Add an inline note

How it works

An inline note is a small coloured symbol — i, !, ? or * — placed inside a sentence in a Text block. The words behind it stay hidden until a student asks for them, and Alva Courses stores the note with the lesson text so it travels with the paragraph it belongs to.

The panel that opens holds an optional bold title and a sentence or two of plain text. Nothing is added to the page itself, which is the point: the lesson is the same length whether it carries two notes or twenty.

Three styles, four symbols

Style sets the colour of the symbol, and the colour is the meaning a student reads before they open anything. Alva Courses gives you three.

• Info is blue — a definition, a unit, a number, anything neutral.
• Tip is green — a shortcut, a preference, something that makes the step easier.
• Warning is amber — the mistake students make here, and how to avoid it.

The three colours are fixed. They only work as signals if a warning looks like a warning in every lesson of every course, so they do not follow your course colours. The symbol is chosen separately and is purely the character inside the badge.

When to use a note instead of a box

A note is for the detail that only some of your students need, and the decision is a writing decision rather than a setting. Reach for one when:

• a term needs a one-line definition that most of the class already knows;
• a step has a caveat that applies to one setup, one country or one skill level;
• you want to answer, in place, the question a few students always email about.

Use a highlighted box or a plain new paragraph when every student has to read the words. A note is opt-in — a student who never hovers never sees it — so nothing that changes what someone buys, pays or must do belongs behind one. The same rule keeps lessons readable: a paragraph with six symbols in it is harder to read than the long version would have been.

Write notes students will read

Keep a note to one or two sentences. The panel is sized for an aside, not a paragraph, and the 500-character limit is generous for what actually reads well on a phone. Use the title as a label rather than a sentence — "Metric only", "If you are on Shopify Payments", "Before you start" — so a student can tell whether the note is for them before they read it.

The body is plain text. Links, images and formatting are not available inside a note, which is deliberate: anything a student has to click belongs in the lesson where they will see it.

Notes in PDF exports and search

Paper cannot hover. When a course is exported to PDF, Alva Courses hides the symbol and prints the note inline, in square brackets, with the title first — "… check your settings [Before you start: units must be metric.] …" — so nothing you wrote is lost in the printed version.

Note text is also indexed by lesson search. A student searching for a word that appears only inside a note still finds the lesson it is hidden in.

Edit or remove a note

In the lesson editor, click an existing note to reopen the form with its current style, symbol, title and text. Change what you need and click Save, or click Remove note to take the symbol out and leave the sentence intact. Save the lesson to publish the change.