A course in Mateflow is a Course Space: a space built from sections and lessons, with progress tracking, reviews, and optional certificates. Use it for an online course, a class, or a training program. You create the course first, then add lessons, set who can access it, and publish it.
Who can do this: Community owners and admins create courses. After that, owners, admins, and the course's space admins can manage it. Moderators can see the course list in the admin console but can't change courses. · Where: Web. Courses can't be created or managed in the mobile app. · Plan: Whether you can create courses, and how many, depends on your platform plan.
Create a course
You can start a course from the community or from the admin console. Both open the same short form.
- From the community: create a space and choose Course Space as the space type. See Create a space.
- From the admin console: go to Admin → Courses → All Courses and click Create Your Course. This form skips the space type step.
Then fill in the form:
- Choose the course's privacy: Public, Private, or Secret. You can change it later. A course you plan to charge for must be Private or Secret.
- Under Course Details, enter the Course Name (up to 100 characters).
- Optionally add a Subtitle, a short tagline shown on course cards (up to 200 characters), and a Description of what learners will get.
- Choose a Category. The category decides where the course appears in the sidebar.
- Optionally upload a Cover Image and a Course Avatar.
- Click Create Course.
When you create a course from the community, it opens with its Course Settings so you can keep going. From the admin console, the new course appears in the course list.
If the Create Your Course button shows an upgrade prompt, your community has reached the number of courses your platform plan allows. See Check plan usage and limits.
Open a course's Course Management panel
Each course has its own Course Management panel. You can open it in three ways:
- On the course page, click the gear icon (Manage Course).
- In the sidebar, open the course's ⋮ menu and click Manage course.
- In Admin → Courses → All Courses, click the course. The Edit Content and Settings icons on a course's row jump straight to its lessons or its settings.
The panel groups everything about the course:
| Section | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Overview | Draft or published status, curriculum and student counts, and shortcuts |
| Course Settings | Name, description, media, instructors, and completion rules |
| Access & pricing | Visibility, paid enrollment, and access groups |
| Join Requests, Students, Team | Approve requests, manage enrolled learners, and see the admins who run the course |
| Curriculum | Sections and lessons |
| Reviews, Analytics | Learner feedback and course performance |
| Publish | The publish checklist and the Publish button |
| Danger Zone | Archive or delete the course |
Fill in a course's Course Settings
Course Settings holds the course's identity and learning rules. Open the Course Management panel, click Course Settings, make your changes, and click Save changes.
Under Basic information:
- Course name, Subtitle, and Description. The description supports rich formatting.
- Category, Promo video, Cover image, and Course avatar.
- Instructors: search for members by name, username, or email. Instructors are shown on the course page and can open every lesson without enrolling, but being an instructor doesn't give someone permission to edit the course.
Under Completion and interaction:
- Seat limit (0 means unlimited).
- Completion criteria: All lessons, Required lessons only, or Completion percentage.
- Certificate: issue a certificate when a learner completes the course. See Course completion and certificates.
- Enable reviews and Allow discussions.
- Drip content: release sections on a schedule instead of all at once.
Prices, visibility, and access groups aren't in Course Settings. They're in Access & pricing. See Control who can access a course.
Manage all courses in the admin console
Admin → Courses → All Courses opens the Course Catalog, a list of every course with its status, completion, and rating. Use the Published, Drafts, and Archived tabs to filter it, and Export to download the catalog as CSV or JSON.
Each course's ⋯ menu includes Students Management, Course Analytics, Live Preview, Publish Course or Unpublish Course, and Delete Course. Deleting a course is permanent and removes its content and student progress. To take a course offline without losing anything, unpublish or archive it instead. See Archive, restore, or delete a space.
Get a new course ready to publish
A new course isn't listed in search or course directories until you publish it. Before that, you'll usually:
- Add sections and lessons. See Add sections and lessons to a course.
- Decide who can access the course, and whether it's free or paid. See Control who can access a course.
- Publish the course. See Publish a course.
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