Write a lesson

A lesson is one email. It contains the content as well as the waiting period that determines when it should be sent. Who receives it and what follows is decided by the course in which it is included.

The title is the subject line

Whatever you type as the title is what appears in the learner's inbox. It is not a chapter heading, and it is competing with everything else in there.

"Connecting your inbox" works. "Lesson 3" tells them nothing about whether to open it now or later.

The title is also shown as a heading at the top of the email itself, so you do not need to repeat it in the content.

Writing the content

Write it as an email, not as a page. Short paragraphs, one idea, and something the reader can do before the next one arrives.

You can use the formatting in the editor and it all renders in the email itself.

When it arrives

Every piece of content carries a waiting period, and it is what turns a pile of writing into a course. It works the same way for lessons, quizzes, assignments and decision points.

• For the first item in a course, it counts from the moment someone enrolls. Set it to 0 and the lesson arrives while they are still on the thank-you page.

• For everything after, it counts from when the previous item was sent.

• For the first item on a track, it counts from the content that sent the learner onto that track.

So the schedule is relative to each learner, not to a calendar. Somebody who enrolls today and somebody who enrolled last month are each at their own point in the same course, and on a branching course, not necessarily on the same path.

Two or three days between lessons is a sensible default. The gap is what gives a reader time to do something with one lesson before the next arrives, without it you are sending a document in instalments.

Publish it

A new lesson is unpublished, and an unpublished lesson is not delivered to anyone. That is deliberate: it lets a half-written draft sit safely inside a course that is already running.

Publish it when it is ready. A course that looks finished but delivers nothing is almost always an unpublished lesson.

Changing a lesson later

Editing a published lesson is safe. Learners who have already received it keep the version that was sent; anyone who has not reached it yet gets the new one.