Use our Drip Schedule feature or Zapier to control when students have access to individual courses!
How It Works
There may be instances where you wish to curate your students' learning experience and restrict students from jumping ahead of content. For lessons within an individual course, we have a few options for setting this up:
If you are looking to apply this at a course level, like only giving access to a course after the successful completion of a previous course, or if you require students to take a set of courses in a particular order, there are a couple of ways to set this up. We don't currently have a built-in prerequisite or dripped course feature however, the following options can help you achieve this experience!
Create Drip Schedules on Multiple Courses
If you are selling a Bundle and would like students to take courses in a particular order, one option is to create a Drip Schedule per course that will create a dripped course effect.
For example, Course 1 could have no Drip Schedule, which means students would have access right away. Course 2 could have a Drip Schedule by Enrollment Date set to 7 days after enrollment, which means they would have access a week after Course 1. Course 3 could have a Drip Schedule by Enrollment Date set to 14 days after enrollment, which means they would have access 2 weeks after Course 1, etc.
With this option, students will still be able to see all course cards in their Student Dashboard, however, if they try to access a course that is not available via Drip just yet, they will see a notification letting them know when it will be available.
Use Zapier to Create Prerequisite Courses
You also have the option to use Zapier to enroll students into courses in a particular order, creating a prerequisite effect!
For example, you could set it up so that a student can only access Course 2 after they have fully completed Course 1. Zapier also has the option to specify actions based on date/time if you prefer to create a Drip effect.
Using this method, students will not see courses in their Student Dashboard until they meet the course completion requirements or the specific date/time you have set.
One thing to note is that Zapier bypasses Thinkific payment integrations. This means students will not be charged upon enrollment in subsequent courses, so you'll need to keep this in mind when pricing your course. For example, you'll want to make sure that the initial course a student buys covers the pricing for not only the first course but all the following courses.
Create a Zap Based on Course Completion
In this example, we will create a zap that automatically enrolls a student into their next course when they reach 100% completion in a previous course. This effectively creates a dripped course and you can repeat this for as many courses as you require.
In this example, I want students to 100% complete Marketing 101 before they can move into my Marketing 102 course.
- Create a new Zap and select Thinkific as your Trigger App, then Save and Continue.
- Select Course Completed as the Trigger, then Save and Continue.
- Connect or select your Thinkific account, then Save and Continue.
- Select the course(s) you want to be a prerequisite for your later courses and Continue.
- Test the trigger. To do this you will need a student to have completed the course prior to creating this zap. Fetch and Continue until the test is successful.
- Now that you have completed your trigger, you can set up your action app. Select Thinkific.
- Under Create, select Enroll User, then Save and Continue.
- Select your Thinkific account, then Save and Continue.
- Under Products, select the course(s) you want the student to be enrolled in after completing your initial course in the trigger.
- Enter in the other relevant information from the students' profile in Step 1, including User First Name, User Last Name and User email:
- Enter any other relevant information like the expiration date or company field.
- Click Continue and send a test to Thinkific.
- Once it returns as successful, click Finish.
- Then turn your Zap!
In the example above, there was only one prerequisite, but you could duplicate the above Zap and change the courses so that when a student completes Marketing 102, they are enrolled in Marketing 103 and so on.
And there you have it! Your students will now automatically be enrolled in subsequent courses once they 100% complete the prerequisite courses.
We’re always working behind the scenes on improvements and if you have feedback on this, we want to know. Please send us a quick email to let us know if you would love to see prerequisite or dripped courses as a built in feature!