Topics

If you’ve got a lot of content, you can use Topics to create a helpful hierarchy in your course. If you’ve got a lot of content, you can use Topics to create a helpful hierarchy in your course. They’re a fantastic way to organize your course content and make it more digestible for your students. Think of them as the chapters in your lesson’s book. Some course admins might only create section headings, and add Lessons to each section, but Topics give you one additional level of organization.

NOTE

Topics can only be added to lessons within a course. If your course requires one level of hierarchy, you’ll want to use Lessons instead.

Like Lessons, you can add course materials to your Topics including text, images, video, PDFs, presentation slides, and more. There are a few distinct differences between Lessons and Topics, along with some additional display settings for Topics that we’ll cover in this section.

• Global Topic Settings

  Settings applied to all topics on your site

• Display & Content Settings

  Add materials, configure video settings, control assignment uploads & topic timers

• Create Topic Content

  Add text & images, insert videos, embed interactive content, etc.

Lessons vs. Topics

Lessons and Topics share a number of similarities but also have a few important distinctions that we’ll explore below.

• Lessons are listed above Topics in the course hierarchy. You can have a course with only lessons, but you cannot have a course that consists of only topics. Topics can only be added beneath lessons.
• You can offer sample lessons, but not sample topics
• Topics can now also be drip-fed the same way as lessons.
• The Topic’s parent lesson determines the schedule. For example: if a lesson is scheduled for January 1, 2025, all nested Topics will also be released on that date.

Sections are very different from Lessons and Topics. To learn more, see our article explaining course sections.

Below you’ll find a visual overview comparing of Lessons and Topics: