Creating Courses

Overview

Self-paced courses let you package what you teach into a structured, on-demand learning product that students can enroll in and learn through on their own time — reaching learners beyond your live sessions. This page is for tutors. It walks through creating a course, building its curriculum from sections and lectures, choosing a pricing model, publishing, and tracking how many students have enrolled. It also covers the AI lesson planner, a separate tool that turns a topic into a ready-to-run lesson plan you can save and refine.

Everything described here lives under your tutor area. Course management starts at /tutor/courses (the My Courses screen), and the lesson planner lives at /tutor/lesson-planner.

A course always begins live as a draft. Drafts are private to you — students can’t see or enroll in a course until you publish it, and you can’t publish until it has at least one lecture.

Creating a course

From My Courses (/tutor/courses), select + New Course to open the create form (/tutor/courses/create). You provide the core details below, then save. The course is created as a draft and you’re taken straight to its edit screen to start building the curriculum.

Course detail fields

The URL slug is generated automatically from your title when the course is created. If another course already uses that slug, the platform appends a counter to keep it unique (for example algebra-basics becomes algebra-basics-2).

Additional fields on the edit screen

A few fields only appear once the course exists, on the Details panel of the edit screen:

• Learning outcomes — one per line; each line is stored as a separate outcome.
• Requirements — one per line; what a student should already know or have.
• Issue certificate on completion — a toggle (certificate_enabled).
• Drip content — a toggle (is_drip) for time-releasing content.

Building the curriculum: sections & lectures

The right-hand Curriculum panel on the edit screen (/tutor/courses/{course}/edit) is where you assemble the course. Content is organized in two levels: sections group related material, and lectures are the individual items inside a section.

Adding a section

At the bottom of the curriculum panel, enter a section title and select + Section. Sections are kept in the order you add them. To remove a section, use its Delete control — this permanently removes the section and every lecture inside it, so use it carefully.

Adding a lecture

Each section has an inline add-lecture form. Fill it in and select + Lecture:

Lectures within a section keep the order you add them. Each lecture row shows an icon for its type so the curriculum is easy to scan. To remove a lecture, use the × control on its row.

Whenever you add or remove a lecture, Tuitionable automatically recalculates the course’s lecture count and total duration, which is why the heading shows Curriculum (N lectures).

You need at least one lecture before you can publish. A course with zero lectures will return “Add at least one lecture before publishing” if you try.

Lecture content types

The type you choose determines how a lecture is presented to enrolled students. The available types are:

About assignment lectures. You can add a lecture of type assignment as a placeholder in your curriculum, and it will appear with its own icon. However, writing the assignment content is not available inside the course builder — there is no in-app assignment-content editor on this screen. Use video, reading, and file lectures for the content you deliver directly.

Setting pricing

A course’s price is controlled by two fields you set on the course details: Pricing (the model) and Price (the amount), together with a Currency.

A course is treated as free whenever its pricing model is free or its price is 0 — even if the model is set to one-time. If you want a paid course, make sure both the model and a non-zero price are set.

For how course payments connect to checkout, the wallet, and your earnings, see the related pages linked at the end.

Publishing & unpublishing

A course is private until you publish it. At the top of the edit screen, the Publish button toggles the course’s status:

• Publish — sets the status to published and records the publish time. The course becomes visible to students and open for enrollment.
• Unpublish — sets the status back to draft. The course is hidden from new students again. You can unpublish at any time.

Before you can publish, the course must have at least one lecture. If it has none, publishing is blocked with a prompt to add a lecture first.

Deleting a course

You can delete a course from the edit screen, but only if no students are enrolled. If a course has enrollments, deletion is blocked — unpublish it instead to stop new sign-ups while preserving access for existing students. Deleting a section or a lecture removes that item (and, for a section, all of its lectures) permanently.

Tracking enrollment

Each card on the My Courses screen (/tutor/courses) shows live stats for that course so you can see how it’s performing at a glance:

• Status badge — draft or published.
• Enrolled count — the number of students enrolled (for example, 14 enrolled).
• Lecture count — how many lectures the course contains.

My Courses list is paginated (12 courses per page) and shows your newest courses first. Select Edit on any card to open its detail and curriculum screen.

The enrolled count updates automatically as students join. Students enroll from the public course pages, not from your creating course screens — your role here is to build, price, publish, and maintain the course.

AI lesson planner

The AI Lesson Planner (/tutor/lesson-planner) is a separate tool that turns a single topic into a structured, ready-to-run lesson plan — complete with objectives, a timed lesson flow, materials, homework, and an assessment idea. Every plan you generate is saved to your personal library for reuse, and you can chat with an AI mentor about any saved plan to go deeper.

Generating a plan

Fill in the Plan a lesson form and select Generate lesson plan:

Generation takes a few seconds. When it succeeds, the new plan appears at the top of Your lesson plans, expanded and ready to read.

Saved plans & library

Your library lists every plan you’ve generated, newest first, each tagged with its subject, level, duration, and when it was created. Click a plan’s header to expand or collapse it. A typical plan shows:

• Summary and Objectives for the lesson.
• Lesson flow — a minute-by-minute timeline of phases, each with key teaching points.
• Materials needed, plus a Homework and Assessment suggestion.

To remove a plan you no longer need, use its Delete control and confirm. Plans are not edited in place — if you want a different version, generate a new one.

Discussing a plan with AI chat

Inside any saved plan, select Discuss this lesson further to open a persistent chat thread with the AI mentor. Ask it to explain a part more simply, suggest a real-world analogy, or advise how to teach the hardest section. Messages are limited to 1,000 characters, and the full conversation is saved with the plan so you can pick it up later.

Troubleshooting

Related pages

• Self-Paced Courses — how courses look and work from the student side.
• Pricing, Packages & Offers — pricing strategy across your tutoring products.
• Earnings & Commission — how paid enrollments involve into your earnings.
• Dashboard, Sessions & Analytics — your wider tutor dashboard and stats.