Build the course once. The record writes itself.
A course is an ordered set of lessons, and a lesson is a stack of chapters — written material, an attached document, a video, a step-by-step procedure, a labelled diagram. Add an exam if the material needs one, a hands-on evaluation if it needs that, or neither. Publish it, and every member who works through it has a completion on file the moment the last requirement is met.
A course is a list, and the list is the whole design.
Everything you author lives in The Academy: courses, the lessons inside them, the exam, the hands-on checklist, and the qualifications the course counts toward. There is one screen for a course, and it holds all of it.
- 1 Sheltering law, roles & the Red Cross relationship 3 chapters · reading, 1 attached document
- 2 Site survey & facility walkthrough 4 chapters · reading, video, labelled diagram
- 3 Registration & intake 3 chapters · step-by-step procedure
- 4 Dormitory setup & ADA compliance 3 chapters · reading, video
- 5 Feeding, supply & the shelter log 3 chapters · reading, attached forms
- 6 Demobilization & turnover 2 chapters · reading
The course editor. Illustrative content; your courses are whatever your program teaches.
- Members must pass an exam
- Members must pass a practical evaluation
- Issue a certificate on completion
- Allow members to audit before prerequisites are met
What a course requires is a per-course decision, not a platform rule.
How it goes together
- Lessons are reusable, not copies. The same “Radio discipline” lesson can sit in your comms course and your SAR course. Fix a procedure in it once and both courses are correct — there is no second copy to forget.
- Order is drag-and-drop, and it's the order members see. No numbering scheme to maintain, no renaming a lesson to make it sort right.
- Draft until you say otherwise. A course is invisible to members while you build it. Publish when it's ready; unpublish when a procedure changes and you'd rather nobody learned the old one.
What the course decides
- What counts as done. All lessons, plus an exam if you required one, plus a hands-on evaluation if you required that. Nothing is marked complete until every requirement you set is met — and completion is recorded in one place, so a course can't be finished twice or half-finished quietly.
- Whether it issues a certificate. A PDF in your organization's own design, generated on completion and downloadable by the member forever after.
- What it counts toward. Attach the course to the qualifications it feeds, and finishing it moves the member down that path automatically — which is its own page.
Not every lesson is a wall of text.
A lesson is built from chapters, and a chapter is whatever the material actually is. Mix them freely inside one lesson — read the policy, watch the demonstration, walk the procedure, then label the panel.
Written material
Formatted text with images, plus any file you attach — the SOP PDF, the checklist, the form they'll be handed in the field.
Video
Upload once and it streams to any device. Optionally require the member to actually watch it — to a percentage you set, or all the way through.
Step-by-step procedure
A numbered visual procedure, scrolling or one step at a time. Built by hand, or pulled out of a video you already have.
Labelled diagram
Your own photo or schematic with the parts named — and the same diagram can become an exam question. See how.
Walking a candidate facility
Six minutes, filmed at a real intake. Watch how the team clears the route before anyone counts cots.
- Confirm the entrance is accessible before assessing anything inside.
- Walk the egress path end to end. Note anything you would have to move at 2 AM.
- Photograph the panel and the shutoffs and attach them to the survey.
The member's view of one lesson — chapters across the top, progress along the bottom, and nothing to install.
Progress is saved as they go
Members work in the gaps they have: ten minutes at a kitchen table, the rest on a phone the next evening. Every chapter and lesson is saved as it's finished, so nobody loses a session's work and nobody has to start a course over.
Video that has to be watched
A video chapter can be a suggestion or a requirement. Set a percentage a member has to reach, or require the whole thing — useful when the demonstration is the training and skipping to the end defeats the point.
Say where it came from
Chapters can cite the source document behind them, which matters when an auditor asks why your shelter course says what it says — and when the underlying standard is revised and you need to find everything that referenced it.
One list, in plain language, on whatever device they have.
Volunteers do not want a learning management system. They want to know what's assigned, what they're partway through, and where the certificate is. That's the whole screen.
A member's course shelf. Illustrative — the real one is theirs.
Three things this list gets right
- Auditing without gaming. A member can start a course before they've earned its prerequisite, and their progress is kept. It simply doesn't count until the prerequisite is genuinely met — at which point it counts without anyone re-doing anything.
- A refresher can't damage the record. Reopening a finished course to re-read it leaves the original completion, date, and score exactly as they were. Nobody has to choose between staying current and protecting their file.
- The certificate is theirs. Generated on completion in your organization's own certificate design, and downloadable from this list for as long as they're a member.
Half of what your people hold, somebody else taught.
FEMA independent study, a state academy class, a Red Cross certification, a CPR card. You still have to know who holds what — so those get tracked here too, without pretending you delivered them.
- Dana WhitfieldFEMA IS-100.C Completed Jul 28, 2026 · certificate attached (PDF) Verify Reject
- Marcus ReyesCPR / AED (American Heart Association) Completed Jun 2, 2026 · expires Jun 2, 2028 · card attached Verify Reject
The verification queue an admin works through.
How an outside course behaves
- The member logs it, with proof. They pick the course, give the date they passed, and upload the certificate or card — a PDF or a photo of it is fine.
- An admin verifies it. Until then it sits pending and counts for nothing. There is no path where a member awards themselves a qualification.
- Once verified, it counts like any other completion. It feeds the same ratings and the same advancement as a course you wrote yourself — and if the certification expires, the record carries the expiry date.
You don't have to type the first draft
Most organizations arrive with the material already written — an SOP, a state curriculum, a binder somebody maintained for years. Hand that document to the AI course generator and it proposes objectives and a lesson plan, you approve or rewrite the plan, and it drafts the chapters for you to edit.
It is a first draft, not an authority: nothing publishes without a human approving it, and the generated chapters cite the document they came from. See how the authoring assist works.
Bring one of your own courses to the call.
Send us an SOP or a lesson plan you already run and we'll build it out in front of you, so you're looking at your material rather than a demo.