Publish a course

Publishing is what makes a course enrollable. Until you publish, a course only exists in draft — you can build out its content, but you can't invite anyone to it yet.

Open the Publish wizard

1. In your course's sidebar, click Publish.

For a course that hasn't been published yet, this opens a 4-step wizard:

1. Organization settings — Set up the profile of your organization
2. Course information — Add details about your course
3. Pricing — Configure the pricing for your course
4. Publish — Make your course available to students

The wizard opens on the first step that still has something missing.

Step 1: Organization settings

This step edits your organization's profile, not the course — the wizard just makes sure it's filled in before letting participants discover your course through it. It requires your organization's Name, Short description, and Rich description all to be set.

If any of those are missing, fill them in here and click Save and Continue (the button reads plain Continue once nothing is unsaved). If your organization already has a complete profile, this step is already checked off and you can move straight through it.

Step 2: Course information

This step requires four things on the course itself: a cover Image, a Course name, a Short course description, and a Rich course description.

• Course name and Short course description are usually already filled in from when you created the course.
• Image and Rich course description are the two fields most new courses are still missing at this point.

The image field works the same way as the course cover picker elsewhere in the app: Select from Media Library to reuse an existing image, or upload a local file, which opens a Resize and crop your image dialog (locked to a 16:9 crop) before adding it to your organization's file library and setting it as the cover.

If you try to continue with something missing, a message appears under the relevant field after a few seconds — Course image is required, Course name is required, Short description is required, or Rich description is required.

Step 3: Pricing

If the course doesn't have a price set up yet, this step opens on an Initialize Your Pricing empty state; click Start Pricing Setup to reveal the actual form.

Choose a Payment method:

• Stripe (Recommended) — payments processed through your organization's connected Stripe account. If Stripe isn't connected yet, an alert explains that and links to Configure Stripe.
• Free — No payment required. This alone satisfies the step.
• Custom (External payment method) — you handle payment yourself; requires a payment link.

Below the payment method is a separate Access control setting — Decide if your course is freely accessible or requires approval:

• Purchasable — anyone can enroll (subject to the payment method above). This is the default for a newly created course.
• Invite only — people need an invitation, though they can still submit a request to join if they find the course.

Access control saves immediately when you change it — it isn't tied to the step's Continue button.

Step 4: Publish

Once the first three steps are complete, this step shows Ready to publish and a Publish course button. If something is still missing, it instead shows Missing requirements for publishing — Please complete all the previous steps before publishing your course.

Click Publish course, then confirm in the dialog that appears — Are you sure you want to publish this course? — with its own Publish button (Publishing... while it's working).

Publishing does three things at once:

1. Marks the course as published.
2. Publishes every section's content — the same as if you'd published each section's draft individually.
3. Makes the course's Participants area usable — before this, that area is blurred with a notice that the course has to be published before you can invite anyone.

After you publish

Once the course is published (and there's nothing newer waiting to publish), visiting Publish in the sidebar shows a Course published confirmation — All your content has been published and is visible to participants — with Invite participants and Back to content buttons.

Publish changes after your course is live

Editing a section on a published course doesn't update what participants see right away — each section keeps a separate published copy, and you publish your edits to it explicitly (see Use the section content editor).

Once a course is published, the sidebar's Publish button reads Publishing — that's true whether or not any sections have unpublished edits. When a published course does have sections with unpublished edits:

• A badge next to the Publishing button shows the number of sections that have unpublished changes.
• Visiting Publish shows an Unpublished Changes screen — Your course has changes that are not yet visible to participants — listing the affected sections grouped by chapter, each with a link to jump straight into that section.
• Click Publish all changes to publish every listed section at once. It shows Publishing... while it runs, then Changes published successfully.

Next steps

• Create a course if you haven't built out the course's content yet.
• Set a price for a course to change payment or access control after launch.
• Invite and manage participants once the course is live.
• See the FAQ for answers to common questions.

FAQ