Getting started with your first interactive course on codedamn

This is chapter 2 of the blog series of building an interactive course on codedamn. The prerequisite of this blog post is that you should already have a codedamn creator account. Let’s begin.

Chapter 1: Introduction to codedamn creator panel
Chapter 2 (currently reading): Getting started with your first interactive course
Chapter 3: Building an interactive lab course item

The Dashboard

When you log in to the creator panel, the first screen you see would be a dashboard-like interface. Don’t be surprised if things are a little different as we’re updating the UI/UX all the time. The fundamental concepts would remain the same.

To create a new course, click on “Create Course” from top right on the dashboard screen.

Course Metadata

On this screen, you’d have to fill out the metadata of your course. Most of the things you see here can be changed later (and aren’t even required right away), but the Course slug is permanent. Course slug is the part of the URL where your course is accessible.

Slug is globally unique. For example, a valid course slug is javascript-dsa-questions and if set, your course would be accessible at codedamn.com/learn/javascript-dsa-course

Once you press the Save Changes button at the bottom, your course is now created and you would be able to see it by clicking on Interactive Courses from the sidebar. Let’s keep going.

Individual Course Items

As soon as you create your course metadata, you’ll be redirected to the second screen saying “Curriculum”

This is your curriculum designer where you would want to spend most of your time. Every course is broken down into sections and every section can contain one or more course items.

Your first step is to add a Section by clicking the “Add Section” button. This section can contain 4 different course items for now:

Video
Quiz
Markdown-enabled article
Hands-on practice lab

In this blog post, we will focus on the first three course items. We will learn how to create an interactive course lab in the next blog.

Creating a video course item

When you click on + Video in the curriculum designer, you only add a video placeholder in your course. You still need to link an uploaded video to your course item.

Let’s understand what this means:

Your video title is “Untitled Video” – you can change it by clicking the pencil button.
The glowing light on pencil button means there is no video associated with this course item yet. Clicking on this would enable an interface to link a video.
The status “Draft” for a course item means that it is not published yet (and not visible to students). Only published course items are displayed to the user.
On clicking Edit pencil icon, you’ll see a dialog box. The important part here is “Missing video” on the left.

You can upload new videos in bulk from the Upload button on the top right. Once you upload a bunch of videos, you might need to wait for a few hours for them to show in the video library.

Video Library is the place where all of your uploaded videos are stored for your account. You can link a video to a course item by selecting that from video library. Clicking on Add Video From Library button under Missing Video should open a video library:

Note: Even processing status might take 20-30 minutes to show up. Therefore it is best to upload all videos together a night before you want to use them.

As soon as they’re ready, clicking on the “Use video” button would link it to the course item.

Creating a Quiz course item

A quiz can be of two types:

Single answer correct
Multiple answers correct

Clicking on + Quiz would add a new quiz course item where you can customize the title and answers.

Creating an Article course Item

The article would allow you to present anything you want in a structured blog-like format. We use markdown for our articles and it is possible to use most of the markdown syntax available.

If you’d like to include a functionality here, please reach out to us.

Creating an Interactive lab on codedamn

Adding an interactive lab is probably the most interesting part of using codedamn for building a course. This part is important and has a small learning curve, therefore we will discuss this in the next chapter of this blog series.