Lessons are a key part of courses, but it's not mandatory to create lessons to launch a course for your learners. You can create a lesson-only experience, an experience without lessons, or a course that includes lessons alongside other modules.

 

Lesson Outline

The lesson outline is like your table of contents. As a best practice, we recommend that you create your table of contents (lesson outline) before your Lessons. It’s also important to note that every lesson has a category and sub-category; a lesson cannot be created without both a category and sub-category. You can create lessons manually or import them via a CSV.

 

At a Glance

Option	Description	How to Create	Recommendation
Lesson Categories	Lesson Categories are the structure of all Lesson content.    Lesson categories contain lessons, and lessons typically contain instructional material. Together, they form a digital guide for your learners.	BluePrint > Courses > Create a New Course or Click Existing Course Name > Lesson Outline > Lesson Categories	When creating lesson categories, save as you go so you don’t lose your work. Information added does not automatically save without manually saving.   Lesson categories will be nested and you can drag and drop to reorder as you wish.   You can also import Lessons and Lesson Categories. Click here to learn more.

 

Key Terms and Definitions

Replicate	To make a copy (clone) of a lesson, lesson category, course.
Parent Lesson Category	Overall Lesson Category
Child Lesson Categories	Sub-Category Lessons included in a Parent Lesson Category
Replicator Cart	Allows you to add lessons, parent and/or child categories in bulk for replication.

 

Pro-Tips:

• If you know how you would like to structure your course, then we recommend to first create a Lesson Outline (blank shells) as a best practice. Create your lesson categories in the order that you want your learners to see them in the Learning Platform.
• Consider using unique or specific names for categories to help learners navigate. For instance, if you have a category called “Introduction" for each section of lesson content, rename the category to be specific to that section (i.e. “Introduction to Financial Markets.).
• Consider aligning categories with study tasks, learning objectives, or topics if your content lacks categorization.
• If an additional content category level is required for lessons, consider appending the titles of lessons or lesson subcategories with this additional information.
• As you create your course, make sure your content is aligned to the correct categories and is in the correct order before making your course live for learners. Any changes to categories later on will affect the display and organization of course content.

 

Lesson Categories: Learner Experience

After creating your lessons and their categories, learners will see an organized list of lessons within the course's Table of Contents. Lessons are required to have a parent category and a subcategory in addition to a title. The parent category displays the topic for the content the learner will approach, while the subcategory indicates a more granular level of content information. The lesson title displays the title or topic of the content to be covered on that lesson page.

 

 

NOTE: Lesson categories are course-specific and will display within courses to learners and within BluePrint to content managers. They are not the same elements as categorization used for product catalogs.

 

In the example below, “Solving Problems With Others” is the parent category, “Overview” is the subcategory, and “Business Management, Leadership, and Strategy” is the lesson. The bars containing the lesson parent categories can be expanded and collapsed, while the subcategories are not clickable. Clicking on a lesson title will open up the lesson, and clicking on the quiz icon will launch practice questions related to the lesson. Once lessons are complete, their confidence levels will also appear here.

 

 

When viewing a lesson, its subcategory will display on the right-side of the page.

 

 

For more information about navigating lessons and using lesson tools, check out our article here. More about lesson feature accesses can also be found here to help you configure a desired learning experience for your learners!