How to Record Course Lessons Using Loom

Go to loom.com/download and install either the Chrome extension or the desktop app. The Chrome extension works well for most course recording — it can capture any browser tab or your full screen. The desktop app adds the ability to record specific application windows, which is helpful if you're demonstrating software that runs outside the browser. Both are free to install.

When you open Loom, you'll see three recording modes:

• Screen and camera — your screen fills the frame with your webcam in a small bubble. Best for slide presentations, software walkthroughs, and any lesson where students need to see what's on your screen while also seeing you.
• Screen only — no webcam. Good for detailed technical demonstrations where the camera bubble would cover important UI elements.
• Camera only — just your webcam, no screen. Works for short introductions, personal messages to students, or lessons where you're teaching a concept verbally without visual aids.

For most course lessons, screen and camera is the right choice. Your students get the content on screen and the human connection of seeing your face.

Before pressing record, arrange what your students will see. If you're presenting slides, open them in presentation mode. If you're walking through a tool or website, zoom your browser to 125% or 150% so the text is readable on smaller screens. Close any tabs or notifications you don't want appearing in the recording. Turn off system notifications — nothing breaks the flow of a lesson like a Slack ping appearing on screen.

Take 30 seconds to check your webcam angle and lighting. Natural light from a window in front of you (not behind you) makes a noticeable difference. You don't need a ring light or a studio — just avoid being backlit or sitting in a dark room.

Click the record button. Loom gives you a 3-second countdown, then you're live. Speak as if you're explaining this to one student sitting across the table from you. Don't read from a script word-for-word — it sounds stiff on video. If you have notes, keep them in bullet points on a sticky note next to your camera so your eyes stay close to the lens.

If you stumble or lose your train of thought, pause for a beat and start the sentence over. You can trim mistakes later, and in practice, small imperfections make lessons feel more human. Students are more forgiving of a natural pause than they are of a robotic delivery.

While recording, press Ctrl+Shift+D (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+D (Mac) to activate Loom's drawing tools. You can circle a button you're about to click, underline a key term on a slide, or draw an arrow pointing to a specific area of the screen. These annotations appear in the recording and disappear after a few seconds. They're especially useful for software walkthroughs where students need to know exactly where to look.

When you're finished, click the stop button in the Loom control bar. Your recording uploads automatically and opens in a new browser tab. Watch it through once. You're checking for three things: Is the audio clear? Is the screen content readable? Did you cover what you intended? If something went significantly wrong — your mic wasn't working, you recorded the wrong screen — it's faster to re-record than to try to fix it.

Almost every recording has a few seconds of dead air at the beginning (the countdown, you settling in) and the end (reaching for the stop button). Click "Edit" on your Loom video page and use the trim handles to cut those moments. You can also remove a section from the middle if you had a long pause or went off track. Loom's editor is intentionally simple — it handles trims and cuts, not complex multi-track editing. For course lessons, that's usually all you need.

For a course hosted on a platform like Ruzuku, you'll want to download the MP4 file and upload it to your course builder. Click the three-dot menu on your video page and select "Download." If you're sharing a draft for feedback first, copy the Loom link instead — your reviewer can watch and leave timestamped comments directly in Loom, which is faster than going back and forth over email.

It's tempting to block off a Saturday and record your entire course in one sitting. In practice, fatigue shows up on camera by lesson three or four — your energy drops, your explanations get rushed, and the quality becomes uneven. A better approach: record one or two lessons per session, review them, and come back fresh the next day. Your students experience each lesson in isolation, so consistency matters more than speed.

Completion rates drop significantly for videos longer than 10 minutes — a pattern that shows up clearly in our platform data at Ruzuku across thousands of courses. If your lesson runs longer, look for a natural split point. Two 7-minute lessons are almost always better than one 14-minute lesson. Students can pause between them, and you get more granular completion data to see where people disengage.

A New Zealand-based writing coach on our platform started with Loom, then switched to Veed because it handled audio better. Then Veed changed its service and dropped the slides-plus-video option she relied on. She ended up writing to our support team asking for alternatives, and we pointed her to Descript.

I mention this because tool switching is real, and it's painful when it happens mid-course. Before you commit to a recording tool, test the specific workflow you'll use — slides plus webcam, screen-only walkthrough, whatever your course needs. Record three lessons, download them, upload to your course platform, and make sure the full pipeline works. It's much easier to switch tools before you have 40 recordings than after.

Loom auto-names recordings with a timestamp, which is useless once you have more than a handful. Rename each video right after recording with a clear pattern: "Module 2 — Lesson 3: Mixing Colors." This saves significant time when you're uploading lessons to your course platform later and trying to match recordings to your outline.

Loom's simplicity is its strength, but it means you'll hit the ceiling if your course needs polished production. There's no multi-track editing — you can't layer in B-roll footage, add background music, or insert title cards within Loom itself. If your lessons need that level of production, you'll want to record in Loom (or any screen recorder) and edit in a tool like Descript or DaVinci Resolve.

The free Starter plan limits you to 5-minute videos and 25 total recordings. That's tight for a full course — most creators will need the Business plan at $12.50/month (billed annually) to remove those limits. If budget is a constraint, OBS Studio is a free open-source alternative that can record screen and camera, though it requires more setup and has no built-in sharing or trimming.

Loom also isn't ideal for lessons that require precise audio editing. If you need to remove filler words, adjust pacing, or clean up background noise, a tool like Descript handles those tasks far better. As Dan Allosso, who uses Descript for his history courses, has noted — he spends about 1.5 to 2 times longer editing out pauses and ums than actually recording. That's the trade-off: Loom gives you speed by skipping the edit step entirely, but you need to be comfortable with a more natural, less polished delivery.

There's also a platform fragmentation problem worth mentioning. With Loom, your workflow is: record in Loom, download the MP4, upload to your course platform, then set up discussions separately, track student progress separately, and manage enrollments somewhere else. Each step is a separate tool with a separate login. On a platform like Ruzuku, you upload your video directly into the lesson builder alongside your text, discussions, and assignments — everything lives in one place. That integration isn't glamorous, but it eliminates the scattered-tool problem that slows creators down once they're past the recording step.