Different Modes of a Course

Every course (in fact, lesson) on Educative has 3 modes: edit, preview, and publish. To ensure a smooth creation process, it's important to understand the difference between them.

We'll cover the following

To create a course, you need to click the “CREATE” button on the top right of the collection editor page. That’s what it looks like:

How to open the course in the edit mode

  • Step 1: Click the “Create” option from the left sidebar and select the “Course” option. Or, directly visit this link.

  • Step 2: Under the “Created Courses” tab, you’ll see your courses. Click the “Edit” button on the relevant course’s card.

The course will open in edit mode. You can make modifications to the collection-editor page or lessons. Do not forget to save the changes through the “SAVE” button on the top right. You will stay on the same page, which means you can continue to edit.

What is preview mode?

To view how your content will be rendered at the learners’ end, click the “PREVIEW” button on the top right. To go back into edit mode, you can simply click the “EDIT” button again.

What is published mode?

The changes saved aren’t locked yet. For this to happen, open the course in edit mode and click the “UPDATE” button on the top right (or “CREATE” if it’s the first time). This will lock the changes and will take you to published mode.

Note that the course isn’t live yet; it just shows how it will look when taken live. Notice the URL. It is the same as the one in the preview mode of the collection-editor page but without the /draft at the end:

https://www.educative.io/collection/<author-id>/<course-id>

To return to the preview mode, append /draft to this URL and hit enter. Appending /draft will not work for lessons.

When the course is launched, it will be assigned a user-friendly URL. For example, the URL for this guide is: https://www.educative.io/courses/author-guide. Appending /draft to this kind of URL will not take you back to the preview mode.