What Is a Playbook?
Understand how Playbooks organize learning content, quests, and progress tracking in Authura
Written By Maya
Last updated 4 days ago
What You’ll Learn
A Playbook is an ordered set of Quests that guides students through a topic using sequenced content, activities, and automatic progress tracking.
In Authura, Playbooks are the core learning product used to deliver structured, trackable learning experiences for both educators and learners.
What This Is
A Playbook is the main learning unit in Authura. It organizes lessons, activities, and learning experiences into a clear step-by-step path that students follow over time.
Rather than acting as a simple collection of resources, a Playbook is intentionally structured. Educators organize content into quests and arrange those quests in a specific order to guide how students learn a topic.
Playbooks can include:
Written instructional content
Images and tables
Interactive learning activities
Quizzes and assessments
LaTeX and formatted educational content
Review and adaptive learning experiences
Educators can create Playbooks from scratch, duplicate their own existing Playbooks, or start from an Authura Playbook Template.
Note: Only educators can create and manage Playbooks. Learners can participate in Playbooks and complete Quests, but they cannot create, edit, or publish Playbooks.
A Playbook Template is a reusable starting point provided by Authura. Templates can be copied and customized, but the final published Playbook is the actual learning product delivered to students.
Playbooks must go through an approval process before they can be used with learners.
How It Works
Playbooks are built from Quests, which are the individual learning activities students complete.
Quests are grouped and ordered to create a guided learning experience. This structure also can visually represent content hierarchies within a subject or Course.
Authura currently includes four Quest types:
Basic Quests — Standard instructional content and activities
Adaptive Quests — Adjust learning based on student performance
Review Quests — Reinforce previously learned concepts
Game Quests — Minecraft-connected learning activities copied from existing Playbook Templates
Important: Game Quests cannot be created manually by educators. They can only be copied from an existing Playbook Template that already contains them.
As students progress through a Playbook, Authura automatically tracks completion and learning progress. This helps educators monitor engagement and provides learners with a clearer sense of advancement through the material.
Playbooks are also different from Courses.
A Playbook contains the actual learning content and activities students complete. A Course manages when and how Playbooks are delivered over time.
In Authura, Playbooks are the product that is published, distributed, and used for learning, while Courses organize those Playbooks into broader learning schedules or experiences.
Because Courses are managed separately from Playbooks, educators can create multiple Courses that use the same Playbook across different class sections, semesters, or learning schedules.
Example
A biology educator may create a Playbook focused on cell structure.
The Playbook could begin with Basic Quests introducing core concepts, followed by Adaptive Quests that adjust difficulty based on quiz performance. Later, Review Quests might revisit earlier material to reinforce understanding before students move forward.
If the educator uses a Minecraft-enabled Playbook Template, students could also complete Game Quests connected to interactive Minecraft learning experiences.
The entire experience is structured in a specific sequence so students progress through the topic in a guided and trackable way.
When to Use
Playbooks are useful whenever learning needs to follow a structured path with measurable progress.
Educators use Playbooks to:
Organize lessons into a clear sequence
Guide learners through complex topics
Track student engagement and completion
Deliver adaptive and review-based learning experiences
Learners use Playbooks to:
Follow a guided learning path
Complete Quests in order
Track progress through a topic
Reinforce learning over time
Understanding how Playbooks work helps clarify how learning content is structured and delivered on Authura.
What's Next
What Is a Quest?
Learn what Quests are in Authura, how they work inside Playbooks, and how each Quest type supports learning progression.What Is a Course?
Understand how Courses organize playbooks, students, and schedules into structured learning experiences in Authura.How to Create a Playbook
Create a new Playbook from a template, customize its details, and submit it for review and publication readiness.Learn how Authura reviews submitted Playbooks before publication, including approval outcomes and review expectations.