Granting Students Access to Your Courses

Usually, students will join your course through the checkout process on your site. Sometimes, however, you may want to add users to your site for free or create test users to let students into your course before your checkout pages are set up. In that case, Zippy Courses has built-in tools for manually adding students to your site.

Note: Zippy Courses requires that you have at least one pricing plan created to add a student to your course. If you haven't created a pricing plan yet, see how to create a plan here.

Creating A New Student

To create a new student in your site, first go to the Students menu in your Zippy Courses admin dashboard, and click the Create New button.

This will take you to a student creation page. Here, you can enter the student's email address, first name, last name, and password:

If you don't want to assign a password to a student, you can leave the Password field blank. Once you press the Create Student button, this email address will automatically be sent your site's Welcome email.

Note: The Welcome email contains a link to your login page, the email address the student's account is under, as well as a link to the password reset process. The Welcome email does not contain the student's password, by default, for security purposes. You can add a password to your Welcome email, however, by using this shortcode: {! User.Password }.

Assigning A Student To A Course

After you have created a student, you will be taken to their student page, where you can see they don't currently have access to any courses yet:

This student can log in to your site, but they won't be able to actually view any of your courses until they are granted access to one. To give a student access to one of your courses, click the Grant Access button. This will cause a popup window to appear:

From here, you will see a list of the courses in your site, and the pricing plans you have created for each course. To give a student access to a course, select the pricing plan you want share with your student. 

Optionally, you can enter an Amount Paid to add a payment record to your site for this order. The student will not actually be billed this amount, but your site's order history will reflect the price you enter. You can use this option if you've collected payment from outside of Zippy Courses.

When you've selected the pricing plan and entered the amount paid, click Grant Access to give the student access to your course. After doing so, you will see a record of the student's order and access on their student page:

The student will now be able to log in and access your course.