Creating a test student account is the easiest way to make sure every aspect of your course is running smoothly — from the initial checkout, all the way to course completion.
In this article:
Why Create a Test Student Account?
How to Create a Test Student Account
How to Test Different Features with Your Test Student Account
Why Create a Test Student Account?
Most of what you build in Thinkific can be easily tested: our Course Builder allows you to Preview lessons, and our Site Builder let's you see your changes right as you're making them. Getting that feedback helps ensure that you are able to deliver the best version of your courses to your students.
But for some of our more complicated features, it can be harder to get that immediate feedback — especially those features that are meant to unfold over time, or are triggered by specific events in a course. This makes it harder to know for sure that everything is working as intended.
That's where having a test student account can really come in handy. Using a test account gives you a complete and accurate picture of your courses from the student's point of view, allowing you to walk through all the different moving parts that you have set up to give your students the best experience possible.
How to Create a Test Student Account
Creating a test student is pretty straightforward, but before you get started with the Thinkific process, you'll need to set up an email account for your test student to use. This is not strictly necessary for every test account you make, but we definitely recommend having at least one test student account with a working email address — so let's start there!
How to Create an Email Address for Your Test Student
The straightforward option here is just to sign up for a new email with your preferred free webmail provider of choice, such as Gmail or Yahoo. Make sure to write down your login credentials, for future reference.
If you're already using Gmail, an even simpler option is to make use of its built-in email aliasing tools: you can easily create unique email addresses that redirect to your main inbox by adding +[name] to the prefix of your regular @gmail address. For example, thinkific+student1@gmail.com will automatically deliver to thinkific@gmail.com - and so will thinkific+student2@gmail.com. You can make as many variations as you need!
How to Create a Test Student Account (Basic Plan or Higher)
- In your Thinkific Admin Dashboard, go to Support Your Students
- Select Users
- Click on the +New User button on the top right
- Fill out the fields as for a regular student; pick a name you will definitely recognize as not a real student, e.g. Test Student
- If you have created an email account (see above) to use for testing, enter it as the email. If not, you can enter anything that looks like an email, e.g. test@fakeemail.com or student@test.x - just make sure you write it down, because you will need it to log in as the student!
- In the Password section, select Manually set user password. Choose a simple password that you can easily remember - and then write it down anyways, just in case.
- Optional: You can also take this opportunity to Enroll your student in any courses you intend on testing. Depending on what you want to test, it may make more sense to leave this for now, and go through the enrollment process later, from the test student's perspective.
- Once everything is filled out, click Save on the top right.
How to Create and Enroll a Test Student (Free Plan)
If you are on our Free plan, you are not able to manually enroll your test student in courses using the Admin dashboard. Instead, we recommend you enroll in the course as part of creating the student account, by following these steps:
- Open an Incognito or Private window in your browser
- Navigate to your Thinkific site, and find the course you want to test
- Enroll in the course
- Sign up as for a regular student; pick a name you will definitely recognize as not a real student, e.g. Test Student
- If you have created an email account (see above) to use for testing, enter it as the email. If not, you can enter anything that looks like an email, e.g. test@fakeemail.com or student@test.x - just make sure you write it down, because you will need it to log in as the student!
- Click Sign up to finish creating the student account, and proceed to your course checkout
How to Test Your Checkout
If you are enrolling in a course as part of creating your student account, you will also have the opportunity to test your checkout as part of the sign-up process. If the course is free, this will be a very simple process - but if you are enrolling in a paid course, you have a few choices on how to handle the actual payment.
The simplest method is just to set up a 100% off coupon for testing purposes, and bypass the need for a transaction altogether. Or, if you want to test to make sure your checkout is handling real transactions properly, you can set up a fixed-discount coupon to reduce the price to $1 or a similarly trivial amount.
For more details on how to handle testing payments, check out our Test Your Course Checkout article.
Important Considerations
- Test student accounts don't need to have valid email addresses, unless you plan to use them to test functionality involving email (e.g. a Course Welcome email message.) The 'email' field in this case will still be used as the login. This can be useful if you need to create an account very quickly to spot test something. For your primary/ongoing student test account it is usually worth setting up an email address.
- For one-off tests, use a new Incognito window every time to ensure cookies are reset, etc.
- For longer/ongoing tests, consider using a different browser entirely, or creating a separate profile for your test student in your preferred browser. Here are some instructions for how to do this in different browsers: in Chrome, in Firefox, in Microsoft Edge.
How to Test Different Features with Your Test Student Account
Once you have your test student account all set up, you can use it to test many different aspects of your student experience. Here are a few of the features that are particularly well-suited to testing with a full student account, and some ideas on how to approach the testing.
Enroll your test student in the course to ensure that your Drip Schedules are running as expected. You will have to monitor the course over time.
If you have a new course starting, or are enrolling a new cohort of students in a course, that can be a perfect time to enroll your test student alongside them; then you have a direct window into how the Drip Schedule is progressing for those students, in case any problems come up!
The Preview options in the Course Builder are designed to ignore things like Prerequisite lessons and Video Completion requirements. Enroll your test student in the course to double-check that these options are working as you intended.
Checkout to Course (Onboarding Experience)
Want to optimize your students' onboarding experience? Have an unusual checkout set-up? Walking your test student through that initial sign-up process can help you spot any areas for improvement, as well as ensure that things like Course Welcome emails or External Payment processors are all interacting the way you expect.
Course Progress, Completion & Certificates
What happens when your student finishes their final lesson, and ticks that Course Completion over to 100%? A test student is the best way to ensure that your end-of-course processes are working smoothly, whether it's issuing a Certificate or sending a Completion email to congratulate (and market to) your successful students.