Create a course manually

When you have the course structure in your head (or in a doc you don’t want Wisteria to parse), the manual path is faster than AI upload.

On /admin/courses, click + New course. The modal opens. Click Create blank course manually.

Fill in course basics

Title — what the learner sees on their dashboard
Description — one or two sentences; appears under the title
Cover image — upload, paste a URL, or browse Unsplash (you can add this later too)
Department — which department this course will deliver to when published
Initial tag — at least one tag. Tags decide which approval workflow runs (see Tags)

Click Create. Wisteria creates the course shell and takes you to the course detail page.

Add modules

The course detail page shows an empty module list. Click + Add module to add the first one. Each module needs:

Title — what the learner sees as the section header
Description — optional, helpful for the module list view
Cover image — optional; falls back to the course cover

You can add modules now or come back later. Each new module opens to its editor.

Module editor

Three tabs:

Details — title, description, cover image
Flashcards — the lesson content (see Writing flashcards)
Quiz — the test questions (see The 4 quiz question types)

Work through each tab. Save as you go (the Save button is on every tab; nothing auto-saves the form fields, only the actual flashcards/quiz content).

When the module is done

On the Quiz tab, click Ready to Submit. This marks the module as finished — it doesn’t submit yet. See Submitting a course for the full submission flow.

When the whole course is done

When every module is marked Ready, a modal pops up automatically asking if you want to submit the course for approval. You can submit immediately, or click Save & exit to defer.

Tips for the manual path

Start with one module. Don’t pre-plan ten modules; create one, edit it end-to-end, see how it feels, then add the next.
Write the quiz before the flashcards. Decide what the learner needs to be able to answer; then write flashcards that teach them. AI Match can then auto-draft missing cards from the quiz questions (see AI Write & AI Match).
Don’t fear the cover image. A reasonable Unsplash photo (search “factory worker safety”, “team meeting”, “office desk”) looks more polished than a missing cover.

When NOT to use this path

If you have a source document (PDF, PPT, PPTX) that already contains the training content, AI upload is faster. Claude reads the document, proposes module splits, drafts flashcards. You spend the same time editing as you would writing from scratch, but with a head start. See AI upload.