Real Courses You Can Open Right Now, Free and Without Signing Up

Every authoring tool's website shows you the same thing: a screenshot of the editor, a list of block types, and a video of someone building a course faster than anyone builds a course. None of it answers the question you actually have, which is what the finished thing looks like to a learner.

What is the course directory?

It is a set of complete courses, built in CourseConverter, that anyone can open and work through in a browser. No account, no email address, no trial. They are organised by category — workplace compliance, onboarding and HR, leadership and management, and others — and each one is a real course rather than a demo of one.

What is it useful for?

Three things, in rough order of how often people use it:

• Judging the output. Click through a course as a learner would. That tells you more in five minutes than any feature comparison.
• Seeing interactions in context. Flip cards, knowledge checks, matching exercises and hotspots all look fine in isolation. What matters is whether they feel worth doing inside a real course.
• Borrowing structure. If you are staring at a blank outline, seeing how a comparable course is broken into modules is often the unblocking move.

Can I use these courses myself?

Several are available to add straight into your own account and edit, which is the fastest way to start something in a familiar shape. You get a full copy — modules, blocks, images — that is yours to rewrite. Nothing is shared back; your edits are yours.

Treat a copied course as a structure, not a script. Compliance content in particular is specific to a jurisdiction, an industry and an organisation, and text that is accurate for one is frequently wrong for another.

How do courses get in there?

Creators submit them and we review each one before it appears. The review is not a quality contest — it is a check that the course is complete, sensible and not a marketing page wearing a course costume. A directory full of thin content would defeat its own purpose, which is to let people judge the tool honestly.

Should I put my course in the directory?

It depends what the course is for. It is worth considering when:

• You are building an audience and the course is a genuine introduction to what you do.
• The material is generic enough to be useful to strangers.
• You would be happy for a prospective client to see it as a work sample.

It is a poor fit for internal, client-specific or commercially sensitive content, and for anything you intend to sell. A course you are charging for should not also be free on someone else's site.

One thing worth weighing before you submit: a directory listing is durable. It will be found by people who have never heard of you, months after you stopped thinking about it, and it will be read as a current sample of your work. That is exactly why it is valuable, and exactly why a course you were only half happy with is the wrong one to list.

What about the template courses?

Separate from the directory, there are ready-to-run template courses on specific topics — Microsoft 365 Copilot at work, employee onboarding, and others — designed to be deployed as-is or adapted. The distinction is that directory courses are examples of what people have built, and templates are starting points we maintain.

What should I be looking for when I read one?

Read as a learner first and a buyer second, and pay attention to four things:

• Where you skim. The sections you skip are the ones a real learner skips too, and they tell you how much text belongs on a screen.
• Whether the knowledge checks feel earned. A good one makes you pause. A bad one asks you to recall a number from two screens ago.
• How the navigation behaves on your phone, which is where a surprising share of compliance training is completed.
• Whether the images are doing work or filling space — a fair test of any tool, including this one.

Where to start

Open two or three directory courses in the categories closest to your work, and read them as a learner rather than as a buyer. Notice where you skim, where you stop, and where a knowledge check feels like a checkpoint rather than an interruption. That reaction is the most useful research you can do before building anything of your own.