From an empty dashboard to a paid, finished cohort
Everything you will touch as an instructor, in the order you will touch it. Each heading matches a real screen in your dashboard.
Your dashboard
Signing in as an instructor lands you on /instructor — your own shell, separate from the public site and from the admin back office. The sidebar is the whole job: Courses, Submissions, Grades, Q&A, Reviews, Live classes, Students, Announcements, Media, Blog, Earnings and Payouts.
Anything switched off by the administrator simply is not there. If your academy does not use quizzes, you will not see a quiz builder — not a greyed-out one, not an upsell.
Creating a course
Courses → Create course opens the editor. The essentials first:
Title, slug and category — the slug is your public URL, so set it before you share the link.
Description — a rich-text editor with images. This is what sells the course, so write it properly.
Thumbnail and social image — pick from the media library or upload; images are compressed automatically.
Price and old price — the old price renders as a strikethrough, which is how you run a sale without a coupon.
Level and difficulty — shown as filters in the catalogue when the administrator has enabled levels.
FAQ — per-course questions and answers that render as an accordion on the course page.
Private and unlisted courses
Visibility is a per-course setting. Unlisted hides a course from the catalogue, search and sitemap but keeps the direct link working — the easiest way to sell a private group. Private goes further: only invited students can open it at all.
A course stays in draft until you publish it. On academies where the administrator requires approval, publishing sends it to a review queue instead of straight to the catalogue.
Building the curriculum
A course is sections, and a section is lessons. Drag to reorder either. A lesson is one of five types:
| Lesson type | What it holds | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Video | An upload, a media-library file, or a YouTube/Vimeo link | Direct files get the custom player with quality picker and captions |
Text | Rich text with images | Good for transcripts, summaries and reading assignments |
A document from the media library | Renders inline; students do not leave the player | |
Quiz | A graded set of questions | Only appears when quizzes are enabled |
Assignment | A brief students submit against | Only appears when assignments are enabled |
Mark any lesson free preview and it plays without enrolment — the single most effective thing you can do for conversion.
If drip release is on, you schedule when each section unlocks. If learning paths are on, a lesson can require the previous one to be completed first.
Video, captions and protection
Upload a video, pick one from the media library, or paste a YouTube or Vimeo URL. Direct .mp4, .webm and .m3u8 files play in the platform’s own player: play/seek, ±10 seconds, volume, playback speed, fullscreen, keyboard shortcuts, and a quality picker when the stream exposes multiple renditions.
Captions are a per-language upload slot on each lesson — one for every active site language. Upload a .vtt or .srt and students get a CC button with the language names in it.
Content protection is configured by the administrator, not per lesson, but it is worth knowing what your students see: a moving watermark carrying their email, blur when the window loses focus, a blocked right-click menu, and hidden media URLs.
Practical advice on video hosting
YouTube unlisted is free and fast but leaks: a determined student can find the video ID. Direct files on your own storage cost more and protect better. Most academies put marketing and free previews on YouTube and paid lessons on direct files.
Quizzes and the question bank
The quiz builder supports three question types, and the type decides who grades it:
Multiple choice — auto-graded the moment the student submits.
Short answer — routed to you for marking.
Essay — routed to you, with the full text and a score box.
A quiz can carry an availability window with a start and end date *and time*, so an exam opens Thursday at 19:00 and closes at 20:30. Outside the window students see a locked state rather than a broken page.
Mixed quizzes work exactly as you would hope: the multiple-choice part scores immediately, the written part waits for you, and the final grade appears when you finish marking.
Assignments and grading
An assignment lesson gives students a brief and a submission box. Everything they hand in lands in Submissions, which is your single grading queue — written quiz answers arrive in the same place, on their own tab.
Grade with a score and a comment. The student is notified, the mark flows into their grades page, and the course progress updates.
Grades gives you the other direction: pick a course and see every student’s exam and assignment marks in one table, exportable.
Running a live class
Live classes → Schedule creates a room on TKDS MEETING — self-hosted under your academy’s own domain, with no Zoom licence and no per-seat fee.
Choose the audience: everyone in a course, or specific invited students. Students see the class on their dashboard and calendar, and get a notification before it starts.
Attendance is automatic. Every join is authorised, and that authorisation is what writes the attendance record. You also get a manual register for anyone who attended in the room.
Export attendance to CSV from the class page.
Attach the recording after you end the class. It appears as a "watch recording" button for exactly the same audience.
Q&A, community and chat
Q&A collects the questions students ask from inside the player, per course. Answer from your dashboard and the student is notified.
When course community is enabled, each course also gets a feed — posts, comments, likes and pinning — which is where a cohort actually forms.
For one-to-one, students enrolled in your course can message you directly, with file attachments. Messages arrive in real time when the administrator has enabled push, and there is an unread badge in the navbar either way.
Students, announcements and reviews
Students on a course shows the roster with each student’s progress, plus a message button. Announcements posts to everyone enrolled and notifies them — the right tool for “the exam moved to Sunday”.
Reviews collects student ratings on your courses, and your public instructor profile aggregates them across everything you teach. You cannot delete a review; you can reply to it.
Earnings and getting paid
Earnings shows what you have made, broken down by course and by month, using the revenue share the administrator set for your account.
Payouts is where you request a withdrawal. The request goes to the academy’s finance queue; you see its status the whole way through, and the history stays on the page.
Trends is the small analytics view: which courses are moving, where enrollments are coming from, and what is stalling.
Your media library
Media is a real file manager — folders, breadcrumbs, search, upload-into-folder, rename and delete. You only ever see your own folders and your own uploads.
Every image is optimised on upload: resized to a sensible maximum and compressed to a hard ceiling, so a 4 MB phone photo does not become a slow course page.
Anywhere the platform asks for a file, you can pick from this library instead of uploading again.
Ready to build the first one?
The free plan lets you publish today and pay only when you sell.