Author guide¶
Everything you need to build and ship courses, quizzes, and programs in PulseLMS.
The Authoring Studio is where course creators design content and instructors get it in front of learners. This guide covers the whole workflow, from a blank course to a published program.
Who can author¶
PulseLMS separates building content from delivering it. The two roles overlap, but they answer different questions.
| Role | What they do | Typical work |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Builds and publishes content | Create courses, add lessons and blocks, build quizzes, assemble programs, publish versions |
| Org admin | Full authoring access, plus org settings | Everything an author can do, across the whole organization |
| Instructor | Manages delivery of published content | Assign courses, grade short-answer questions, reset attempts for learners who fail a required check |
You may hold more than one role
Roles are additive. Someone can be both an author and an instructor; they will see the authoring tools and the delivery actions.
The Authoring Studio¶
The studio is organized into three workspaces, each with its own top-level page.
Courses¶
The core building block. A course is a structured tree of modules, lessons, and content blocks that learners work through. Courses carry catalog metadata, enrollment rules, and compliance settings, and are published as immutable versions.
Quizzes¶
Standalone graded assessments backed by question banks. Configure pass scores, attempt limits, time limits, shuffling, and security options. A published quiz can be dropped into any lesson as a block.
Programs¶
Ordered paths that bundle several published courses into a guided sequence, with optional step-by-step unlocking. Publish a program, then assign it with due dates.
→ Programs
A typical authoring flow¶
A course usually comes together in this order:
- Create the course and give it a title and category
- Add modules and lessons to outline the structure
- Fill lessons with content blocks: text, images, video, audio, files, callouts, knowledge checks
- Build any quizzes you need and add them as lesson blocks
- Set catalog metadata: difficulty, estimated time, tags
- Set enrollment, compliance, and retake rules in course settings
- Publish the first version with a "what changed" note
- Assign it to learners, or let them self-enroll from the catalog
Video gets its own studio
Any video block can be opened in the Video Studio, where you drop knowledge checks, callouts, and chapter markers directly onto the video timeline.
Draft, published, and versions¶
Everything you build starts as a draft that only authors can see. Publishing snapshots the current state into an immutable version that learners can enroll in. Editing a published course flags unpublished changes until you publish again.
Because versions are immutable, learners who are already partway through a course keep the exact version they started on; they are never disrupted mid-course by an edit. See Publishing & versions for the full model.
Where to go next¶
| I want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| Build a course structure and add content | Courses & lessons |
| Add interactivity to a video | Video Studio |
| Create a graded assessment | Quizzes & question banks |
| Chain courses into a path | Programs |
| Understand publishing and what learners see | Publishing & versions |