Your First Course, Start to Finish

Never taken a course on LecturePanda before? This walks the whole thing — registering, working through the material, and getting your certificate — in the order you'll actually meet it.

What you'll need

Just an email address you can get to. There's no account to create and no password to choose — registering for a course gives you a personal link, and that link is how you come back to it.

If you'd rather have somewhere permanent to keep your courses and certificates, you can create a free account at any time, before or after. It's optional.

1. Register for the course

Find the course

You'll arrive in one of three ways, and they all end at the same registration form:

A link straight to the registration form. Sent by email, or published on your provider's website.

The course's own page. Many providers share a page describing the course — the speakers, the credits on offer, the fees, what's required — with a Register button on the left and a QR code you can scan with your phone's camera. Some print that QR code on a flyer or show it on screen at an event; it opens this same page.

A course catalog. Providers with many courses often publish them as a searchable list. Click a title and you land on that course's page, then Register from there.

Choose what describes you

The first thing the page asks is What best describes you?

Pick the option that matches you. This is not just a label: it decides what you pay and which credits you're eligible to claim at the end, so choose the one that genuinely applies — your profession, your membership status, whether you're a student. If none of them look right, ask your provider before guessing.

Fill in the form

Your name and email, plus anything your provider needs in order to report or verify your credit — often a license or membership number, sometimes a professional ID and date of birth. What's asked for depends entirely on the kind of course; plenty ask for nothing beyond your name and email.

There's also a checkbox to create an account while you're here. It's optional, but it's the least effort you'll ever spend on it: tick it and every course you take is collected in one place, with your certificates and receipts attached. See Your Account & Learning History.

Get your name and ID right the first time

Your name is printed on your certificate exactly as you type it here, and any ID you enter is what your credit is reported against.

Where an ID can be verified, it's checked as you register and details that don't match are rejected on the spot — so most typos never make it through. What no check can catch is valid details that simply aren't yours: if you handle registrations for colleagues or share a computer, make sure the information on screen is your own before you continue.

You can correct these later, but it's much less work now.

Then click Continue. If the course has a fee you'll be asked to pay at this point.

You're registered

You'll get a confirmation email with your personal link back into the course. Keep that email — it's how you return if you don't finish in one sitting, and it's the same link every time.

2. Work through the course

Open the link from your email. Every course runs through the same four steps, shown across the top and repeated as buttons along the bottom:

Learning Materials → Claim Credits → Complete Evaluations → Submit

Work left to right:

1. Learning Materials — watch the videos and work through any interactive modules. Play them on the course page and let each one run to the end; the progress bar under the video only credits a section once it has played all the way through. See When a Video Won't Complete if a video won't tick over.
2. Claim Credits — tick the credits you're claiming for this course.
3. Complete Evaluations — finish every quiz and evaluation on your list. Nothing can be left open.
4. Submit — send in your completion.

Steps you haven't reached yet are greyed out and can't be clicked. That's the mechanism behind almost every "it won't let me continue" — the step isn't broken, something earlier is unfinished. Working Through a Course sets out exactly what unlocks each one.

Your progress saves as you go, so you can stop at any point and pick up later from the same link.

Check your details before you finish

The Edit Profile link at the top of the course page opens your registration details. Worth a glance before you submit, because your name goes onto the certificate as it appears there.

3. Get your certificate

As soon as you submit, your certificate appears as a download link on the final step — one for each credit you earned.

Download it there and then. Certificates are never emailed, so there's nothing arriving in your inbox later. You can always come back for another copy — Getting Your Certificate covers how — but saving it now is much quicker.

If your course reports your credit to an outside accrediting body, that happens when you press Submit. How soon it shows up on their side is up to them; see When Your Credit Gets Reported.

4. Answering live questions during a presentation

Some live sessions let the speaker put questions to the room and collect answers on your phone. If yours does, you'll either be emailed a link or shown a QR code on the presenter's screen.

What you'll see, in order:

1. "Waiting for Speaker to Connect" — you're early. The page waits by itself; leave it open.
2. A list of rooms. Once the speaker opens their session it appears here. Tap the one matching the session you're in — at a multi-track event there may be several.
3. "Waiting for first question..." — you're in the right place, and the speaker hasn't asked anything yet.
4. The question, with the answers as buttons. Tap yours. Questions appear on their own as the speaker releases them, so you never need to refresh or press anything to get the next one.
5. The results, once answers are in — how the whole room responded.

At the bottom of the screen there's an Ask A Question button. It opens a box to text a question to the speaker, which joins a queue on their screen for them to pick up.

It doesn't affect your credit

Answering live questions is separate from the four steps above. It won't complete your course, and skipping it won't stop you claiming your credit.

If you get stuck

Help for Learners lists the problems people hit most often, each with the fix. If none of it matches, your course provider is the right person to ask — they can see your registration and almost every fix is on their side. See Getting Help.