How to Create a Course on Teachable

To create a course on Teachable, you must sign up for one of its plans. This will then allow you to build your course curriculum, add lessons, and fill them with valuable and varied content.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how it’s done.

Key Takeaways:

Start by building the course outline and adding sections with accompanying lessons
Fill each lesson with images, text, video, audio, downloadable documents, and more
To finish, create a pricing plan and edit the sales pages for your course

How to Create a Course Using Teachable (Step by Step)

Teachable’s course builder is very straightforward and intuitive to use. The beginner-friendly format will ensure that anyone can quickly create an engaging and great-looking course.

Start with the Basic Details

Step 1: To get started with your course, log into your Teachable school and click on “Courses.” Then, select “Create Course.”

Step 2: Your next job is to give your course a name. Don’t worry, if you want to change it later down the line, you can. Click “Continue” when done.

Create the Course Outline

Step 3: Next, click on “Build Your Outline.”

Step 4: You have a few options available. You can either:

Build Your Outline from Scratch: This is the best option if you have already defined your outline.
Generate with AI: This option is useful if you need a helping hand. Bear in mind that this feature is still “experimental,” so it might not give you precise results.
Copy From: If you have already created a course, this option allows you to copy the existing outline over into your new course.

For this guide, we’re going to select “Build from Scratch.”

Step 5: After selecting “Build from Scratch,” the curriculum page will open up. The two most important items on this screen are the “New Section” and “New Lesson” options.

A section is essentially a module that you use to group your lessons. For example, your first section could be an introduction to your course with lessons included for introducing the tutor and explaining the course outline and what students can expect to learn.

Step 6: Create all your sections by clicking on “New Section” and giving it a name. Under each section, click “New Lesson” and name it.

You can rearrange the order of your sections and lessons by clicking the six dots located to the left of them and dragging and dropping them in the desired location.

Develop Your Lessons

Step 7: Once your sections and lessons are looking good, it’s time to start adding the lesson content. Click on any of your lesson titles to begin.

An editing page will open up. On the right-hand side, you will see your course outline listed, making it easy to flip between different lessons as you edit them. In the center, you will see an “Add Content” button. Click that to bring up the element menu.

At the bottom of each lesson page, there are a couple of additional options. Here you can choose to toggle on student comments. This allows students to write a message or give feedback on that particular lesson.

“Public Preview” allows anyone to access the lesson. This is to enable you to provide a “taster session” for free without anyone having to enroll. It’s a good sales tactic since it encourages people to sign up to access the rest of the course content.

And, lastly, you can delete the entire lesson if you wish.

Step 8: Click “Add Content” and pick your desired content type from the element menu. It will then appear on the left of the lesson page. To add more content elements, click “Add Content” as many times as you need to.

Each content element that you add will have an “Edit” button in the top left and six dots in the top right that let you drag and drop it into a new position.

Let’s now take a look at some of the different types of content elements that you can add.

Text & Images

This allows you to write any text-based information. This is also where you add images to your content by clicking the image icon at the top of the editing screen. You also get a range of text formatting options to add interest to the page.

To adjust the size of any images you add, grab a corner of it using your mouse and drag it inwards or outwards so you get the desired size.

Additionally, there is a “Banner Image” element that lets you place a single image onto the lesson page without any accompanying text.

Video, Audio, and Embed Media

Pre-recorded videos can be uploaded onto your lessons. Each video cannot be more than 2 GB in size: beware that the free plan limits you to ten video uploads in total.

Alternatively, you can host your videos elsewhere such as YouTube or Loom, and add the embed link by using the “Embed Media” element. Embed Media also lets you embed other types of content such as Google Docs and Typeform.

Similarly, pre-recorded audio files can be uploaded for students to listen to by using the “Audio” element.

PDF Viewer

Readable PDFs can be uploaded and embedded onto the lesson page. You can also provide a download option so that students can save the PDF to their devices.

Resource

The resource element gives you the ability to upload as many files as you need to provide supporting content for your lessons. This feature supports most file types including PDF, Docx, JPEG, PNG, XLS, and more.

Students can then download the supporting content to read and work on. This feature is great for adding assignments, workbooks, study guides, projects, and more. Doing this adds another dimension to your course, rather than relying solely on the content you place onto Teachable.

Quizzes

Finally, Teachable has a quiz element that you can use to build knowledge-testing quiz questions. If you are on the Pro plan upwards, you can record the grades for your quizzes, provide instant student feedback, and set compliance parameters (more on compliance below).

Continue adding the desired and relevant elements for all your course lessons until complete. When satisfied, move on to the next step.

Step 9: On the course curriculum overview page, it’s time to publish your content. Either click on the “Publish” button to the right of each lesson or use the “Quick Actions” box to bulk publish each section’s lessons.

Refine the Course Settings

Step 10: We’re almost there! Now you just need to refine your course settings and get everything running in the right order.

For those on the Pro plan, you have the option of dripping content out to students. For example, you can choose to release each course section on a weekly basis.

Select “Drip” at the top of each section and choose when the content will be shown in the school. This can be a number of days after enrollment or on a specific date. Don’t forget to toggle the “Activate Drip” button at the bottom of the editing screen.

Step 11: Now head to the “Information” tab. Here, you can change the course title, add a description, and upload your branding. You can also add an author bio and image.

While on the same page, click to view the “Course Settings” tab.

Step 12: Scroll down to where it says “Course Display” and “Course Compliance.” Under course display you can choose whether or not to have the course progress bar displayed to students.

Course compliance is a very useful feature as it ensures students are learning and forces them to consume content in the correct order. However, you must be subscribed to the Pro plan upwards to use this.

Here’s what you can do:

Enforce Lesson Order: Students have to take each lesson in the correct order, they cannot skip about.
Enforce Video Watching: Students cannot move on until they have watched at least 90% of the video.
Enforce Graded Quiz Completion: Students must achieve a certain grade for a quiz in order to progress.

Choose which compliance options you want switched on and don’t forget to hit “Save” in the top-right corner when you’re done.

Create a Pricing Plan

Step 13: Your course is ready! Now it’s time to sell it.

To do this, you have to create a pricing plan. Click “Pricing” and “Add Pricing Plan.”

Step 14: Select how you want to charge – or not charge – for the course. Here are your options:

Free: Provides access to your course free of charge.
One-Time Purchase: A single fee payable to access the course.
Payment Plan: A fixed number of monthly payments. For example, $50 per month for six months.
Subscription: A recurring monthly or annual payment.

Choose which type of payment plan you wish to use and input all the required information. When ready, hit “Save.”

Edit the Sales Pages

Step 15: When you create a course, Teachable automatically generates several web pages for it. These include the sales page, checkout page, and thank you page. The information on these pages will be generic so you must go in and edit them.

Click on “Sales Pages,” select the page you want, and hit “Edit.”

Step 16: Editing pages is pretty much the same as editing and adding content to your lesson pages. Click on the page blocks to update the information on them, click on the dots to drag and drop them into a new position, and add new elements as you wish.

When complete, click “Update” in the top-right corner of the screen and repeat the process for all other sales pages. If you want to add more pages, you can add them.

Your course and sales pages are now finished and ready to be unleashed on the world!

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