Using the Lesson Plan Editor

Course Builder's Lesson Plan Editor shows the most common settings for a lesson plan—things like activity titles and durations, poll questions, and breakout prompts—in a form-like interface.

You’ll be shown a form that prompts you to customize or fill in the core settings for the lesson—things like activity titles, poll questions, and breakout prompts.

More complex configuration options, such as Forum stage layouts and the specific elements that appear there, are hidden by default. These can be accessed at any time by toggling the "View All Settings" switch in the top right. To learn more about editing these options see: Editing All Settings.

The two editor modes—All Settings View and Default View—offer complementary features for the same underlying lesson plan. You can switch back and forth at any time using the switch at the top right.

The rest of this article is about the view when the View All Settings switch is turned OFF. Visit Editing All Settings below for more information about other lesson plan settings.

On the left side of the editor window is the Outline View of the lesson plan. Click on any of the blue links to display the corresponding step in the main editing area on the right side of the window. A blue triangle appears next to the currently displayed step.

To add or remove learning outcomes attached to a single lesson plan, use the Outcomes field in the "Basic Class Info" section at the top of the lesson plan. Begin typing the name of a learning outcome and the field will autocomplete with any that are attached to the syllabus.

Note: This interface will not allow you to attach new learning outcomes to the syllabus overall. To do that, return to the Syllabus Editor.

To edit the title of an activity or a step, hover over it and click the pencil icon that appears. Type your changes and press Enter on your keyboard to save them.

Some fields have a white background and others have a light purple background as pictured below.

When you use a template to create your lesson plan, this content will be pre-generated, but you can edit or add to these notes as you see fit.

Some fields require content before the lesson plan can be published to Forum. Incomplete fields are marked with an orange dot in the Outline View (left side of the screen) and a red border around the content field in the main editing area (right side of the screen).

Typically, this will include Breakouts, Poll Questions, and slide content for each activity.

Choose a Step Option

Some activities in our templates require choosing a Step Option.

The choices are as follows:

Click the caret icon to the left of an activity to collapse or expand the view.

Tip: Collapse activities that you’ve finished editing to help focus your attention and scroll more quickly between activities.

If you create a lesson plan from a template, your lesson plan will usually be populated with slides for the Lesson Introduction, Activity Learning Goals, and a Session Summary.

These slides will be automatically populated based on the data you provide in the lesson plan. Below is an example of an automatically generated slide for a Lesson Introduction.

The content is automatically generated based on the slide type:

Note: Automatic updating on a slide is disabled if you ever manually edit that slide.