Getting started

This page walks the whole path once, in order. Each step links to the page that covers it properly.

Before you begin

You will need three things, and none of them are technical.

Something to build from — a document, or just a subject. One document is enough to start: a 20 to 100 page handbook, a set of standard operating procedures, or a slide deck exported as PDF all work well. It must be material your organisation created, or that you are licensed to adapt — see Uploading source material.

No document is also enough. If the thing your team needs to know is not written down anywhere, name the subject instead and it is mapped into one-hour skills you can pick from — each of which has to name a real, teachable method or it does not survive the gate.

Someone who can approve content. A course is not finished until a person on your side has read the scripts and watched the lessons. That person needs to know the subject. The platform removes the recording and the editing; it does not remove the expert.

Somewhere for the finished course to go. Coursor AI produces files. You publish them — usually by uploading them to the learning management system you already run.

1. Your workspace

Your organisation gets one workspace. Invite the people who need it and give each of them a role, because roles decide what someone can do: uploading material, starting a course, approving one, and deleting things are separate permissions.

Sign-in is per person. Do not share an account — the record of who confirmed a document and who approved a course is only worth having if it names a real person.

2. Set up your trainers

Every course says who it is by, and that identity carries through the narration and the workbook byline, and through the on-camera opening as well where the trainer has an avatar set. It lives under Settings → Trainers.

Most organisations end up with several — a clinical trainer, a safety trainer, an IT trainer — each with their own name, credentials, teaching style and voice, and an avatar only if you want one. Every course is made by the trainer marked default. Choosing a trainer per course is not built yet, so when a course should be taught by someone else, make them the default before you start it.

Two of the fields are ids from the services that narrate and render the presenter, and what they do when left empty is different in each case:

• ElevenLabs voice — required. It is the voice that narrates. With no voice id, rendering refuses rather than narrating your course in a voice belonging to someone else.
• HeyGen avatar — optional. It is the face on camera. Leave it empty and the course renders as narration over slides: nobody appears on camera in the lessons, no camera credits are spent, and nothing is blocked. A great deal of compliance training is deliberately faceless, so this is a finished course and not a half-configured one.

You can also set a course-title convention on a trainer — a prefix every one of their course titles has to start with. Leave it empty and no prefix is imposed.

3. Upload one document

Go to Source material and upload your file. PDF, plain text and Markdown are accepted. Uploading a file is the only way material gets in — there is nowhere to give the platform a web address and have it read the page.

Before anything is generated you must confirm, for that file, the basis on which you are entitled to use it. The default is that you or your organisation created it. Choosing any other basis means naming the licence or permission you are relying on.

The file is then extracted and split into passages that keep their page number and heading. When it shows a page count and a passage count, it is ready.

4. Start a course from it

Starting a course does not write the course. It writes the plan — the sections, the lessons inside each one, and how many minutes each lesson should take — and then it stops and waits for you. Nothing else is generated until you approve that plan.

5. Approve the plan — the course is waiting on you here

Open the course. Where the course document will later be, there is a panel headed Approve the plan for this course, and it stays there until somebody presses approve. It does not time out, and it does not go ahead on its own. This is the one step in the walkthrough where waiting longer changes nothing.

Read the lesson list, then change it: add a lesson, remove one, move one between sections, rename a section, set the minutes a lesson should take, or leave an instruction on a single lesson or on the plan as a whole. Nothing is saved as you type — approving is the act, and it is the one that starts the spending.

This is the cheapest correction in the whole process. Moving a lesson now is a keystroke; the same change once the course is written is a re-generation.

Approving is the same permission as confirming the document in step 6, so whoever you picked as your approver can do both.

When you approve, one writing pass runs per lesson and produces the course document: a script for every lesson and its opening line, the student workbook and a quiz sized to the course — roughly one question per three minutes, so about twenty for an hour, never fewer than eight and never more than forty. That takes a while. It is writing a whole course, not answering a prompt.

6. Review the document — this is the important part

Read it. All of it. This is the cheapest moment in the whole process to fix anything, because everything is still text.

Look for the things a machine cannot know: a figure that changed last quarter, a policy that was superseded, a product name nobody uses internally, a step that is technically correct and practically wrong. Edit in place, or send a lesson back to be written again.

When it is right, confirm the document. Nothing renders before you do.

See Reviewing a course for what to look at, lesson by lesson.

7. Produce

Rendering narrates every lesson in your trainer’s voice, renders the presenter if an avatar is set, composes and animates the slides, and assembles the lesson videos. This is real compute and it takes real time — hours for a full course, not minutes.

8. Automated checks

When rendering finishes, the course goes through five layers of automated checks before anyone is asked to look at it. If a hard gate fails, the course goes back to be re-rendered — or, where the fault is in the text, back to the document for you to fix.

See Automated quality checks.

9. Approve the finished lessons

When the checks are green the course is ready for review. Someone on your team watches the lessons and approves. That approval is recorded against their account.

Approval is a state the course is moved into, and the only thing that moves it there is a person pressing approve. The delivery kit downloads from that state onward and is refused before it.

10. Download and publish

An approved course downloads as one archive: the lesson videos in order and a subtitle file for each, the short course intro that plays first, the whole course assembled as a single video, the cover art at listing size and as a 4K master, the student workbook as a PDF, the objectives and assessment map, the quiz as text and as a bulk-import CSV, and the listing fields.

If your LMS takes a package rather than loose files, the same course also exports as SCORM 1.2 or xAPI, from the Your own LMS panel on the course. That download carries the same lessons, subtitles and final quiz inside a manifest your LMS understands, with a player that reports completion back to it. Completion is recorded by your LMS and only by your LMS.

Neither download is an integration: both are files you take and upload yourself. Nothing is pushed into your LMS for you.

See The delivery kit for what each file is and where it goes.

Then do it again, faster

The second course is quicker than the first, because your trainer is already set up and you already know what your review pass is looking for. And when the policy changes, you change the document and produce the course again — which is the part that is genuinely hard to buy any other way.

Start with one document, or with just a subject

That is the whole path. The fastest way to see whether it holds is to watch it run on something of yours: send us one document, a handbook or a set of SOPs or a deck, and we will produce lessons from it. If what your team needs to know is not written down anywhere, name the subject instead and send nothing at all. Either way you see the same review screen described in step 6.

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