A new experience for Learning Lab authors

GitHub Learning Lab provides hands-on, guided learning experiences to help aspiring and experienced developers learn how to build software, work in teams, and more. We’ve spent some time focusing on the authoring experience, and we can’t wait to show you everything you can do with the improvements we made to Learning Lab.

What’s new

Anyone with a GitHub account can create a public course, and we’ve made it even easier with a few improvements to the course creation flow.

Create a course with the course builder UI

If using YAML has been holding you back from writing a course, the new course builder is a dream come true. We’ve completely redesigned course building, and with a few clicks, you can now create, test, and edit courses directly in Learning Lab.

The course builder does the heavy lifting, allowing you to do what you do best: teach. When you create a new course, the app will create the course repositories in your account before directing you to an editor. Then, you’re able to select bot actions, write responses, and validate that everything is working properly.

The course builder can also help you make changes to existing courses from the course dashboard. If you have a great idea for a course, now it’s easier than ever to get started.

Embed videos in your course steps

Since we made course building easier, you’ll have more time to do a sound check with your microphone and create a few great videos to go along with your courses. Now you can even embed those videos from YouTube or Vimeo directly in the course steps. 

Learn more about embedding videos in courses

Teach in multiple languages

Do you want to teach your course in more than one language? We now support multiple languages from a single course repository. To show you how easy it is, we translated the “Introduction to GitHub” course into Spanish and Japanese.

By removing language barriers, we hope that even more users can take advantage of our courses and create content of their own.

Check out GitHub’s open source courses

We know that seeing examples of a project’s source can help ignite new ideas and speed up development. With this in mind, we’ve decided to open source all Learning Lab courses created by our GitHub team. Whether you’re multilingual and want to contribute a translation, you have an idea to make the courses better, or you want to fork and customize a course for your preferred workflows—we’ve seen the powerful things that the open source community can do and we’re excited to experience it with you. To see all of our open source course repositories, check out the GitHub Training organization on GitHub. 

Build your own bot behaviors

Another update we’ve made is open sourcing the Learning Lab bot’s behaviors so you can train it to do new things. We never want to be a roadblock or get in the way of shipping creative and innovative work, and we hope the ability to change bot behaviors helps. 

Learn more about bot behaviors

Learning Lab API

Finally, we’re beginning to explore opportunities for you to connect with Learning Lab from applications outside of the GitHub platform. The API is now open for preview and ready for you to build with.

Learn more about the API

Join us in building a brighter tomorrow

Whether you’re a professional educator, developer, part of a non-profit, open source maintainer, or aspiring teacher—you can help someone discover a future in technology. We want to provide a place for you to connect with like-minded professionals, explore new ideas, and shape the future of education. Learn how you can get involved, and check out the Learning Lab Author Community.

Get started with Learning Lab

Written by

Cynthia Rich

@crichID