How to set your own Drip Schedule for your Online Courses
Zippy Courses gives you the ability to schedule your Course content in a variety of ways, so that you can run your course in the way that you want to. This robust content scheduling is one of the most powerful features of Zippy Courses.
The screenshot above shows an example content schedule that delivers 2 lessons every week. Lessons 1 and 2 are already available, but the following lessons are only available every Mondays and Tuesdays for the duration of the course. Zippy Courses gives you near-infinite scheduling possibilities for your course, letting you serve your content exactly the way you would want to.
Your course's scheduling options are set under the Units and Lessons tab of your course editor.
Setting up your drip
To set your lesson's drip settings, select the Calendar icon next to your lesson's title. This will show you a series of possible scheduling options.
You can set your course's drip by the day of the week, by a number of days, or using a combination of both across multiple lessons. You can also require that a lesson be "completed" before moving on to the next lesson.
If you don't want a lesson to be included in your drip, select the "Do not apply scheduling to this entry" option. This lesson would then not be included in your course drip, and could be accessed as soon as someone joins the course. This is a great tool for offering bonus content for your lesson, or other content that you don't want to be dripped out over time.
Configuring drip settings
At the top of the "Units and Lessons" page, there is an option to Configure your Zippy Courses scheduling options for your course. This will pull up a window with some additional options:
This is a lot of different settings, so let's break down what each of these would mean for your scheduling:
'All Access' vs 'Drip Scheduling'
All Access courses give a student immediate access to the entire course. There are no additional settings for this scheduling option. Students will not have to wait any amount of time for a lessons to be released.
On the other hand, Drip scheduling gives students sequential access to content. Many instructors prefer this scheduling option because it avoids overloading the student with too much content when they first join.
Zippy Courses defaults to a drip sequence based on when a student joins, but you can also choose to start the sequence on a specific date. With both options, you can schedule lessons for a day of the week or X days after the student joins the course / start date.
Example: One lesson every day after a start date
In this example, Lesson 1 will be available on June 2, i.e. 1 day after the start date. The rest of the lessons become available 1 day after the previous lesson.
Controlling Drip with "Units" or "Lessons"
By default, Zippy Courses will drip your course out on a per-lesson basis. That means you set a drip for each individual lesson, and each lesson releases according to this drip. However, you can also set your drip to be controlled by your Units instead of your Lessons, meaning that an entire unit would be dripped at once instead of each individual lesson. This is a great alternative if you want each unit to have all lessons available at the same time.
When Does the Course Begin?
By default, a course will "begin" (meaning the student will gain access to the first course) as soon as they purchase the course. However, you can also set a dedicated "Start" date for your courses drip. When you set this date, your students (including those who purchase after the "Start Date") will be treated as if they started your course drip on your start date. That means that if your start date is January 1st, and a student joins on January 10th, they will see the first 10 days of your course's drip schedule.
Scheduling is Based on Time Since...
This setting determines whether or not the Drip setting you include in Zippy Courses is relative to your course's "Start" date, or relative to when the previous lesson became available. For example, in the course below:
These drips would behave as follows:
- If your drip is based on when the last lesson was made available, then Lesson one would be available after one day. Then, lesson two would be available two days after lesson 1(three days total). Finally, the third lesson would be available another three days after lesson two, making the total drip time six days.
- Alternatively if you set that drip based on the beginning of the course, then lesson one would be available after one day, just like the initial drip. However, lesson two would be available two days after the start of the course, meaning it would be available just one day after lesson one. Then lesson 3 would be available on the third day, making the total drip last three days.
There's no right or wrong way to set these drip settings, so think about which options would work best for your course, and set your drip appropriately.
On top of these normal drip settings, you can also set up Launch Windows for your product. View this guide on creating launch windows to learn how to set up a launch window for your product.