Micro-learning & informational videos
Not everything worth teaching is worth building a course around.
Two short content types that need no course, no enrollment and no cohort. A micro-lesson is a single screen a learner works through and marks done. An informational video is a title, a description and one video. Both are open to anyone signed in, and both are part of the platform on every plan.
Two content types
The same shelf, two different things on it.
They share a list page, a card layout and a publishing rule. They differ in what the title opens.
Micro-learning
A lesson a learner takes
A title and a summary, an optional video, a body of authored rich text, and knowledge checks. A Mark as done control at the foot of it, which stays disabled until every check on the page has been answered correctly.
One screen. There is no module, no page sequence and no navigation to learn, because a thing that is short and has one objective should not arrive with a table of contents.
Informational videos
A video somebody needs to see
A title, a description and one video — uploaded to the platform or hosted somewhere else — with captions on the uploaded case and a transcript link where one is recorded. Nothing else on the page.
A briefing, a policy update, a walkthrough of a change to a form. Material that has to reach everybody and would be absurd as a course.
Inside a micro-lesson
Everything on one screen, in one order.
The page renders the title and summary, the video if there is one, the body, the knowledge checks, and the control that marks it done. In that order, every time.
Checks that are not a test
Knowledge checks can be answered in any order, with unlimited retries and no score. A check is a prompt to think rather than an assessment, so nothing keeps a history of the wrong turns.
Done means answered correctly
Answering is not enough — the answer has to be right. Because retries are unlimited, that asks for persistence rather than luck.
The gate lives in the model
Whether a lesson can be marked done is decided underneath the page rather than by the page, so a future route to the same act cannot arrive without the rule attached to it.
Authored with the tools that exist
The body is the same sanitized rich text used everywhere else in the platform, and the check validation is the same code the course block editor uses — extracted and shared, not reimplemented.
A draft is visible to its author
An unpublished lesson is reachable by the person writing it, and by the full-access administrative role. It does not appear on the list, and it refuses a direct link from anybody else.
Not a small course
A micro-lesson is its own thing in the platform rather than a Course with most of it switched off, so nothing that means "an actual course" — a roster, a certificate, a completion figure — has to learn an exception for it.
Informational videos
The video stack you already have, pointed at everybody.
An informational video is not a second implementation of video. It is the platform's existing video, with the requirement that it belong to a course removed.
- Uploaded or externally hosted. The same file-or-link rule the course video library applies, including the check that refuses both at once and the normalization of a pasted video URL.
- Captions on uploaded video. One caption track and a language per video, stored as WebVTT — a SubRip file is converted on the way in — and validated to catch what a browser would otherwise reject silently.
- Served from your own deployment. Caption files go through the same permission-checked uploads route as every other file, which is what keeps them same-origin and avoids cross-origin handling entirely.
- Captions are refused where they would be a lie. A video hosted somewhere else is rendered by that host, so the platform will not accept a caption file for it. It asks for a transcript link instead, and says so at the point of upload.
- Archiving, and what blocks a deletion. Videos can be archived and listed separately, and the shared library check that names what still points at an item before it can be removed covers these too.
An honest limit
A caption file is not a caption guarantee
The platform validates that a caption track is well-formed and will play. It cannot know whether the captions are accurate, complete or in sync — automatically generated nonsense passes the same check a professionally authored track does.
That is stated here for the same reason the authoring quality check states its own limits: a check that is described as more than it is becomes a reason not to look.
Finding them, and putting them there
Two list pages, and a narrow permission to publish to them.
Cards, newest first
Each list page shows a thumbnail, a title and a description, ordered newest first and paginated twelve to a page.
Twelve because the card grid resolves to three, two or one column depending on the width of the screen, and twelve divides evenly at all three — a final row that is short at every size is a row that looks like a fault.
Where each audience finds them
Students get two links in their own navigation bar, because these are destinations a learner comes back to rather than something they are sent to once.
Staff reach the same two pages from the existing Authoring menu, spending no room in a navigation bar that is already carrying an organization.
One page, not two
There is no separate management view. A viewer who is allowed to author sees the authoring controls on the list; everybody else sees the cards.
Gating the page by role as well would refuse an author the page that shows what they wrote.
Uploading is unchanged
Anyone who can already add a video to a course library still can, on exactly the same terms. This feature did not widen that.
Publishing is narrower
Creating and publishing a micro-lesson or an informational video is reserved for an ISD and for the full-access administrative role — the same line the platform already draws around creating a course.
Editing stays with the author
An item is edited, archived, published and unpublished by the person who created it, or by the full-access administrative role. The same shape used everywhere else.
What is recorded
"Opened" is not "watched", and the platform will not say it is.
A micro-lesson records completion, because there is a real act to record: the learner answered every check correctly and marked it done.
Video is different. For a video uploaded to your deployment, the platform records that a person opened it, on the strength of an actual play event from the player. That is the whole of the claim. It does not mean the video was watched to the end, and it is not written as though it did.
For a video hosted somewhere else, nothing is recorded at all, because nothing honest can be. The platform does not control that player and receives no reliable signal from it, so inventing a number would be worse than having none.
The four words this feature refuses to use about a video — watched, completed, viewed, attended — are checked for. A test sweeps every page these features render looking for them, and it caught the feature's own first draft using one of them.
The reporting consequence
What you can and cannot ask for
- Who completed a micro-lesson, and when
- Who opened an uploaded informational video
- Not: how much of a video anybody watched
- Not: anything at all about an externally hosted video
Next step
See the short path and the long one side by side.
A walkthrough can cover both: a micro-lesson published to the whole installation in a few minutes, and a full course with a roster, assessment and a certificate behind it.