Coursera Content Authoring Tool

In early 2015, Coursera made an ambitious move to a new platform. However, one important part of that initiative was missing: with this new platform, partners needed new tools to create content. As the designer in charge of this project, I was responsible of all stages of authoring tool design, from concept to design to supporting engineers during deployment. In doing so, I established a standard for the entire company -- this design is now the foundation for all authoring tools designed by teams at Coursera.

Experience Principles


Using comprehensive user research and Instructor Journey Map, my team was able to highlight some common user pain-points and opportunities for improvement. These insights helped us develop three key experience principles for our partners:

  1. 1. I (content creator) trust Coursera will guide me to ensure that I have a successful and coherent course at the end.
  2. 2. I feel confident in creating a MOOC course.
  3. 3. I need to know if I’m investing my time on right content before the course launches.

These principles led to the design that addressed the glaring unbalance between the effort required off-line at the beginning of the journey and on-line at the later stage of authoring and launching. The user flow below was illustrated to understand and communicate key actions users take on the new platform, focusing on content creation and feedback incorporation.

Concept to Product


The new course creation tool is designed to provide authors with advice, best practices, and feedback early on in the content creation process.

Setup wizard gives content authors a sense of progress and easy achievement. Based on the prospective launch date of a course (given during the setup stage), Coursera suggests milestones during course creation. The milestones serves as a guideline and encourages users to conduct a beta test early on and therefore providing opportunities to improve the content quality before the content is finalized.

Coursera Partners Conference

Course Creation Roadmap provides novice learners with best practices, advice, and places to seek inspiration.
User research

A combination of microcopy, ghost text, and tooltips helps content creators accomplish tasks and build high quality content.
Coursera Partners Conference

Before users submit their course for review, Coursera provides automated checklists to lighten the burden of performing manual technical QA.

In order to make the authoring tool accessible, we completely overhauled the UI. Visual design and micro interaction played huge roles in elevating the authoring platform, making it more delightful and usable.

The Result


Where Coursera started out primarily as a publishing platform, it has now become a lively authoring platform. This new authoring tool made content creation more accessible to our authors and supports collaboration among course teams. After the launch of these new authoring tools, usage on our admin platform tripled. Lastly, Coursera can now expect much higher quality content from course author thanks to the built-in beta testing, learner feedback system, and QA process.