote it, rather than being silently dropped.
A picture inside a sentence stays inside the sentence. Only a picture on its own line gets moved to the side.
A video takes that space. If a lesson has a video, the video holds the right-hand side for the whole lesson and any pictures render in the text itself. Use one or the other per lesson.

This is how you build a lesson that explains a screen: a heading per step, the text on the left, the screenshot of that step on the right, changing as they go.

Adding a picture today: the editor's image button takes a web address. Upload from your own machine is being added — until then, a picture needs to already be online somewhere you control.

Quizzes

Add questions to a module and they become its quiz, sitting after the module's last lesson. Learners can retake it. Set the bar with the module's quiz pass mark.

Write questions that test whether someone could do the thing, not whether they remember what you called it.

Labs

Training Center → Labs is where labs live, separately from any one course, so you can reuse them. Three kinds:

Simulation — a scenario with an objective and a rubric. The learner works through it and gets feedback against the rubric you wrote.
Embedded environment — a tool you point at, opened from inside the lesson.
Practice workspace — opens RAiN AI Studio, the real agent studio, with a practice workspace and a daily run limit, kept separate from live client work.

Build the lab here, then attach it to a lesson from that lesson's Hands-on lab field.

Answering learners

Training Center → Community collects the questions learners have asked under your lessons, and the reviews they've left. Questions arrive attached to the lesson they were asked in, so you can see what they were looking at when they got stuck.

Answering quickly is the single clearest signal that a course is alive.

Working with other people

Training Center → Team is where you add the people who work on your courses.

An instructor writes courses and answers learners.
An owner can do that and also handle payouts and the team itself.

Adding someone links their existing RAiN account, so they need to have signed up first. A provider always keeps at least one owner — the last one can't be removed or demoted, because a provider with no owner has nobody who could appoint one.

Publishing

Submit the course for review when it's ready. Approved courses go live in the catalog under your provider name. You can keep editing afterwards; substantial changes may be reviewed again before they reach learners.

FAQs

Can I write a lesson before I have its video? Yes. Leave Published unticked and it's invisible to learners while you work.

Do I have to add a picture to every section? No. A section with none keeps showing the previous picture, so add them where they earn their place.

Can a lesson have both a video and side pictures? No — they want the same space. A lesson with a video shows the video there, and any images stay in the text.

My table lost its colours when I saved. Expected. Colours, fonts and alignment aren't part of a lesson; the Academy styles every course the same way so learners get one consistent reading experience. Structure — headings, lists, tables, code, quotes — is all kept.

How do learners find a lab? Only through a lesson. Attach it in the lesson's Hands-on lab field.