Last week, we silently launched a new feature: the ability for learners to create their own list of courses.  In just a few days, learners have already created hundreds of lists.

This feature builds on top of our My Courses feature, which has been renamed to My Classes (we are Class Central after all…).

Previously, Class Central users could add courses to seven default lists. In preparation for launching Custom Lists, we streamlined the Default Lists and dropped the following lists: Enrolled, Audited, Partially Completed, and Dropped. The active default lists are now as follows: Interested, Taking Right Now, and Completed/Audited. These default lists are one of Class Central’s most popular features. Learners have added courses 6 million times to these lists!  Now, in addition to the default lists, users can create their own lists and name them whatever they want.

Custom Lists

The Custom Lists feature is inspired by YouTube’s playlist feature. There are several ways to create a new Custom List in Class Central. You can quickly create a custom list by hovering over (or clicking on) the +Add button next to a course in our course listing page (or the +Add button on the course page itself).  Or you can create a new list by visiting the My Classes page.

Here are a few examples of public lists:

1. 2018’s Most Popular Free Online Courses (35 courses) – List by Dhawal Shah
2. Georgia Tech OMSCS Courses (28 courses) – List by Bobby Brady
3. iMBA Courses (34 courses) – List by Bobby Brady

When you create a new list, you can choose whether it will be Public, Unlisted, or Private.  Public lists are publicly searchable and viewable. Unlisted lists do not come up in search results but can be accessed by anyone with the URL. Private lists are viewable only to the user who created the list.

At the time of writing of this post, each user is limited to 5 lists and 100 courses per list.

Let us know in the comments what you think of this feature, how you are using it (or plan to use it), or if you have any feature requests. If you’ve already created a Custom List, feel free to share it in the comments too.