Setting Up Your Lessons
ActionEra lessons are standalone screens that can be included individually under listings to appear in directories or topics.
Lessons are separate from ActionCourses and fulfill a more customizable and niche approach to course creation. If you're looking for a more streamlined "packaged" system for course creation, use ActionCourses.
As a whole, lessons are created as a way to create standalone "Assets" for your directory/topic listings that are groups of assets, like videos with text and audio options.
You can access lessons under ACTIONPAGES in the Content Portal:
Lesson Options and Fields
Image of the Lessons home screen
Image of a new lesson screen
New Lesson Fields
- Title - The title of the screen
- Description - The subtitle of the listing
- Image URL - The thumbnail of the listing
- Release Date - When the content will be visible
- Call to Action Text and URL - When included, will create a button at the bottom of the screen with custom text and destination URL
- Featured toggle - (Web Only) when toggled on, will add the lesson under a special "Featured" section
- Topics/Listings - What topic/listing the lesson is associated with
- Sort Order - What sort order the lesson will appear in along other content
- Tags - Tags control the visibility of the content based on what tags the user has
- Active toggle - When toggled on/off the content will be visible (to those with associated tags) or hidden
- Web URL - The direct URL for access via the web app
Lesson Sections / Adding Lesson Content
Lesson content is broken up into lesson sections from which the screen will load content in an order you set.
When creating new sections/content you will need to select the "Add Section" button above the table of sections at the bottom of the screen. When selected you will open a drawer menu on the right that looks like this:
Image of adding new section menu
The section drawer contains 3 types of fields:
- Sort Order field - The first field, this sort order field is used to order how the segments will load on the screen, from lowest to highest number
- Description field - The second field, this description field is used internally as a way to identify what was added to that lesson section
- Content fields - All subsequent fields, these fields, when filled, will generate content on the lesson screen in the order they appear within the drawer. The lesson section fields include every major content delivery type within ActionEra.
Lesson Creation Structure
Because lessons are created in sections and generated in a set way, you will need to use multiple sections in order to have content load in the order that you want.
As an example of this, lets say you want to have a headline, followed by a video, followed by a title, followed by text, followed by an audio file.
To add the content in this order there would need to be 2 sections.
Section 1 would include the Headline and the Video
Section 2 would include the Title, text, and audio file.
When loaded on the screen using these two sections we would get the order we desire. If these content sections were loaded as a single section it would instead appear as
Headline, then title, then text, then video, then audio; which given the order we desire, would likely create a confusing page for users to experience.
Pro-Tip: Limit the number of videos you include in each lesson to as few as possible! Each video added to the screen will increase the time it takes for the screen to load and decrease the user experience when loading your lessons. You can break your content up into multiple lessons with multiple screens for optimal user experience!