Fifteen years of material is a filing cabinet, a shared drive with three versions of every folder, and a box of practice papers under the desk. The fear is that digitising it means a term of evenings with a scanner. It doesn't. The audit is an afternoon. The first batch is one folder, one class's material, and it comes back converted in about five business days. Everything else can follow when you've seen what the first folder became.
This guide is the order to do it in, what to skip, and what happens after the upload. It's written for the owner who built the material and is the only person who knows where everything is.
- Audit before you scan. What exists, what state it's in, whose it is. An afternoon with the worksheet.
- Start with your best folder, not your biggest. One subject at one year level.
- If you'd photocopy from it, it will convert. Straight, 300 dpi, whole page.
- Leave handwriting and angled phone photos in the drawer. Re-scan or retype later, or never.
- Record the rights basis per document now, while you still know the answer.
- One class's material converts in about five business days, a whole centre's in ten to fifteen. Then you approve, assign and report.
Audit first, scan second
The mistake most owners make is to start scanning. The scanner is right there, the Year 6 folder is on top, and by 9pm there are forty PDFs named scan0001 to scan0040 and no idea what's in them.
Do the audit first. Take the material audit worksheet, sit down with the drive and the drawer, and answer three questions for each folder.
| Question | What you're recording | Why it matters later |
|---|---|---|
| What exists? | Year level, subject, format (PDF, Word, scan, paper) | Tells you what to convert first and what to skip |
| What state is it in? | Clean, needs a re-scan, unusable | Saves you converting a folder that will come back flagged |
| Whose is it? | Wrote it, licensed it, copied it under a licence, not sure | The one question you can't answer later from a PDF |
You don't need to open every file. A folder of typed worksheets you wrote in 2019 gets one line. A box of photocopies from a textbook gets one line and a note in the rights column. The point is a page you can look at and see the shape of what you've got.
Most owners find the same thing: three or four folders that are the heart of the centre, a lot of duplicates, and a long tail of one-off sheets nobody has used since the tutor who made them left.
The start-here rule
Start with the folder you'd show a parent. Not the biggest one, not the oldest, not the one for the year level with the most students. The one you're proudest of, where the sequence is right, the answer keys are complete and the pages are typed.
There are two reasons. The first is that a clean folder converts cleanly, so the first thing you see on the platform is your material at its best, in your order, marked against your answer keys. That's the moment you decide whether this is worth doing for the rest of the drawer, and a tired photocopy would decide it for you.
The second is that your best folder is the one your students most need between sessions. It's the program you'd want working on a Tuesday night. Convert that first and it's earning its keep while the second folder is being scanned.
One subject at one year level, a term's worth. That's one class's material, and it's the shape the pilot is built around. The upload and convert page goes through what comes back.
Scan quality: if you'd photocopy from it, it converts
Most of the questions we get about scanning have one answer. If you'd be happy to photocopy a page and hand the copy to a student, it will convert. If you'd wince at the copy, it won't.
In practice that means four things, and an office copier does all four by default.
| Scan | What it looks like | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Straight, flat, 300 dpi, whole page, no shadow | A clean office copier scan of a typed sheet | Converts almost perfectly. Scores high on fidelity. |
| Slightly skewed, or a faint photocopy of a photocopy | A tired sheet that's been through three tutors | Converts, but pages get flagged for a re-scan. Adds a day or two. |
| Phone photo at an angle, page cut off, shadow across it | Someone stood over the desk with a phone | Flagged at upload. Re-scan before it goes any further. |
| Handwritten notes, annotated worksheets | Your Tuesday board notes, a marked-up key | Usually doesn't convert. Retype the parts that matter or leave it. |
Each document gets a fidelity score before anything is made from it. A clean typed worksheet scores in the high nineties. A skewed photocopy scores lower, and the pages that need a re-scan are named, so you re-scan those pages rather than the folder. Nothing below the line is silently accepted and converted badly. There's a short glossary entry on scan quality if you want the settings written down for whoever's doing the scanning.
Maths gets a specialist step so that fractions, exponents and symbols come through as maths rather than as a string of characters. Diagrams and graphs are captured with the question they belong to. You don't need to do anything different for a maths folder, but it's worth knowing that a clean scan of a formula-heavy page is what makes that step work.
What not to bother with
Some material isn't worth digitising, and knowing that in the audit saves a weekend.
Handwriting, first. Your own annotations, a tutor's marked-up answer key, board notes photographed after class. The conversion can't read it reliably, and you'd spend longer fixing the result than retyping the two rules that mattered. If a handwritten sheet is genuinely the only copy of something you teach every term, retype it. Otherwise leave it.
Phone photos taken at an angle, second. They're the most common thing in a shared drive and the least useful. A scanning app on the same phone, held flat over the page, produces something usable. The photo from the doorway doesn't.
Duplicates, third. The audit will show you three versions of the Year 9 fractions sheet. Pick one. The platform reproduces whichever you upload, faithfully, and three near-identical sets is confusing for a student and a tutor.
Material you're not sure you have the rights to, fourth, until you are sure. That's the next section.
If the folder you want to start with is paper and the scanner is the problem, there's a prep service where you post us the folder and we scan, sort and curate it before conversion. It's $1,200 per 500 pages, and it exists for the centre whose best material is in a box.
Rights, one line per document
Every document that goes on the platform records where it came from. Not because we'll check it, but because the first time anyone asks, you want the answer written down already.
There are four honest answers, and the material rights register is a grid for recording them.
| You... | Rights basis | On the platform |
|---|---|---|
| Wrote it yourself | Yours. No licence needed. | Upload it. |
| Licensed it from a publisher | Licensed. Record the terms. | Upload within the terms. |
| Copied it from a published text | Statutory Education Licence in Australia, within its limits. Different in New Zealand. | Record the licence and the limit. Confirm with your adviser. |
| Aren't sure | Not sure. | Find out before use. Don't upload yet. |
The audit is the moment to do this. You're already looking at each folder, and you know which ones you wrote in 2019 and which came from a book. In a year, looking at a PDF, you won't.
The licence position in Australia and the different position in New Zealand are described in the Statutory Education Licence guide. It isn't legal advice and neither is this. If a folder is in the third or fourth row, the answer comes from the Copyright Agency or your own adviser, not from us.
Name folders the way you teach
The structure your students and tutors see on the platform is the structure you upload. If your drive says Year 6 Selective, Week 3, Ratios, that's what appears. Not board, grade, subject, chapter. Not someone else's syllabus.
So the folder names matter, and the audit is when to fix them. Three rules that hold up.
Name by how you'd say it to a tutor. "Year 9 Maths, Term 2, Week 4, Linear equations" is a name a new casual tutor can find on their first day. "LinEq_final_v3_USE THIS ONE" isn't.
Keep the week or the sequence in the name. Your material has an order, and that order is most of what makes it yours. A folder where the sequence lives in the filenames converts into a program. A folder where the sequence lives in your head converts into a pile.
Keep answer keys next to the sheets they answer. Same folder, matching name. The conversion marks your questions against your key, and where your worksheet states an answer, the platform's has to match it or the item is flagged in red. A key that's in a different folder under a different name is a key that has to be matched by hand.
None of this is a big job. It's an hour of renaming, once, and it's the difference between your platform reading like your centre and reading like a download folder.
A realistic turnaround
The question behind "how long does this take" is usually "how long until I can use it." Here's the honest shape.
| Stage | Who | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Audit | You, with the worksheet | An afternoon |
| Renaming and picking the first folder | You | An hour |
| Scanning, if the folder is paper | You or a tutor at the copier | An evening for one class's folder |
| Upload | You | Ten minutes |
| Conversion of one class's material | Us | About five business days |
| A whole centre's material | Us | Ten to fifteen business days |
| Approval | You, or a tutor you delegate to | An hour for a clean batch, longer if you edit |
| Assigning the first set | You | Three clicks |
Poor scans add time, because we ask for re-scans of the flagged pages before converting rather than after. That's the one stage that stretches, and the audit is how you avoid it.
Setup converts everything you currently teach, on every plan, so there's no allowance to size the cabinet against. Material you add later is $500 per course, meaning a year level with its subjects, or $150 per subject, one-off, and audio narration is $250 per subject. The pricing page has the figures.
What comes back, and the step before students see it
A converted folder comes back as a batch. Practice questions in the same order as your worksheet, marked against your answer key. A worked solution for every question that follows the method in your notes. Short explanations drawn from your notes. Flashcards from your rule boxes. Timed sets from your practice papers. Every item tagged to the topic and the page it came from.
The conversion only ever works from your pages. It can't fill a gap from outside your material, and an item that can't be traced to a page is rejected before you see it.
Then it waits for you. Everything lands in an approval queue with the source page beside it, and nothing publishes until you say so. Where your worksheet had an answer key, each item shows whether the platform's answer matches it. Mismatches are flagged in red. Most of the time the worksheet is the one that's wrong, and now you know.
- Practice question
A recipe needs 3/4 cup of sugar. Maya only wants to make 2/3 of the recipe. How much sugar does she need?
Fractions Worksheet 3, p.2, Q4ApprovedEditBin - Worked solution
Multiply the fraction of the recipe by the amount: 2/3 × 3/4 = 6/12 = 1/2 cup.
Fractions Worksheet 3, p.2, Q4 answer keyApprovedEditBin - Practice questioncheck the key
Which of these is equivalent to 5/8? (a) 10/12 (b) 15/24 (c) 20/30 (d) 25/32
Fractions Worksheet 3, p.3, Q9ApproveEditBin - Flashcard
To add fractions with different denominators, first find a common denominator.
Fractions notes, p.1, rule boxApproveEditBin
Approve in bulk when a batch is clean. Edit the wording of anything you'd phrase differently, and your edit is what publishes. Bin what you don't want. Most owners read the first folder's batch closely and approve the second in bulk. The approve before publish page has the detail, including how to give a senior tutor approval rights for their own year level.
After approval: assign, mark, report
This is the part the audit was for.
Tuesday, after class, you pick the class, the set and the due date. Three clicks, and the week's work from your material is on every student's phone. Wednesday to Sunday they work through it. It's marked the moment they submit, with a worked solution in your method. A student stuck at 9pm taps once and gets an explanation from your page, with the page it came from.
Monday morning the dashboard shows who did it, who didn't, and the topic eight of twelve got wrong. That's Tuesday's lesson. Every second Friday each parent gets a one-page report with your logo, from your address: what their child worked on, what improved by topic, what's next.
The folder that was doing nothing between Tuesdays is now doing all of that, and you haven't written a word you didn't already have.
This week
Print the material audit worksheet and block out an afternoon. Walk the drive and the drawer. Fill in the three columns for each folder, and put a star next to the one you'd show a parent. Rename that folder the way you'd say it to a tutor, check the answer keys are in it, and pull out a term's worth. One subject at one year level is your first batch. If the folder is paper, book the copier for an evening.
Don't scan anything else yet.