Hi Cheryl and welcome to the Mendix community!
Are you using the properties pane of the "add" button to create your new page? As long as your add button is within the "course" data view, it should automatically prefill the page with your course attributes. If you can't find it, please let us know and we'll point you towards it!
I ran into the same problem and found out what the issue was. You must make sure that Create Object button is on:
If not, then "Prefill page contests based on the Course entity" checkbox will not appear. I am not sure what the purpose of having the “Create Object” on/off is. I mean, under what condition will you have this switch off? When you are creating a form, then an object creation must ensue as a result of using that form. Otherwise, where would the results of completing a form be stored?