The Complete Guide to Poplearn Slack Commands

Poplearn's whole admin surface is three slash commands. That's deliberate — for most teams the person running training is also doing several other jobs, and a separate admin portal is one more place to remember.

/courses new

Creates a course from a document you paste in.

Poplearn splits the material into modules short enough to finish in one sitting, and writes the quiz questions for each. You don't author anything — no block editor, no templates, no layout choices.

Use it when: the material already exists in writing. A handbook, a policy, an SOP, a process doc, a competitive brief, a release note.

Worth knowing: read the generated modules before assigning them. This takes a few minutes and catches the things automated conversion gets wrong — a section that split awkwardly, a question whose answer is too obvious, an order that made sense as reference but not as teaching.

Source format matters. Documents with real heading structure convert best, because the split follows those headings. If your source is a PDF export of something, convert from the original instead — the structure survives.

/assign

Sends a course to a person, a channel, or every new hire from that point forward. Reminders are included.

The three targets suit different situations:

• A person — one-off or remedial training. Genuinely a snapshot, and should be.
• A channel — role-specific training. /assign #support targets whoever is in #support now, and stays correct as the team changes, because the channel is maintained continuously for other reasons.
• Future joiners — onboarding and company-wide policies. The sequence runs whether or not anyone remembered to enrol someone, which removes the most common onboarding failure.

Worth knowing: check the channel membership matches who needs the training. Channels sometimes contain observers — managers, stakeholders, bots — who'll be assigned material they don't need. Usually the proxy holds; when it doesn't, assign to individuals for that case.

/progress

Returns live completion by team, exportable on demand.

The output is per-person and timestamped rather than an aggregate percentage. That matters for two reasons: compliance needs to know whether a named person completed a named policy on a named date, and a manager needs names rather than a count in order to do anything.

Use it when: checking coverage before a deadline, producing evidence for an audit, or giving a team lead their own picture.

Worth knowing: the most useful check is the denominator, not the percentage. Confirm the people you expected to be assigned actually were — a course assigned to the wrong set produces confidently wrong numbers, and 100% completion of an incomplete population is the most dangerous reporting error available.

A typical sequence

Setting up onboarding, start to finish:

1. /courses new with your existing onboarding document.
2. Read the generated modules; reorder if the document wasn't in teaching order.
3. /assign to everyone who joins from today forward.
4. /progress periodically, or whenever someone asks about coverage.

That's the whole thing. After step three it runs without maintenance.

Beyond the commands

Paid plans add web-based course authoring and web-based user management for teams that prefer a browser for setup, plus in-app rewards and a leaderboard. The Slack commands cover the full workflow on their own — the web tools are an alternative, not a requirement.

The free plan covers teams under 20 seats with Slack-based authoring and unlimited courses and assignments.

Add Poplearn to Slack — installs in about a minute.