Scheduling Your Course Content
Step 3 of the course creation process covers creating a drip schedule for your online course. If you're just getting started and haven't created your first course, you can click here to start this support guide series from the beginning.
Scheduling your course content allows you to control when a student will gain access to each unit and lesson in the course. This gives your students a reason to come back to your course every few days, weeks, or months; However you decide to schedule your course.
The first choice you have to make with scheduling is whether or not you want your content to be dripped out over time or be available immediately. You can select an option from the Scheduling Type box to get started:
Here, you can choose from two scheduling type options:
- Drip Scheduling: Drip Scheduling lets you release your content over time with each lesson becoming available after a certain number of days or on a specific day of the week.
- Instant Access: With Instant Access, students will be able to view all lessons immediately upon purchasing. Use this option if you want your full course to be accessible as soon as someone registers for the course.
You can also release content based on Units or Lessons. Use Unit scheduling if you want an entire unit to be released at once, and use Lesson scheduling if you want each lesson to be controlled individually.
Setting your Course Schedule
If you choose to drip your content over time, you can choose to release content by the Day of The Week (such as on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, etc..) or based on how long it's been since the previous lesson was released. Dripping based on the number of days since the previous lesson is released will make your drip consistent for all students, while dripping based on the day of the week may look different for different students, depending on when they join. For example, if you drip out a course starting on a Monday, then students who join on Tuesday will have to wait 6 days for the first lesson to become available, while students joining on a Sunday will only have to wait one day.
Let’s say that we want our first unit to be available immediately when someone joins the course and the second unit to become available a week later. In that case, you would set each unit to be released on the schedule in the image below:
Since the first unit is set to “0” days, the unit will be available right away when the student joins the course. Then, seven days after the student joins the course, the second unit will become available. So when a student joins your course, they will see this schedule:
Congratulations! Your course is built and ready for launch. The next step is to create a Public Details page (think of this like a mini-sales page for your course) and add it to your Course Directory (which displays all of the courses you currently have available).