Add an audio lesson - a podcast, a talk, a voice memo
Not every lesson needs a picture. A talk, a guided relaxation, an interview, a story read aloud - some teaching is just your voice, and recording it takes minutes rather than an afternoon of lighting and camera angles.
Audio lessons work exactly like video ones. Same drop area, same player, same captions, same approval before anything reaches learners.
How it works
- Drag the audio file onto the drop area on your courses page - MP3, M4A or WAV, including a voice memo straight off your phone. Or ask Bernard to add it to a lesson; it's the same thing underneath.
- Let it upload, then get on with your day. The file goes straight to secure storage, so a two-hour recording is no harder than a five-minute one, and once the bar completes you can close the page.
- Everything else is automatic. Within a few minutes the audio is ready to play everywhere, and captions and a transcript have been written for it (Captions and transcripts, written for me).
Learners get the same player your video lessons use - play and pause, speed, captions they can switch on, chapters, and their place kept if they come back later. Where the picture would be, they see your course cover image.
Two things an audio lesson doesn't get, and neither is a fault: there's no cover frame taken from the recording (there's no picture to take one from), and no thumbnail preview when you drag along the scrubber. If you ask Bernard for a lesson's status, it will say those two were skipped rather than pretending something went wrong.
The transcript does the same double duty it does for video: your teaching becomes searchable, so you can ask where you talk about something and jump straight to it (Where do I say that? Search inside my own lessons). It also means a podcast- style lesson is readable text on your own site, which is more than a podcast host will ever give you.
Clips and course trailers stay video-only - they're pictures, and there are none here. Everything else about the lesson is unchanged: give it a title and a few lines of notes (Add a lesson to my course), slot it into the syllabus, and learners see it after you've checked the preview and approved it.
If your lesson does have pictures, Put my own video file into a lesson is the same story with a camera.
The prompt
“I've dropped an audio recording onto my courses page - make it a lesson in my [course name] course called [the lesson title], with these notes underneath: [a few lines].”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- Do audio lessons get captions and a transcript?
- Yes - exactly the same as video. A few minutes after the upload finishes, the words are written out, learners can switch captions on, and you can search your teaching for a phrase and jump to the minute. That's the whole point of putting audio here rather than on a podcast host.
- What do learners see while it plays?
- Your course artwork, in the same player your video lessons use - play, pause, speed, captions, chapters, and it picks up where they left off. There's nothing to design; if the course has a cover image, that's what shows. As with any change, learners see the new lesson once you've approved it.
- Can I record on my phone?
- Yes. A voice memo from your phone is a perfectly good lesson - record it, drop it on, give it a title and a few lines of notes. It's the cheapest lesson you'll ever make, and it still ends up searchable.