The Content Collection in Learn

Behind every course on Learn, there’s an area hidden from students called the Content Collection. The main idea Learn is built around is that you:

(1) Upload documents to the Content Collection

(2) Link to these documents from the part of Learn that your students see

This applies to PDFs, Word docx files, PowerPoint pptx files – just about all of the files most lecturers need to upload to Learn.

This separation between the Content Collection on the one hand, and the visible pages that students see on the other, is unfortunately not immediately obvious due to the idiosyncratic way in which Learn was designed.

If you’d like to know more about this, we’ve written a quick explainer here:

> Getting a mental model of how Learn deals with files.

Why should I care about this?

1. Keeping your section of the Content Collection tidy makes your Learn pages easier to manage

For example, imagine you want the same document to appear on several Learn pages.

You can upload the document once to the Content Collection, and then link to it from the pages where you want it to appear. This is better than having lots of identical files called:

  • Worksheet.pdf
  • Worksheet(1).pdf
  • Worksheet(2).pdf (etc.)

2. Uploading files to Learn one-by-one is a pain

By dealing with the Content Collection directly, you can upload files in bulk. This can be a massive time-saver.

There are two ways to do this:

(a) Use Learn’s Upload Multiple Files tool

You can drag and drop multiple files into Learn using the steps described here:

> Uploading multiple files at once

(b) Set up a Web Folder

You can have a folder on your computer which is in sync with the folders that you deal with in the Content Collection.

> Settting up Web Folders in Learn