From an idea or your documents to a full course
How MagiCastor turns a short description or a folder of documents into a complete course, and where you stay in control at every step.
2 min readBy LdesignMedia
Most courses start the same way. Somebody has the knowledge, in a folder of documents, a slide deck or their own head. Somebody else needs a course by a certain date. This post walks through what happens in MagiCastor between those two points.
1. Start with what you have
You can start in two ways, and you can combine them.
- Upload your material: a syllabus, a slide deck, a set of PDFs. Up to 50 files.
- Or describe the course in two sentences: who it is for and what they should be able to do afterwards.
Our example course started that way: two typed sentences, typos included, and no files.
If your PDFs contain pictures, MagiCastor cuts them out too. You choose which ones the course may use. Reading your material costs no credits.
2. Read the whole plan
Before a single lesson is written, you get the whole course on one page: the sections in order, what each one covers, the activities in each section and how many questions each quiz carries.
If your folder is big, the plan can split it into several courses. You can split or merge them yourself as well.
This is the moment to disagree. Drafting the plan costs no credits either, so you see the whole course before you spend anything.
3. Change what you want changed
The plan is yours to edit. Rename a section, drag it earlier, swap a quiz for a discussion, delete an activity that misses the point, or move a section into another course. Nothing is written until you approve it.
4. Write it, then add it
When you approve the plan, MagiCastor writes the course. You can read every part and ask for any single section or activity to be written again, without touching the rest. Small fixes do not need a rewrite: you can change a few words in a page, book, lesson, quiz or assignment directly.
Only then does the course go into your learning platform, which is Moodle today. It arrives as a new course, in the category you pick, hidden until you publish it. The questions sit in the question bank, the grades in the gradebook, and completion tracking is switched on.
What you end up with
An ordinary course. It is built from the activities your teachers already know: lessons, pages, quizzes, assignments, H5P and SCORM modules. You keep editing it like any other course, and it stays where it is even if you stop using MagiCastor.
