Reviewer sign-off

Some lessons should not reach a learner on the author's word alone: a rigging load, a hearing-safety figure, an animal-health rule. Those lessons carry a box at the top that begins "Before release" and says who must act: a qualified reviewer, a practitioner (or the platform owner's own demonstration), or a decision the course author still has to make.

If you were invited to review

1. Open your invitation link and sign in with the address it was sent to.
2. Go to Review lessons (/audit/review). It lists every marked lesson in the courses you were invited to, where each one stands, and how you will be credited.
3. Open a lesson, read it against its sources, and at the foot of the page choose one verdict: Cleared, Cleared with a correction, or Not cleared. Check that every source is a document a reader can open and none is an AI tool or a chat transcript ("according to ChatGPT", a chatbot in the Sources list): a fact whose only source is an AI is not cleared.
4. A correction is one short note (up to 1,000 characters) attached to that lesson. Nobody replies to it and nobody is notified; the author applies it. Recording a new verdict replaces your old one.
5. To read offline, press Download the lessons for your review (PDF) or (EPUB) under the course on Review lessons. The file holds only the lessons marked for review, each headed by what you are asked to check. You still record each verdict on the lesson's page.

If the verdict form is greyed out, the sentence above it says why: the course's own instructor cannot review it, your name and credential are not added yet, you are signed in with an address that has no invitation, the need is one only the platform owner records, or the need names a different reviewer from the one your invitation is for.

You can record a verdict only after the person who invited you has added your name and credential, because that is what the lesson will show: "Reviewed by {name}, {credential}, on {date}", with a line saying a review checks the content and is not an endorsement.

Any change to the lesson's text, even a typo fix, resets its verdict and asks for a fresh review. That is deliberate: your name never sits on wording you did not read.

If you run the course

• On the course's page under Teach, add each reviewer's name and credential under Invite someone to review this course. The platform owner or the school's admin may also add an evidence link (a license lookup or a professional profile); only they see it, beside the reviewer's credit on the sign-off panel, and learners never do.
• The Reviewer sign-off panel on the same page lists every need, its state (awaiting, cleared, correction to apply, not cleared, changed since review), who cleared it, and any correction.
• Apply a correction by editing the lesson. The platform owner can then press Applied as written once, which keeps the reviewer's badge on the edited text and shows the date it was applied. Any later edit resets the verdict like any other.
• Two different reviewers on one lesson (a land surveyor and a Native reviewer, say) are signed off separately. A need that names a particular reviewer shows it after its kind, for example "Qualified reviewer (native reviewer)". Set Reviews for on that reviewer's invitation so they can record it; each reviewer then clears only their own needs, so one verdict never stands in for another's.
• A decision marker clears only when the marker is edited out of the course file.
• On /teach, a QR 12/17 chip shows how many qualified-reviewer needs are cleared.
• A held course with no marked lessons says so on the panel: clear its hold by hand.

Releasing the hold (platform owner)

When every qualified-reviewer and practitioner need is cleared and no decision is left, Release the review hold appears on the sign-off panel. The server checks again before clearing anything, so a released course never shows a learner a "Before release" box. Releasing does not vet the course: vetting is still its own step (see Vetting a course, and the "Coming soon" page).

The platform owner or the school's admin releases a hold, never the course's own author. Only the platform owner clears practitioner needs (with their own demonstration), and only an invited reviewer clears a qualified-reviewer need.

The course's sources

Every course has a Sources page beside its course page, listing every work its lessons cite and, for each, the lessons that use it and where in the work (a page, a section, a locator). While a course is held it is open only to its editors and invited reviewers; releasing the course opens it to learners, with nothing else to switch on.

A course built since November 2026 also has a sources packet: the list its owner approved before the first lesson was written, one entry per source with what it is used for and the provenance checks it passed. Ask the platform owner for it if you want to see what the course rests on before you read a lesson. What the checks are, and why no AI-text detector is among them, is in Sources approval before writing.