This guide will introduce the various types of courses that you can create within your school. You can find a general overview of creating courses in LearnWorlds here. As soon as you prepare your course sections & learning activities, you can set up the course Access type from the course's Access tab.
You have the option to select from six distinct course types: Paid, Draft, Coming Soon, Enrollment Closed, Free, and Private.
You can find more about the plan availability per course type below.
Starter | Pro Trainer | Learning Center | High Volume | |
Paid | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Draft | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Coming soon | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Enrollment closed | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Free | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Private | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Paid
Whenever your course is ready to go public, you can choose to offer it as Paid. From now on, this course will only be accessible to those who will purchase it or have been manually enrolled.
In the Access tab, select Paid and click on Set the price. A good way to attract users is by offering a discount, with the discounted price shown below. In Enroll Button, you can take a sneak peek at the enrollment button.
You can also offer Free Sections in a Paid Course or further check how to Edit the Pricing of your Courses.
Draft
Creating your course in authoring mode and keeping it Draft, ensures that it remains unpublished and invisible while under development. This mode allows you to work at your own pace, gradually adding content. Opting for this mode during the course development phase provides the opportunity to establish it more effectively.
Coming Soon
To build anticipation for your upcoming course, consider offering a teaser to spark interest in the content that's on the way. By setting the course status to "Coming Soon," the course will appear in your school, but enrollment will remain closed. Instead, the course card will display a message indicating that the course is on its way and will be available soon. Users can still visit the course overview page if the respective link is available. If you’ve added a course outline section, they can see the planned content, but they won’t be able to access it just yet. When they try, a message will let them know the course isn’t ready to view.
Enrollment Closed
If you want to limit the number of users in your course, you can close enrollment. When enrollment is closed, new users cannot enroll or purchase the course (one-off payment). However, the course remains visible in catalogs, its course layout page can be viewed by anyone, and existing users can still access its content.
Free
Make your course Free and open to all school users. This way, registered users can access your content and become familiar with it, which can increase the likelihood of them purchasing one of your premium courses.
Private
You can offer your users a Private course, which you can very easily adapt to each learner's needs and abilities. Private Courses are accessible only to those who have been explicitly manually enrolled in them. Since private courses are not published, are not listed in course catalogs. For more information on how to give access to Private Courses, you can check this article.
Important Notes
- If you change a course type from Free to Paid, Private, Coming Soon, or Draft, users who were previously enrolled in the course will be unenrolled. In Paid and Private courses, users will need to purchase the course to regain access. Access can also be reinstated if you revert the course's price back to free.
- If you change a course from Free or Paid to Enrollment Closed, enrolled users will not lose access.
- If users are enrolled in a Paid or Enrollment Closed course and the access status changes to Free or Private, they will not lose access.
- You can check anytime Edit the Access of your Courses.