Your first course, guided
How a new organization's creator goes from sign-up to a first course their people can take, in one guided conversation.
A new organization opens on Home with Let's build your first course. This page is what happens next. It takes a few minutes, and you finish with a course whose first module your learners can take today. How the organization itself is made, and what Vidext sets up in it, is in Set up your organization.
Only the person who created the organization sees the guided start.
Four questions
The page stands on its own, with no sidebar, and asks one question at a time under four marks, one filled for each step reached. Each question is answered on the page: pick one of the answers, or type your own in the message field.
Your website
With a work email, Vidext offers your email domain's website first, or Use another website. If you signed up with a personal address, type your company's website. Vidext reads your website's logo and colours and shows them on the page, with where it found them. Your brand kit itself comes from the longer read of the site that every new workspace gets. See Branding.
The goal
Pick one or more: Onboarding new hires, Safety and compliance, Technical training, or Upskilling teams. While you answer, Vidext's agents research your company on the public web: what it does, where it works, how big it is and who it hires, the rules it works under, and recent news. What they find appears under What I found, each fact with its source.
Who learns
Pick who takes the first course from the groups the research suggests (up to four), or type your own.
Pick a course
Three proposed courses appear, built from your goals, your learners and what the research found. Each shows a photo for what it answers, its title and the fact that makes it worth doing first. Choose Build this course, or choose Your own idea and describe it in the message field.
Not now, on the line above the questions, takes you to Home as it always is. The guided start picks up where you left it the next time you open Home, until its course starts being built.
The first module
Once you pick a course, the page becomes the chat you will use from now on, drawn like any other conversation. From then on Home is Home as it always is, and the course's conversation stays where you left it. The agents plan the course as three short modules of about three minutes each and build only the first. While it builds, the conversation shows Home's templates, example modules made with Vidext: open any of them to watch it. Here they are only to watch; you can start from one later on Home.
When the first module is built, it opens in the studio on its own, so you can watch it and change any line.
Share it
Share, on the module line above the message field, opens Who should take it?. On wider screens, the course as learners will get it stands beside the question: its modules, and which of them is built.
- Type or paste email addresses. Each becomes a row.
- On each row, choose Learner (takes the course) or Editor (joins as a member and builds courses with you). Everyone starts as a learner.
- With at least one learner, Certificate when they finish gives each learner a Standard certificate by email when they complete the course. It is on unless you turn it off. See Certifications.
- Choose Publish and share, or Invite when everyone on the list is an editor.
With learners on the list, sharing publishes the course with its first module and assigns it to your default team, then adds the learners to that team. Learners who already have a Vidext account join at once; everyone else gets an invitation by email, and the course is waiting for them when they accept. Editors are added the same way, as members: at once with an account, by invitation without one. Each row then says what happened to that address. See Publish a course and Members and roles.
Not now closes it, as Escape and browser Back do. Share stays on the module line, so you can share later, or never: nothing is published until you do.
Once it is shared, Vidext takes you to Home, where a short celebration shows who you shared it with. Go to your workspace closes it, and the guided start is over.
The setup guide
After the celebration, a Setup guide stands at the foot of the sidebar, where the release notes usually are, until every step is done. Only the person who ran the guided start sees it. Its steps tick themselves off as you work:
- Your first course: build the first module, publish the course and invite your learners. The guided start already did all three, so this group arrives done.
- Finish the course: build the remaining modules, publish the update so learners get them, and see a learner finish a module.
Each step opens where it is done: the course's conversation for building and publishing, and the course's page for learners. The guide can be folded down to its progress bar. Closing it, or finishing every step, puts it away for good. It shows only while the sidebar is open on a wide screen.
What the guided start does not do
- It builds one module. The other two are planned. Learners get them only once you build them from the chat and publish an update; building never shows learners anything. See Publish a course.
- It researches your company, never you. The agents read public pages about the company. They do not look up you or your colleagues.
- It does not publish on its own. Nothing reaches learners until you choose Publish and share. With only editors on the list, nothing is published at all.
- It does not come back once it is over. After the celebration, everything is the ordinary chat, with the setup guide beside it; see the Quickstart.
Your default team
Sharing assigns the course to your default team, and everyone you add from here joins that team, editors included, so they all get the course, as does anyone who joins the team later. To aim the course at a narrower group, create a team and assign it instead. See Teams and assignment.
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