Who it is for
Couples trying to conceive, people going through IVF who want to understand their lab reports, parents-to-be who wonder what is happening week by week, and anyone who wants to know how a new life begins. You do not need a science background.
Your teacher
Kara Raubenheimer is a Reproductive Biologist registered with the HPCSA, with 17 years of experience and a master’s degree in medical physiology from Stellenbosch University. As an embryologist, she created Fertility with Kara after seeing how overwhelming fertility information can become. You can read her story on the Meet Kara page.
How it is built
The course is built to answer the questions people ask in fertility care. It follows a new life in order, from egg and sperm to birth, then opens the door to the IVF laboratory. Each module is made of short lessons you can read in a few minutes, with learning aims, a note on what you should already know, a “Keep learning” panel for the full science and a brief summary at the end.
Every lesson lists its sources: standard embryology textbooks, freely available medical references such as StatPearls on the NCBI Bookshelf, and research papers checked on PubMed. Fertility facts follow the Fertility with Kara evidence library and current guidance, including NICE NG257 (2026), the WHO semen manual (6th edition, 2021) and ESHRE’s guidance on treatment add-ons (2023).
The pictures
Every picture in this course is a watercolour-style illustration made for the course, in the same style as the Fertility with Kara illustrations on the website and in the ebooks. Labels are added separately, on top of each picture, so every name and number can be checked. Charts are drawn, so every number is exact, and set on the same painted paper. The people in the pictures are invented characters, not Kara, patients or staff. Drawings are simplified and not to scale.
Counting weeks
Embryology counts weeks from fertilisation. Pregnancy is counted from the first day of the last period, about two weeks earlier. Lessons give both the first time a week is mentioned.
Your privacy
The course has no tracking. When you buy the package, it keeps your email address, your name, your enrolment and your order (the amount, PayFast’s payment reference and when you agreed to start straight away), so that you can sign in and so I can help if something goes wrong. If you choose a password, only a scrambled (hashed) form of it is kept. Sign-in links last 30 minutes (three days in the welcome email), and short-lived counters of sign-in attempts protect your account. Signing in sets two small essential cookies for fertilitywithkara.com and this course: one keeps you signed in, and the other lets the menu show “Continue” instead of “Get the package”. Your progress, quiz scores and the name on your certificate are still stored only in your own browser, never on the course’s server, and you can clear them on the progress page. The website’s privacy page explains more.
This content is provided for general educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide individual medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Individual fertility circumstances differ, and decisions about investigations or treatment should be discussed with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.