Plan the learning

Courses and lessons

For tutors and providers: write a subject programme once as a course, add its lessons right beneath it, and set any lesson as work for a learner without leaving the list. Building a paced plan from an exam board's official specification is a different tool — see the Curriculum builder guide.

What it does

A course is a subject programme — "KS3 Maths — Number & Algebra", "Year 5 Science", "GCSE English Literature". Inside it sit lessons: the teaching content, activities and materials, each with an optional length in minutes.

A course can follow a specification from the catalogue — an exam board's, or the national curriculum's — and each lesson can mark the units of it that the lesson covers. A class that follows the course tells families which specification it teaches towards.

Courses are written by providers and admins. Any lesson can be set as work for a learner, so a piece of work always points back to what it was teaching, and each lesson shows how much work has been set from it.

Everything you do from the list — writing a lesson, setting it as work, seeing the work set from it, editing a course — opens in a pane on the right. The list stays beside it, and closing the pane leaves you where you were.

Where to find it

• Navigation: Curriculum → Teaching → Courses & lessons (Teaching also holds Assignments and Resources)
• URL: /dashboard/courses (the old /dashboard/curriculum address still brings you here)

Administrators see every course on the platform; providers see their own.

Step by step

Create a course

1. Go to Courses & lessons.
2. Either type into the add row at the foot of the list — Title, Subject and Level, each under its own column — and press Enter, or select New course to fill in the same details (there, Subject suggests AltEd's subjects, grouped, as you type, so families searching by subject find your classes), a Specification (optional) from the catalogue, and a Description — written like a note, with headings, lists, bold and links — in a pane on the right.
3. The course appears with its lessons open beneath it, ready for the first one.

A saved course also holds up to five pictures, added the same three ways as a class's — Choose pictures, dragging them onto the box, or pasting one from your clipboard. Order them with ‹ and ›, or make one the cover with ☆. Any class that follows this course and has no pictures of its own shows these, so photographing the materials once covers every class you run from it.

The Description is shown in full beneath the course, formatted as you wrote it, with Show more when it runs long.

Draft a course with AI

When AI is available on your AltEd, Draft a course with AI sits beside New course.

1. Select Draft a course with AI.
2. Choose a Specification from the catalogue, paste Your syllabus or notes — a scheme of work, a topic list, what you want to cover — or both. With no specification, choose None — use my syllabus.
3. Fill in Level (for example "Year 7"), how many Lessons (up to 40) and Minutes each.
4. Select Draft the course. The line beside the button shows your AI credits; a draft costs about 4. A long course can take up to a minute.
5. Check the draft course: change the Title, Subject, Level and Description; rename any lesson or change its minutes; untick a lesson to leave it out. Each lesson shows its summary, its objectives and the specification units it covers.
6. Select Create the course. The course and the lessons you kept are made in one go, opened beneath the course in the list. Each lesson's objectives go into its Content, its summary into Summary, and its units are marked as covered.

Nothing is created until you press Create the course, and Back returns to your choices without spending anything more. Drafting again costs credits again.

Add lessons

1. Click the number under Lessons on the course (or Show lessons in its ⋯ menu). The lessons open beneath the row.
2. In the add row at the foot of the lessons, type a Lesson title, an optional Summary and Minutes, each under its column, and press Enter (or Add lesson). The lesson is added marked "no content yet".

Click to enlargeTap to enlarge

Write a lesson's content

Open the lesson's ⋯ menu and choose Write the content (Edit content once it has some). The lesson opens in a wide pane with its Title, Minutes, Summary and Content. Save the lesson saves it and closes the pane.

Mark the units a lesson covers

1. Give the course a specification: Edit course in its ⋯ menu, then Specification (optional). The list holds the published catalogue, and any specification you imported yourself.
2. Open a lesson — Write the content or Edit content in its menu, or the number under Units. Under Specification units, the specification opens as a tree: tick each unit the lesson covers. Ticking a heading ticks everything under it, and a heading with only some of its units ticked shows part-ticked. Search the specification finds a unit by its words or its code.
3. Select Save the lesson. The number under Units shows how many it covers.

Choosing a different specification for the course removes the old one's units from its lessons.

Somebody reading a lesson they can't change — a family, say, whose child it was set as work for — sees the units it covers as a list under Specification units, when the specification is one the catalogue shows them.

Set a lesson as work

1. In the lesson's ⋯ menu, choose Set as work for a learner. A pane opens naming the lesson and its course.
2. The Title starts as the lesson's title — change it if you like. Choose the Learner, and add a Due date and Instructions if you want them.
3. Select Set assignment. The pane closes, the lesson's Assignments count goes up, and the work is on the learner's list in Assignments.

See the work set from a lesson

Click the number under Assignments on a lesson (or Work set from it in its menu). A pane lists each piece of work set from that lesson — the learner, its title, due date and status — with Open to go to it in Assignments. Set as work for a learner at the top swaps the list for the form in the same pane, and back to the list once the work is set.

The count and the list show the work you can see: work you set for learners you teach, and work set for your own family's learners.

Edit or remove

• Click a course's title, Subject or Level in the list to change it in place — Enter saves, Escape puts it back. Edit course in its ⋯ menu opens the whole course, description included, in a pane.
• In the open lessons, click a lesson's title, summary or minutes to change it in place.
• Delete course removes the course and all its lessons. Delete lesson removes just that one. Both ask you to confirm first. Work already set from a deleted lesson keeps its title.

You can only edit or delete courses and lessons you created. Admins can manage any of them.

What each screen shows

Courses & lessons lists every course you can see: Course (with its description underneath), Subject, Level, Specification and Lessons; administrators also see Created by. Once the list is long enough you can search it and filter by subject or level; every column with an arrow sorts.

A course's open lessons show Lesson, Summary, Minutes, Units and Assignments, each lesson with its ⋯ menu. A course with no lessons says "No lessons yet — add the first one below."

With nothing created at all you'll see No courses yet with Create a course.

Tips and good to know

• Lessons are reusable. One course can serve every learner you teach — set a lesson as work for each of them.
• Your courses and lessons are yours. Nobody else can open them, with one exception: when a lesson is set as work, the people who can see that work — the learner's family, and whoever set it — can read that one lesson, not the rest of the course. You can only set work from a lesson you can open yourself.
• A lesson marks units of its course's specification, never a family's own curriculum plan — the Curriculum builder paces a family's plan from the same catalogue.
• Write the Content for your future self: a lesson you can pick up cold in six months is worth far more than a one-line reminder.
• Level is free text, so use whatever vocabulary you and the families you work with actually use (Key Stage, year group, exam board tier).
• The add rows line up with the columns above them: what you type under Summary is what shows under Summary.
• A drafted course only uses units from the specification you chose, and only those still in it. Anything AI suggests beyond your material is worth trimming before you create it — it's a draft, written by a language model.
• No learner's details go into a course draft: only the specification's topics, what you paste and your choices. It runs on your own AI credits.

Troubleshooting

Related guides

• Assignments
• AI credits
• Learners
• The provider's guide