How to Fork and Customize Training Courses in empowsec

Every security team has watched employees click through a training module about a fictional company with tools nobody recognizes and a policy that contradicts the one posted on the intranet. Generic content is easy to distribute but hard to take seriously. empowsec addresses this with training customization: companies and resellers can fork a global course into their own editable copy, insert their real policies, examples, and phrasing, and still stay connected to upstream improvements.

This article explains how forking works, what exactly you can edit afterwards, how syncing keeps a fork current, and how empowsec decides which version each learner sees.

Why Generic Training Content Underperforms

Awareness training changes behavior when learners recognize themselves in it. A module that names your actual ticketing system, your real reporting address, and your genuine escalation path lands differently from one about a made-up corporation. The gap shows up in the details: a phishing lesson that tells people to forward suspicious mail to an address that does not exist at your company actively trains the wrong behavior. Customization closes that gap - but historically it meant rebuilding courses from scratch and losing them the moment the vendor shipped an update. Forking solves both halves of the problem.

Fork a Course into Your Own Editable Copy

Training customization is capability-gated: it is enabled per company, so administrators only see the option when their organization is allowed to customize content. From the customization screen, a company sees the courses available to it - the global empowsec library plus, if the company belongs to a reseller, that reseller's own courses - and can fork any of them with one click. Resellers can do the same with global courses for their entire client base.

A fork is a deep copy, not a pointer. empowsec duplicates the course's quiz interactions and all of its interactive pages, including their media files, into a copy owned by your organization. The original stays untouched for everyone else, and forking the same course twice simply returns your existing copy instead of creating duplicates. The screen also shows at a glance which courses you have already customized and how your fork differs, for example in passing score or question count.

Edit Settings, Quizzes, and Interactive Pages

Once forked, the copy is fully yours to edit. At the course level you can adjust the passing score and settings such as whether learners see the correct answers after a quiz. The quiz editor lets you rewrite, add, or remove questions - multiple choice and true-or-false - each anchored to a point in the video, with full control over answers and which of them are correct.

Interactive pages are where customization gets powerful. empowsec supports a wide range of page types you can rework inside a fork: information pages and accordions for your own policy text, graded and ungraded quizzes, hotspot images where learners click the suspicious parts of a screenshot, branching scenarios, drag-and-drop and click-to-match exercises, ordering and fill-in-the-blank tasks, embedded videos, and simulated email and chat conversations. That means your fork can include an email simulation styled after the exact lure your industry sees, or a scenario that walks through your real incident reporting flow step by step.

Sync with the Source Without Losing Ownership

Content ages. The upstream course you forked will receive corrections, refreshed statistics, and new questions over time. Instead of leaving your copy stranded, empowsec lets you sync a fork with its source: one action re-imports the current upstream version - title, description, passing score, settings, quiz questions, and interactive pages - while the course remains your organization's own copy. Since syncing replaces your edits with fresh upstream content, the practical rhythm is to sync when the source has meaningfully improved and then re-apply your organization-specific changes on top.

If you decide the customization is no longer needed, deleting the fork reverts your organization cleanly to the original course. Nothing breaks: learners simply see the parent version again.

Who Sees Which Version: Company, Reseller, Global

With forks existing at two levels, empowsec resolves which version a learner receives by picking the most specific one available: a company fork wins over a reseller fork, and a reseller fork wins over the global original. A reseller can therefore maintain a branded, regionally adapted version of a course for all of its client companies, while an individual client with specific requirements forks further and overrides it for its own people - without either copy affecting anyone else.

Reseller forks carry one extra superpower: they can be translated. Dedicated translation management shows, per language, whether the course text and every quiz question have been translated, and flags incomplete languages - so a reseller serving clients across several countries can offer the same customized course in each market's language with confidence that nothing was missed.

Key Takeaways

• Forking creates a deep, editable copy of a global or reseller course - quiz interactions, interactive pages, and media included - while the original stays untouched.
• Customization is capability-gated, so access is granted deliberately per company rather than being on for everyone.
• Everything relevant is editable: passing score, quiz questions, and a rich set of interactive page types from hotspot images to email and chat simulations.
• Sync keeps forks current by re-importing the latest source version, and deleting a fork cleanly reverts learners to the parent course.
• Learners see the most specific version: company fork over reseller fork over global original.
• Reseller forks are translatable, with per-language completeness tracking for multilingual client bases.