In Thrive Apprentice, a course is formed by one or more lessons that can be organized in chapters and/or modules. This way, the next step after you have created a Thrive Apprentice course, is to add one or more lessons to that course.
If you haven’t created any courses yet, don’t hesitate to check out our article about how to create your first Thrive Apprentice course.
So, after your course is created and saved, you can find it in the Apprentice Dashboard, in the “Courses” section:
As you can see, there is a red circle in the top right corner, which indicates that the course is not published:
When you will publish at least one lesson in this course, then you will be able to publish the entire course.
If you hover over one of your course cards, you will notice four more icons that you can use here:
You can (1) move, (2) duplicate, (3) delete, or (4) preview the course using one of these options:
Keep in mind that if you choose to duplicate a course, the newly created one will be displayed right next to the original version. It will appear as “Copy of…” the original course name and will have all the content already existing in the initial one:
Also, the duplicate course will be unpublished by default. The “Access restrictions” will not be kept the same as in the original version, but will inherit, instead, the default settings for access restriction as you have set them here.
Note: If a lesson is published, but the course isn’t, it doesn’t mean that the lesson will be visible to your users. In order for a lesson to be visible to your users, both the lesson and the course need to be published.
How to Add a New Lesson to a Course
The first thing you need to do in order to add a new lesson is to access the course. In your Apprentice Dashboard, click on the course you want to add the lesson to.
This is the “Content” tab that will be opened when you access your course:
As you can see, there are four tabs you can use here, besides the “Content” one. You also have “Course details” and “Access restrictions” and “Drip”.
The “Content” tab is where you can add content to the course, the “Course Details” tab allows you to work on the more general settings of the course, such as the course description, cover photo, etc. The “Access restrictions” tab is where you can tie your course to a product and set restrictions to it, and the “Drip” tab allows you to create a drip campaign if you want to drip feed course content to your students.
Here you have a separate article for each of the above mentioned tabs, that you might find useful if you want to learn more about each of them:
- How to Create Your First Thrive Apprentice Course
- How to Use the Products Section of Thrive Apprentice
- Using the Drip Campaign Templates in Thrive Apprentice
For adding new content, simply click on the blue plus sign from the right hand-side of the page or on the “Add New Content” option:
A pop-up will open and you will have to choose the type of content you want to add to your course. We will focus on lessons, but you are welcome to check out these articles we have about chapters and modules as well.
Click on “+Add Lesson” to get started:
The “Add Lesson” pop-up will open:
Now, there are three main lesson types: Text Lesson, Audio Lesson, and Video Lesson. You can choose each one of these from the drop-down menu next to the “Lesson Title” field:
Choose what type of lesson you want to create. Here is how to configure each lesson type:
Text Lesson
First thing’s first, assign a title to your lesson by filling in the “Lesson Title” field:
After you’ve entered a suitable title, you can edit the URL of the lesson:
Then, you can enter the lesson summary, which can be a brief description of what people are going to learn while taking the lesson:
Next, decide whether the users can comment on the lesson by opening the drop-down from the “Allow users comment on this lesson” section:
The next drop down allows you to decide what kind of access restrictions to use for this course. You can inherit the access restrictions that are set at product level, you can offer it for free for all logged in users, or free for everyone:
Once you’ve given the lesson a title and a description you will get to the unique features of a Thrive Apprentice Lesson. More exactly, you can upload a cover image:
If you go for the cover image option, you SHOULD upload an image that comes as close as possible to the dimensions that the course cover image has, which is: 1170 x 400 pixels.
When you’re done, make sure you save everything using the green “Save” button from the bottom right corner:
Audio Lesson
Similar to creating a text lesson, start by giving the lesson a title, as well as a description, enter its URL and choose if you want to allow users to comment on the lesson or not:
Next, from the drop-down menu choose which platform you are uploading the audio from. There are two options for this: you can upload an audio file via SoundCloud or you can use a custom code.
- SoundCloud
If you choose this option from the drop-down menu, what you have to do is to paste the URL code into the URL field:
You can obtain that by going to your SoundCloud audio file, click on the “Share” icon, and copy the URL.
When you’re done, make sure you save everything using the green “Save” button from the bottom right corner.
- Custom
Choosing this option from the drop-down menu, you will have to paste the Embed Code into the dedicated field:
Video Lesson
Just like in the other two cases described above, go ahead and set up the basic details of the video lesson:
Next, from the drop-down menu choose which platform you are uploading the video from.
- Youtube | Vimeo | Wistia | Custom
If you choose any of these three platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia), you will have to paste the URL of your video inside the dedicated field:
Keep in mind: when you choose the YouTube platform, some extra options will appear below the URL field. This is what they are for:
- Optimize related videos: if you choose this option, the related videos will show at the end of the video that you’ve inserted as the lesson.
- Auto-hide YouTube Logo: if you choose this option, the “YouTube” logo from the video will not be visible anymore
- Auto-hide Player Controls: if you choose this option, the play controls such as volume, play/pause will not be visible
- Autoplay: if you choose this option, the video will automatically start playing when entering the lesson
- Hide Full-Screen Button: if you choose this option, the Full-Screen button will not be shown.
Use these additional options to customize the YouTube video as you wish. Once you’re done, don’t forget to save everything.
- Custom
Just like in the Audio Lesson case, if you choose the “Custom” option from the drop-down menu, you have to paste the Custom Embed Code in the dedicated field:
Save everything.
Once you’ve created the lessons you want, you will be able to see a list of all your lessons:
When you hover over a lesson, a few options will appear:
Preview
You can use this option to preview the lesson, as a regular user would. If you want to see what the lesson looks like in the front-end, click on the “Preview” option:
Edit
The next set of options will let you edit the basics of the lesson. If you hover over/click on “Edit”, a sub-menu will open, with a few available options to choose from:
Add content
The first option is the “Add Content” one:
This will open the lesson in the editor mode:
This editor mode is just like the Thrive Architect editor, so adding content to your lesson here will be easy for you, because the interface of the editor is identical to that of Thrive Architect.
If you are not familiar with Thrive Architect, you should know that the interface is a drag and drop one. To add a new element to the lesson, you just have to click on the plus sign from the right sidebar, choose the element, and drag and drop it on your editor:
If you need to know more about various elements you can add to your lesson, please take a look at our knowledge base.
Once you are done adding content to your lesson, make sure to save your work using the “Save Work” button from the bottom-left part of the editor.
Edit details
The “Edit details” option will open the same pop-up where you previously entered the title, description, and everything else. You can edit all the elements from there:
Add resources
Use this option to attach various resources to your lesson, such as PDF files, links, etc.:
After you click on the “Add resources” button, a lightbox will appear where you can actually select the files you want to link or upload. Here, click on “Add resource”:
Next, you will have to open the drop-down list for your first resource, and decide whether you want to “Link to file/URL”, “Upload file”, or “Site content”:
- Link to file/URL: if the first option is selected, then you can paste the URL of the resource you want to link here:
In addition to this, you can also add a description for the resource (but this is optional).
- Upload file: if you choose to upload a file, then you will be taken to your Media Library, where you can upload the file you need. Here as well you have the option of adding a description to your resource:
- Site content: use this option if you want to link to a page or post already existing on your website:
You just have to type in the name of a page or post and select it from the drop-down list that will appear. Furthermore, add a description to your resource, if you want.
In addition to the already explained options, there are still several other options you can use here. You can remove the resource if you want, from the “Delete resource” trash icon or add another one.
Lastly, don’t forget to “Save” your changes before exiting:
After the resource is added, you can always return to this pop-up if you want to edit it:
Duplicate lesson
The “Duplicate lesson” is the next one in the list:
Naturally, this option will create a copy of the lesson. Keep in mind that the duplicate lesson will appear as “Clone of…” the original lesson, and will be, by default, in an unpublished state:
The cloned lesson will, however, keep all the content of the original lesson, the only thing left to do here is to “Publish” it just like you would do with any other lesson:
Delete lesson
And, lastly, if you want to remove your lesson, simply click on the “Delete lesson” option found last in this set of options, and confirm:
How to Publish a Lesson
To publish a lesson, simply click on/hover over the “Publish” option next to the “Edit” one:
Lessons can also be scheduled to be posted at a specific time, and you can click on the down arrow next to “Publish”, to find the “Schedule” option:
We have created an article in which we explain how this scheduling feature works, so please check it out here if you need more instructions on that.
After your lesson is published, you can go ahead and publish your course, as well, by clicking on the green “Publish” button:
Note: In order to publish a course, you need to have at least one lesson published inside that course. However, a published lesson in an unpublished course will not be visible on the live site, it just means that it is completed and no extra modifications are needed.
Important!
If a course is published, it will be visible to your users, on the live site. This is why you should NOT publish the course unless it is ready to be displayed on the site!
If you want to see how the course looks like, you can simply click on the “Preview Course” option:
