04. Lessons and courses: how content works

Lessons and courses: how content works

This is for new 5Mins admins who now need to understand what learners actually receive. By the end you'll know the difference between a lesson and a course, and you'll have built a course of your own.

Everything downstream depends on this. You enrol people into courses, not lessons, and course completion is what your reports measure. So the shape of your courses decides what your data can tell you later.

Before you start

  • Finish article 3, Organise people into teams and managers.

  • Have a topic in mind for a first course. One real topic your team needs beats a test course you'll delete.

The content model in one minute

  • Lessons are the bite-sized units. A lesson is a single piece of learning, and it is the thing a learner sits down and watches or reads.

  • Courses are groupings of lessons. A course gives lessons an order, a title, a description, and rules about who can take it and what counts as finished.

You do not have to write lessons from scratch. When you build a course outline you can pull lessons from the 5Mins Library, use Your Content for material your organisation already has, or embed links. You can also add assessments to the outline.

Build a course

help-video-0932143

🎬 Watch this as a short narrated video

Steps shown in this video

  1. Open Content & Courses → Your Courses in the admin area

  2. Click Create course

  3. Give your course a title

  4. Add a description and thumbnail so learners know what to expect

  5. Build your outline in Course Content — add lessons from the 5Mins Library, Your Content, or embed links, plus assessments

  6. Configure availability and completion rules in Settings, then click Create Course

  1. Open Content & Courses → Your courses in the admin area. You'll see the courses that already exist in your organisation.

  2. Click Create course. The course builder opens.

  3. Give your course a title. This is what learners see, so name it the way they'd search for it.

  4. Add a description and a thumbnail so learners know what to expect before they start.

  5. Open the Course content tab and build your outline. Add lessons from the 5Mins Library, from Your Content, or as embedded links, and add assessments where you want to check understanding.

  6. Open the Settings tab to configure availability and completion rules, then click Create course.

What you should see now

  • Your new course appears under Content & Courses → Your courses.

  • It has a title, a description, and a thumbnail.

  • Its outline holds the lessons and any assessments you added, in the order you set.

  • Its availability and completion rules are set on the Settings tab.

Common questions

Can I enrol someone into a single lesson?Enrolment works at course level. If you want a single lesson to be something you enrol people into and report on, put that lesson in a course of its own.

Do I have to create all my lessons before I can create a course?No. Most of a first course can come straight from the 5Mins Library. Use Your Content or embedded links when you have organisation-specific material to include.

Where do I decide what counts as finishing the course?On the Settings tab, alongside availability. That is worth a careful look, because completion rules are what your course completion reports will later be counting.

Next up

You have a course and you have teams. Next: Enrol people into a course, where you put the two together.