Use YouTube to Build a Course in 3 Steps

By: Rachel Kolman October 6, 2022
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Course creation should be as easy as a click of a button. With LearnDash’s Course Creation Wizard, it actually is that easy. 

The Course Creation Wizard takes a YouTube playlist and builds an entire course in seconds by pasting in one URL and clicking load. The wizard then creates a course with lessons for each individual video in the playlist. 

If you’ve ever wished for another way to monetize your YouTube content, this LearnDash feature is built for you. Packaging your videos as a course is a perfect passive income tool. Using a YouTube playlist as the basis of your course has many benefits, including: 

  • Less time to launch a course
  • Quick monetization of existing content
  • An already-established audience

Ready to explore this strategy for yourself? Here’s how to build a course with a YouTube playlist in three steps. 

Step 1: Outline a course with your existing video content

If you don’t have a YouTube playlist created already for your course idea, now’s the time. A good first step is to to go through your YouTube videos and group together a progression of videos. Make sure those videos are placed in a compelling and correct order in a playlist.

For example, if you have a YouTube series teaching users how to get started in investing, you may want to start with a video that discusses how much to invest. Then you can move on to opening your first account, picking an investment strategy, and so on. This is the order in which your students will experience your course. 

As you can see below for our LearnDash course, we’ve gone ahead and numbered our videos to keep it simple.

Step 2: Load Videos into LearnDash with the Course Creation Wizard

Make sure you grab the actual playlist URL and not the individual video URLs. On YouTube, the best way to do this is by clicking the “Share” button for the entire playlist and clicking “copy” on the generated link.

Pro Tip: The course creation wizard works with both public and private YouTube playlists. To build a course from a private playlist, you’ll connect your Google account to LearnDash’s Google app, which allows LearnDash to read the content from your private playlist one time only – no data is stored. 

To use the Course Create Wizard, navigate to LEARNDASH LMS > Courses. Click on the “Create from Video Playlist” button at the top right corner. Paste in your YouTube playlist here. 

Click the Load the playlist data button.  From here, choose your course access settings and and click “create the course.”

Step 3: Make The Final Edits Before You Launch Your Course

By default, each video creates a new lesson in the course. The text in each lesson comes from the YouTube video’s description. If you’d like to customize the copy, you can do that easily by editing the post. 

Here are a few more ways you can customize your Lesson pages and turn videos into a full classroom experience: 

  • Add Lesson Materials. Turn on “Lesson Materials” if you’d like to add documents such as lecture notes or a transcript to the video. 
  • Watch entire videos. Take advantage of LearnDash’s video progression feature. Ensure a learner watches the entire video first and marks the lesson as complete before being able to move on to the next lesson. 
  • Add quizzes and polls. You can easily add a quiz at the end of each lesson through LearnDash’s quizzes feature. Or, take advantage of educational plugins like H5P to make quizzes or polls appear in the middle of a video for a literal “pop quiz!”
  • Encourage participation. If you’d like learners to interact, you can turn on post comments or add a bbpress forum to the course. Make individual threads for each video lesson to encourage discussion. 
  • Drip the content. Dripping your video content is an excellent way to get users returning to your course. This is especially useful if your videos are private on YouTube – your LearnDash course becomes a gate. You can edit and plan a release schedule in the lesson settings. 
  • Drive completion rates. Entice users to finish the entire video series by creating a downloadable certificate for learners after they complete your course. 

Save Time Building Your Online Course with LearnDash

Creating an online course can sometimes be time intensive, but LearnDash’s user-friendly tools make it easy.  You can build an online course in seconds with the LearnDash course creation wizard and a YouTube playlist. 

For a visual walkthrough with LearnDash experts, you can watch our Course Creation Wizard Webinar Replay:

Or, check out our full Course Creation Wizard Documentation. But really, it’s as simple as the three steps we’ve outlined above. 


You can always see how fast and easy it is for yourself by trying out the LearnDash demo. In the course creator demo, click “create from video playlist” and see if you can spin up an entire new course in less than a minute. What video course will you create first?

Rachel Kolman

Rachel Kolman has over 10 years of experience writing and editing for a variety of clients and brands. She is passionate about education, social change, pop culture, and video games. She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and two cats.