Learning Lab
Courses Learning Paths For Organizations Docs
Sign in

Testing your course

Now it's time to get your course published in draft mode to test.

Install Learning Lab in your repositories

The Learning Lab GitHub App will need to be installed on your course and template repository. It might be easiest to install Learning Lab on the organization so you don't need to install it on any future course and template repositories.

Publish as a draft course

When you first publish a course, it will be in draft. Only you and other administrators of the course repository will be able to take the course while it is in draft.

To publish a course in draft:

  1. Navigate to https://lab.github.com/YOUR-ORG/new, replacing YOUR-ORG with your organization's user name. screenshot of the course publishing screen
  2. Enter the name of your course repository in the field.
  3. If your organization can create private courses, select Public or Private.
  4. Click Create course

A console will appear with real time updates as the course publishes.

Test your course

Now that your course has been created, it's ready for testing. To test:

  1. Navigate to your course by going to https://lab.github.com/YOUR-ORG/YOUR-TITLE, replacing YOUR-ORG with the name of your organization and YOUR-TITLE with the title of course course.
  2. Verify the course description.
  3. Register for the course.
  4. Verify the repo was created for you as a learner.
  5. Complete the steps in your course.
  6. Click on all links in your course.

Making updates to your course

As you test your course, it is likely that you'll want to make updates. Pushing any changes to your course repository's master branch will automatically update the course. See Keep in sync for more information.

Error handling

As you test your course, you'll run into errors and bugs. Sometimes, recognizing where you got stuck and giving a close look at the config.yml will show you exactly where you've run into issues.

Other times, you might need some extra context. Once a course has been published (even in draft), the Learning Lab app will report a status back to your course repository indicating whether your course was properly updated. This will be visible in the repository's commit history, or in pull requests.

screenshot of the Learning Lab bot CI