Build your first course
Courses, sections and lessons: how they fit together, what a lesson can hold, and getting it published.
- courses
- visibility
A course in Drry has three levels. The course holds sections, and sections hold lessons. A lesson can also have sub-lessons nested one level under it, which is useful for a lesson with several parts.
Courses are in the sidebar under Courses. Every plan gets unlimited courses, including the free one.
Press New course
Two fields: a title, and a cover colour from seven presets. Both are changeable later, and you can swap the colour for a photo once you are inside.
Add a section
Sections are the chapters. "Getting started", "Week one", "The basics". Even a short course reads better with two or three than as one long list.
Add lessons
Inside a section, press Add lesson. Each lesson opens in its own editor.
There are three lesson types in the dropdown: Lesson (video or text), Audio lesson, and Quiz. You do not choose between video and text: a lesson is a video lesson if you put a video on it and a text lesson if you do not.
Write the lesson
The body is a normal rich text editor: headings, bold, lists, quotes, links and inline images.
Below it you can add attachments, up to ten per lesson at 100 MB each. Members see them under a Resources heading. PDFs, documents, slides, spreadsheets, images and zip files are all accepted.
Publish the lesson, then the course
Lessons and courses are published separately. Switch on Lesson published and press Save, then open Course settings and switch the course itself to published.
If your lessons are still drafts when you publish the course, Drry asks whether to publish them too. Say yes unless you deliberately want an empty shell.
Controlling when lessons open
Course settings has a When it opens section, and each lesson has its own. You can release a lesson a number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, a number of days after they finish another lesson, or only once they have completed specific lessons first.
One thing to know: the clock starts from when the member joined your community, not from when they started the course. Someone who has been a member for a year sees a brand new twelve week course fully unlocked from day one.
Common questions
Can I sell a single course on its own?
No. One membership unlocks everything in your community. That is deliberate, and it is why there is no per-course checkout.
Can a lesson have both a video and audio?
No, one or the other. Trying to switch type while media is attached tells you to remove the other first.
Does duplicating a course use more storage?
Yes. It genuinely copies the video files, so a duplicated course counts twice against your storage allowance. It can be refused if that puts you over.
What do members see when a course has no published lessons?
An empty course. Sections with nothing published in them disappear entirely, so a course that is all draft lessons looks broken. Publish at least one lesson.