Create your own online course

If you have something to explain and want to build a course rather than a sales page, you can start for free. A course on Skillok is a challenge in a repository: stages in order, each with its own check, and the materials themselves are ordinary files with an edit history.

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In this article

What a course is made of#

A course is a folder in a repository with a challenge.md file and stages in stages/. A stage is an ordinary markdown note: text, plus a check in its header.

  • Theory — LaTeX formulas, tables, diagrams, highlighted code. It counts once the learner marks it as read.
  • Questions — single or multiple choice, ordering, pairs, fill in the blanks, a number, a short answer, flashcards. Wrong answers come back at the end of the round, and later into review on a schedule.
  • Hands-on tasks — a summary, a calculation, an analysis: the check is that the file exists, has the required sections and the right number.
  • Code — tests in Python or JavaScript run in a sandbox.

The next stage opens once the current one is passed. Stages earn experience.

The materials live in a repository#

You write the course as files: every stage has a history, a co-author can propose an edit as a pull request, and you look at the diff and accept or decline it. After git clone it opens and edits in Obsidian. You can make a draft from your own note with the "Make a challenge" button and then edit it by hand.

Publishing#

A private repository is seen by you and your co-authors. A public one is open to everyone: share a link to the "Learn" tab of your repository. There is no shared course catalogue on the site — you bring your audience yourself.

What is missing#

  • payments for a course and paid, gated access;
  • video hosting — host videos yourself and link to them from a stage;
  • webinars and an interactive whiteboard;
  • a results log for a group, and certificates.

Who it suits#

Teachers and specialists who want to build a course for free and try it on the first few people; authors of technical courses who care about formulas, code and automatic checking; people who want to keep their materials in the open, with history.

Where to start#

Write in challenge.md what a learner will be able to do at the end. Build three stages in full — theory, questions and one hands-on task — and let two or three people you know go through them. Their mistakes will tell you what to rewrite before you invest time in the rest. If you teach a small group rather than the public, see the LMS for a small team page.

Try it on your own task

Create a repository — history, issues and pull requests from day one.

Create a repository

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Platform for tutors A lesson lasts an hour, but learning goes on all week. Skillok covers the time between lessons — materials, homework, checking, and a history of the student's progress. To be clear from the start: there is no interactive whiteboard or video calling, so run the lesson itself in the tool you already use. Confluence alternative Confluence keeps documentation as pages inside spaces. In Skillok documentation is a set of markdown files in a repository, and you work with it the way you work with code — edit, history, review. That is stricter and more transparent, but there is no visual page builder and no real-time co-editing. GitHub alternative Skillok is built like GitHub and repeats the familiar parts — repository, commits, branches, issues, pull requests, projects, organizations. The interface is available in English and Russian. Below is an honest list of what already works, what does not yet, and how to move your code in a few minutes. Notion alternative Notion is built from page blocks and databases. Skillok works differently — your notes are plain markdown files in a repository, and every change has a history. If you care about text, order and being able to take everything with you at any moment, this may suit you better. If you need database tables with formulas and real-time co-editing, it will not. LMS for a small team A full LMS is dozens of features, most of which a small team never needs. In Skillok the learning side is built from a few things — challenges with automatic checking, materials with history, and assignments with review. Here is exactly what there is, so you can decide whether it is enough. Jira alternative Jira can do almost anything, and that is exactly why small teams often dislike it — too many settings for a simple "what are we doing, who is doing it, what is done". In Skillok issues and boards are simpler, modelled on GitHub, and they live next to your code and documents.

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