Create a Course

This guide walks you through the Create Course wizard field by field. The wizard captures the course shell — its title, descriptions, category, type, and pricing — and saves it as a Draft. Once the shell exists, you move into the Curriculum Builder to add your sections and lessons.

Before you start

• You need the Admin or Instructor role.
• Have your course title, a short description, a full description, and a category ready — these four are the only fields required to create the course.
• A thumbnail (1280×720) and an assigned instructor are recommended but optional.
• Pricing is admin-only. Instructors do not see the Pricing step, and courses they create default to free.

The wizard at a glance

The wizard defines five steps, but not all of them appear for every user:

So an admin steps through Basic → Details → Pricing → Review, while an instructor steps through Basic → Details → Review. The Settings step is not rendered in the current wizard — its two most useful fields (feature flag and certificate) are surfaced inline on steps 1 and 2 instead, and the rest are configured later in the full course editor.

A progress bar and a step indicator track where you are. At the bottom you always have Previous, Save as Draft, and either Next or (on the last step) Create Course.

Step 1 — Basic Information

The core, catalog-facing details. This is the only step with fields that block creation.

Creating a category inline

If the category you need does not exist, click New next to the Category picker. A small modal opens — no need to leave the wizard or ask an admin:

On save, the category tree refreshes and the new category is automatically selected for your course.

Step 2 — Course Details

How the course is taught and what learners get out of it. None of these fields are required — the step always validates, so you can skip straight through with the defaults.

Learning Objectives is a dynamic list: click Add Objective for each bullet, or the trash icon to remove one. Blank rows are stripped out automatically when the course is saved.

Default Enrollment appears only when Course Type is Instructor Led. When on, learners can enroll at any time without picking a specific batch, and a course coordinator follows up after enrollment.

Certificate enables a certificate on completion. A default template is applied automatically; to change or customize it, visit the Certificates page. Learners only receive a certificate once a template is assigned and the course is completed.

Step 3 — Pricing

Admins only. Controls whether the course is free or paid, in which currencies, and how many learners can enroll.

When you choose Paid Course, the multi-currency panel appears. Add a price by picking a currency and entering an amount, then Add Price. You must add at least one price before you can leave this step on a paid course.

The available currencies are:

Auto-Convert is a shortcut: pick a base currency, enter one amount, and click Get Rates & Fill. Arythmatic fetches live exchange rates and fills every currency, rounding to psychological pricing (ending in .99; JPY is rounded to whole yen). Every row stays editable, so review the filled values before saving.

Step 4 — Settings

The Settings step is defined in the wizard but not rendered in the current build. Its fields are still meaningful — two of them are surfaced on earlier steps, and the rest are configured later in the full course editor after creation.

Step 5 — Review

A read-only summary so you can sanity-check everything before committing. It shows four cards — Course Information (title, category, short description), Course Details (type, difficulty, estimated duration, and default-enrollment state for instructor-led courses), Pricing (FREE or the primary price plus any additional currencies, and max enrollments), and Learning Objectives — alongside a large live catalog preview captioned "How it will look in the catalog." Nothing here is editable; use Previous to go back and change a field. When you are happy, click Create Course.

What's required to create

Only four fields gate creation, all on Basic Information: a title (3–200 chars), a short description (10–300 chars), a full description (50+ chars), and a category. On a paid course, you also need at least one currency price. Everything else has a working default, so you can create a minimal course in under a minute and enrich it later.

Saving, auto-save, and shortcuts

• Save as Draft is available on every step. It creates the course immediately in Draft status, uploads any thumbnail, and drops you into the course editor.
• Auto-save to your browser runs continuously. About a second after you stop typing, the form is written to local storage and you see a "Draft saved" indicator. If you close the tab and return, Arythmatic restores your in-progress form ("Draft restored from previous session"). This is a local convenience — it is not the same as saving the course to the server.
• Keyboard shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl + Enter advances (or creates on the last step), Cmd/Ctrl + → / Cmd/Ctrl + ← move between steps, and Cmd/Ctrl + S saves a draft.

Generate with AI and Duplicate

• Generate with AI (top-right) opens a panel that drafts a course for you and fills in the title, full and short descriptions, tags, difficulty level, and learning objectives. Review and edit before creating — it is a starting point, not a finished course.
• Duplicate: opening the wizard from an existing course's Duplicate action pre-fills the form from the original (with "(Copy)" appended to the title), so you can spin up a variant quickly.

What happens next

Clicking Create Course saves the course in Draft status and takes you to the course detail page. Nothing is visible to learners yet. From here you can:

• Build the curriculum — open the Curriculum Builder and add sections and content.
• Adjust any field you skipped from the course editor tabs (descriptions, thumbnail, pricing, completion criteria, SEO).
• Preview and publish, then assign the course to one or more groups so learners can see it.