The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20211216213321/https://lab.github.com/docs/learning-paths
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Learning Paths

GitHub Learning Lab is no longer accepting new public courses from outside of GitHub.

Learning paths allow you to combine Learning Lab courses, videos, and other links to create end-to-end coverage for a specific topic. They can be used provide comprehensive coverage of a topic such as "building your first website", or they can be used to combine a series of learning lab courses you want every user to complete.

Creating a Learning Path

Under the hood, a learning path is very similar to a course. They are created in a GitHub repository using a simple config.yml and a course-description.md file.

Check out Building: Create the course for more details.

When you create the course, select Learning Path:

Screenshot of the course-creation UI with Learning Path selected

Editing the config.yml

Inside the config.yml file, you'll edit the steps to point to the courses and resources you'd like to include in the learning path:

title: My Learning Path
description: A couple of great learning resources!
steps:
  # Point to a course on Learning Lab owned by the same user or organization as this Learning Path
  - course: introduction-to-github

  # Point to a course owned by another user on Learning Lab
  - course: githubtraining/introduction-to-github

  # Point to an external link
  - link: https://opensource.guide/starting-a-project/#writing-a-readme
    title: The ingredients of a great README 
    description: >-
      Great READMEs help users understand your project, why it matters and what they can do with it.
      This guide shares some helpful tips to write great READMEs.

  # Embed a video
  - link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3jLJU7DT5E
    video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3jLJU7DT5E
    title: What is GitHub?
    description: >-
      Hey, it's your first time here, so let's not take any chances.
      Check out this short video to understand why people use GitHub.

steps

The steps block contains a list of the resources within the path. There are two types of steps, a url and a course:

External URL steps:

Learners will be presented with the link and asked to acknowledge they have reviewed the resource:

Field Required Description
title ✓ The title of the step. Appears in the the learning path page in Learning Lab, and is used for notifications on user progress in the path.
description ✓ A longer description of the resource linked in the step. Displayed below the step title, and used for notifications on user progress.
link ✓ The url the learner will use to access the resource.
video A YouTube or Vimeo embed link, to display the video in the step. The video will appear in the progress tab after a user has registered for the learning path. You must provide the video url as both the link and the video for the video to appear in the step.

Course steps:

Learners will be presented with a button to register for the course. The step will be marked complete when they have completed the course:

Field Required Description
course ✓ The owner/name of a course, like githubtraining/introduction-to-github. If you are the owner of the course, you can omit the owner/
description A short description of the course. If omitted, the description will be pulled from the config.yml in the course repository.

Editing the course-details.md

The course-details.md file is used to populate the Learning Path detail page. You'll find a detailed guide here: Content for the catalog