Courses
Your program's learning content is primarily composed of Courses. Each course you create will contain many Lessons, and optionally many Modules to separate those lessons into groups. For example, our program might be about design and we might create a course titled "Interface Design". It would then have many Lessons to teach about interface design. When a student purchases access to your program (or enrolls for free) they will have access to all courses inside it by default. We usually recommend selling access to your entire program or a content bundle rather than selling individual courses, but you can set a course to have "paid enrollment" to sell it on its own if it better fits your business.
Learn about the many options you have for selling courses in our payment guide articles.
See our Payment Guide on:
Selling Paid Memberships
Selling Content Bundles
Selling Individual Products
While courses are the primary building block in your program structure, as you build your program and explore the options available to you, you'll learn that the power in your program extends far beyond the courses it includes.
Course Attributes
Configuring your first course is simple. Each course has a name, description, cover image, and optional difficultly label. You can optionally upload or embed a preview video to provide students with a preview of what your course will cover and help them decide if it is the right course for them to purchase.
A course can only be seen by your students if the published box is checked. While completing your lesson content you can leave the course in draft mode and it will be hidden from any students currently enrolled in your platform.
Course Settings
On the right side of your course edit view, there are various settings for your course. You can decide if the course will have a price of its own (paid enrollment), or if it will be included free when a student signs up. By default any student enrolled in your program will have access to all of your courses. While editing a course, you can set a paid enrollment for that course. This will allow you to set a price for the course independent of any program enrollment fee or payment plan you have configured.
A course's price will be charged in the same currency as you've configured on your Payment Settings page.
If Paid Enrollment is selected, make sure you always set a price higher than zero. If you set the course price or upsell price to $0.00, students will see a message in place of the price and purchase button that reads "Currently Unavailable". If you want to offer the course for free, simply select Free Enrollment.
If you want to grant course access to selected students for free, or to students who have paid you outside of Heights Platform, see Granting and Revoking Content Access.
You can enable a public landing page for your course if you'd like potential students to be able to view information about the course before signing up and logging into your program. If the course has "paid enrollment", you can check off "allow purchase from landing page" to allow a student to checkout and purchase the course right there on the course landing page.
If you want to hide your course from your main audience, but allow certain students to purchase it, you can set the course to be a hidden course to hide it from your main course list and course sidebar. If you are a member of our Academy plan, you can go a step further and create roles that will create groups of courses visible to certain segments of your audience.
The join button text affects the text students will see on the course's "purchase" button.
The replace join button URL option allows you to force the purchase button of a course to redirect to an external URL. This option is used when you wish to use an external checkout to sell your course instead of Heights Platform's built-in checkout process.
The Launch Date allows you to set a date that your course content releases. If you leave this set to today's date or any day in the past it means that when a student purchases your course, they will be able to access it immediately. If you wish to presell your course before you complete all of your lesson content, or have a set release date that all purchasers get initial access to your course on, then you could set the launch date to any day in the future, and customers will be able to purchase the course, but its lessons will not be available until the launch date (even though they have purchased the course).
Finally, the course URL is automatically set when you create a course, but if you'd like to update it in the future you can do so from the URL field. Under the URL field you will find links to the various views of a particular course (its purchase page, upsell page, landing page, etc). You can copy that landing page URL and send it to any potential student to allow them to view details or purchase your course if the relevant settings described above are enabled.
Creating Course Content
When you have created your course and are ready to start adding modules, lessons, and uploading your content, you'll want to take a look at the Outline and Lesson Editor.
Course Upsells
We offer a great amount of flexibility in the way you choose to sell access to your program. Sometimes you'll want to sell an individual course at a price that is independent of any program enrollment payment plan. If you are selling a course separately, you can also sell the course as an upsell.
To set your upsell, head over to the checkout settings, by clicking on "edit checkout", as shown below:
If you choose to offer this, an upsell sales page for your course will be shown to students right after they complete their program enrollment.
You can set a special discounted upsell price that is different from the regular course price. If the student decides to navigate away from the upsell page and continue on to the program, they will be able to return to it, but only during their initial login to your program. After a student has logged in to your program more than once, the upsell course page will no longer be available to them, though they can purchase the course at the regular price like any other course that is not an upsell.
An upsell will only be shown after enrollment if your program is set to a paid enrollment option. Only one upsell offer can be active at a time. If you set multiple courses as upsells, only the first will be shown to the enrolling student. If you have also set a digital product as an upsell, it will take priority over the course upsell.
Free products can’t have upsells because there is no checkout process for them. The only type of free product that can have an upsell is a Challenge. You can learn more about creating a challenge here: Challenges.
For more on the topic of upsells, you may want to read the Payments, Checkout Settings or the Digital Products sections.