Instructor How-To Guide

The Academic Center is the part of campus where structured courses live. Everything an instructor does — building a course, teaching it live, tracking who's enrolled, handing out assignments — happens here.

Two delivery types

Self-Paced courses are a library of lessons a student can move through on their own time. No schedule, no cohort, no live sessions.

Live Cohort courses share the same lesson content but are delivered to a group on a schedule. Cohort students also get a weekly rhythm, live sessions, weekly assignments, and a dedicated discussion room in the Student Center.

Where to find the instructor dashboard

Go to /academic-center/manage. You'll need the instructor role on your account; if you don't have it, ask whoever runs the project to grant it.

What you can do from the dashboard

• Create and edit courses (Modules, Lessons, publish state)
• Manage enrollments (bulk-enroll by email, pause, drop, complete)
• Schedule live sessions (Live Sessions tab)
• Post weekly assignments (Assignments tab)
• Post announcements that email enrolled students automatically

1. Go to /academic-center/manage.
2. Click + New Course.
3. Fill in: title, description, delivery type (Self-Paced or Live Cohort).
4. A URL slug is auto-generated from the title. You can't change it after creation, so pick a title you'll be happy with.
5. The course starts as a Draft — students can't see it in the catalog until you publish it.

After saving, the course detail page opens with tabs for Modules, Lessons, and so on. The course editor is also reachable later from the dashboard by clicking Edit Course on any course card.

A Module is a grouping unit. For weekly-rhythm courses (like Developing), one module = one week. For a self-paced course, modules can represent topics or sections. Modules have a position (order) and can be reordered.

A Lesson is the individual learning unit inside a module.

Lesson types — when to use each

• Video — recorded teaching sessions or video content. Paste the video URL into the lesson.
• Reading — book chapters or text-based material. Use the markdown body for the reading itself, or link out to a Library work.
• Exercise — techniques and practice activities. The Exercise Prompt field carries the specific instruction the student follows.
• Reflection — journaling, workbook, and personal practice. The student writes a private reflection tied to the lesson.
• Assignment — cross-campus activities (visiting the Library, Student Center, Mentor Center). Use the Resource Links field to add buttons that deep-link into other parts of campus.
• Discussion — a cohort discussion requirement. Set min_threads and min_replies for completion thresholds. The actual conversation lives in the cohort's Student Center space; the discussion lesson cross-queries it.
• Live Session — live teaching. After the session, the recording shows up on the lesson automatically (see Running a Live Lecture).

The weekly-rhythm model

For courses like Developing, each module represents one week and contains one lesson per activity lane: a video or live session for teaching, a reading, an exercise, an assignment, a reflection, and a discussion. Students see this as "This Week" on their cohort dashboard.

Lesson content

Lesson bodies are written in Markdown. You can also use the AI Draft Assistant to generate a first draft from Library sources, then edit before saving.

Required vs optional, and previewable

• Required lessons count toward course completion. Optional lessons don't.
• Previewable lessons are visible to non-enrolled visitors on the public course page as a teaser. Use this sparingly.

Live lectures use Daily.co for video. The flow is: create a Daily.co room → schedule a session in MU that points at that room → students join in-page when it's time. Daily handles the video; MU handles the schedule, the RSVP, and the recording archive.

Before the session

1. Log in to your Daily.co dashboard.
2. Click Create room. Give it a recognizable name (e.g. developing-week-1).
3. Recommended settings:
   • Enable recording: ON — so the session is auto-archived for students who couldn't attend.
   • Enable chat: optional. Cohort discussion happens in the Student Center, but in-room chat is useful for quick questions during the talk.
   • Privacy: Private — only people with the link can join.
4. Copy the room URL. It looks likehttps://yoursubdomain.daily.co/developing-week-1.
5. In MU, go to /academic-center/manage→ your course → Live Sessions tab.
6. Select the cohort this session is for.
7. Click + New Session. (If the button is disabled, hover over it — the tooltip will tell you why, usually "no cohorts linked to this course yet.")
8. Fill in:
   • Title — e.g. "Week 1: What Is Manifesting"
   • Session Type — Lecture (default), Q&A, Office Hours, Workshop, or Guest
   • Date/Time — when the session starts and ends
   • Meeting URL — paste the full Daily.co room URL
   • Daily Room Name — just the room slug (e.g. developing-week-1). This is what Daily's recording webhook uses to match the recording back to this session, so it must match exactly.
   • Materials — optional links to readings or slides
   • Description — a sentence or two about what the session covers
9. Save. Enrolled cohort students will see the session on their cohort dashboard and can RSVP.

During the session

1. Students go to /academic-center/cohort. The session appears with a Join Live Sessionbutton that activates 15 minutes before start time.
2. Clicking Join opens the Daily.co room embedded in-page — no separate app or download needed.
3. You (the instructor) join the same room from your Daily dashboard or by visiting the room URL directly.
4. The room has built-in controls for camera, microphone, screen share, gallery view, and recording.
5. If recording was enabled in the room settings, it starts automatically when the session starts. You can also start and stop it manually from Daily's controls.

After the session

1. Daily processes the recording. This takes a few minutes.
2. A webhook automatically updates the MU session record with the recording URL, duration, and status.
3. Students return to the session page and see Watch Recording — the video plays directly in the browser.
4. The cohort dashboard shows Recording available on past sessions that have recordings.

Tips and troubleshooting

• Test your setup before the first real session.Create a throwaway room, join it yourself, verify video and audio work. The Daily.co dashboard has a built-in test call.
• Double-check the Daily Room Name. The recording webhook matches on this field. If it doesn't match exactly, the recording won't attach automatically.
• If a recording doesn't appear:
  1. Was recording actually enabled in Daily?
  2. Does the Daily Room Name on the MU session match the room exactly?
  3. Is the Daily webhook configured to call the MU edge function?
• You can also manually paste a recording URL into the session edit form if the webhook didn't fire.

A cohort is a specific group of people taking a course together during a defined time window — e.g. "Developing Pilot, Fall 2026."

Creating a cohort

Cohorts are currently created in the database. Ask an admin to add one and link it to your course. (Self-serve cohort creation is on the roadmap but not built yet.)

Cohort dates

A cohort has a start and end date. These determine "current week" for students viewing the cohort dashboard, which drives what shows up under This Week.

Enrolling students

1. From the dashboard, open the Enrollments tab.
2. Click Bulk Enroll.
3. Paste a list of email addresses. They must belong to people who already have MU accounts. Choose the course and the cohort to enroll them in.
4. Submit. You'll see successes and any rejections (e.g. no account found for an email).

The student's cohort view

Enrolled students see their cohort dashboard at /academic-center/cohort. It shows this week's activities, upcoming and past live sessions, weekly assignments, and a link to the cohort's discussion room in the Student Center.

Assignments are cohort-specific weekly prompts. They appear on the student's cohort dashboard under This Weekand complement the course lessons — they add the accountability and context layer that a self-paced course doesn't have.

Creating an assignment

1. Open the Assignments tab on the instructor dashboard.
2. Select the course, then the cohort.
3. Click + New Assignment. Fill in:
   • Title
   • Body (Markdown)
   • Reading links — books or chapters the assignment refers to
   • Tracker prompt — a one-line nudge that shows up in the Manifesting Tracker if the student uses it
   • Due date
4. Save.

Assignments are tied to a cohort, not to a course in general. If you run the same course again with a new cohort, you'll create a fresh set (or duplicate from the previous one once that feature lands).

Instructor announcements are posted as threads in the cohort's Student Center space, marked as instructor prompts. When you post one, every enrolled student in that cohort automatically receives an email notification.

How to post one

1. Open the Student Center and navigate to your cohort's room. (Or use the Announcements tab on the instructor dashboard if you prefer.)
2. Start a new thread. Mark it as an instructor prompt (it'll get a pinned/instructor pill).
3. Submit. The email goes out via a database trigger — you don't need to send it manually.

Use announcements for "this is important and time-sensitive" things: schedule changes, reminders, reading lists, kickoff notes. Use the cohort's regular discussion threads for everything else.

When editing a lesson, you'll see a Generate Draftoption. It uses Library sources you select (passages, chapters) plus the lesson's existing context to draft a first pass of the lesson body in your course's tone.

How to use it well

1. Pick Library sources that genuinely ground the lesson. Fewer, more specific sources beat a long list of vaguely related ones.
2. Generate the draft. Read it critically. The assistant is good at structure and synthesis, but it'll occasionally phrase things in ways that don't match how you teach.
3. Edit. Cut, rewrite, add your own examples. The assistant is a starting point, not the final word.
4. Save.

The assistant never publishes directly — you always review first. Source references are automatically tracked, so students reading the lesson can see which Library texts it drew from.