Course Roles

Members of our Academy plan will have access to the Roles feature. If you aren't on our Academy plan, that's okay! Our other plans already include features that can help you segment your platform users and content! In most cases, creators will never have a need for our roles feature (see Hidden Courses and Content Bundles). The roles feature is specifically for segmenting course access to disable a certain audience from viewing and is typically used by larger businesses.

Course content can be restricted to students with the help of our drip lesson feature, require to unlock lesson feature, and by making the course sold separately. Courses can also be set as "hidden courses" or added to bundle payment plans. Course creators can also add additional admins/authors, and make students messageboard moderators. All of these things are possible on any paid plan, even without the course roles feature!

If you are a member of our Academy plan and need further segmentation to your learning content, read on:

By default, students have access to all courses on your platform. If you would like to limit the visibility of certain courses and separate students into different groups you can create custom student roles. A course can have multiple roles to allow multiple different groups of students to access it. For example, you might have an introductory course that applies to all of your students, but then you might have a beginner course and an advanced course where you don't want beginners to see the advanced content and you don't want advanced students to see the beginner content. You can create any number of roles needed to segment your students into groups that work for you.

Roles don't grant access to courses, they only affect visibility of the course – meaning free courses are free to those who have the role, and paid courses sold separately still have to be purchased by those who have the role.

Roles are useful when you have a private course that you only want to be visible to a small segment of your audience (such as a limited time bonus for certain members, or a custom course for a private client).

Popular Uses for Roles:

1. You have a private client and you want to create custom courses for their team, but you don't want your regular audience to know that those courses exist. (If you plan to sell this course, and want to be able to promote it via its public landing page, then the Hidden Course setting might be a better solution for you than roles.)

2. You have a free bonus course that you want to make visible to a few students, but you don't want other students to feel like they are missing out, so you put the course in a role to ensure that your main audience doesn't see the bonus course.

3. You want to make a certain course available for purchase by a subset of your audience. Let's say you are selling a new course, but you only want to give certain students the opportunity to purchase it during a special presale. You could add the course to a role to give that group of students the chance to buy the course first. You could then remove the course from the role when it is ready to be made available for everyone to purchase.

A student can view all courses that are not part of any role, as well as courses that are part of a role they are a member of. Any course inside a role will be hidden from the rest of your students unless they are also members of that role.

Heights Role Edit and Creation Screen Role and Permissions Page

The Roles page is accessible from a link in your Account Settings page if you are on our Academy plan.

Roles can also be assigned via Zapier or our API. For example, you might connect a Google Sheet to Heights Platform via Zapier, where every student listed in the Google Sheet will automatically be assigned a role when they are added to that sheet, allowing you to better manage larger customers that might want you to assign any of their employees to a role in your program based on the level of access they purchased from you.

You should avoid using roles when you want students to be able to automatically enroll without any manual actions on your part or you want students to access your content freely.