Email courses
What an email course is, and how to run one.
An email course teaches one thing at a time, in the place people already read: their inbox. No portal, no login, no app to install. This page covers what the format is, when it works, and what running one actually involves.
The short definition
An email course is a sequence of lessons delivered as email, spaced out over days or weeks, that a learner works through at their own pace. Each message is one step. The next one arrives on a schedule, or once the learner has finished what came before.
That is the whole idea. What makes it different from a newsletter is that it has an order, an end, and something to complete along the way. What makes it different from a hosted course is that there is nowhere to log in. The course comes to the learner instead of the learner going to it.
The format
What a course is made of
Lessons
The teaching itself: one idea per message, short enough to read in a few minutes. Plain text and light HTML travel further than video: a lesson is a few kilobytes and readable offline once it has landed.
Quizzes
A check that the lesson landed. In Gmail these are interactive inside the message itself, so answering never leaves the inbox; everywhere else the same quiz arrives with a link to answer on the web.
Assignments
Work to hand back, for anything a multiple choice question cannot test. Useful where the point is to have done the thing, not to have recognised the right answer.
Scheduling
The schedule runs from each learner's own start
This is the part that separates an email course from a broadcast. A newsletter goes out to everyone on Tuesday. A course starts when a particular person enrols, and every step after that is timed relative to what came before: two days after the previous lesson, or as soon as they finish the quiz in between.
So someone who joins in March and someone who joins in July both get the same path from their own day one. There are no cohorts to organise, nobody waits for a start date, and nobody receives lesson four before finishing lesson three.
Honestly
When the format fits, and when it does not
Good fit
- Material that is better spaced out than binged: onboarding, refreshers, habit-forming practice.
- Audiences who will not log into another portal: new hires in week one, customers, partners, volunteers.
- People on weak or metered connections, where a video platform is not realistic.
- Anything you want to know was actually read and understood, not just made available.
Poor fit
- Content that depends on video, screen sharing or live sessions to make sense.
- Reference material people need to search and re-read out of order. That is documentation, not a course.
- Anything needing proctored exams or formal accreditation.
- Selling a course directly: Inbox Academy has no checkout of its own, so payment happens on your side and enrolment is triggered from it.
Running one
What you need to run one
Four things, whether you build it yourself or use something like Inbox Academy.
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1
Somewhere to write the lessons
And to reorder them, because the order you first think of is rarely the one you ship. The guide walks through writing a first course.
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2
Delivery that actually reaches inboxes
Authenticated sending, bounce handling and unsubscribes. This is the part that is unglamorous to build and expensive to get wrong.
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3
A per-learner schedule
Timed from each person's enrolment rather than the calendar, and able to wait for a quiz to be answered before sending what comes next.
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4
A way to see who is stuck
Who opened, who answered, who stopped. Without it a course is a broadcast and you find out it was not working much later than you would like.
Inbox Academy is all four. It is built on django-email-learning, our open-source library. If you would rather run the infrastructure yourself, you can self-host that for free.
Run your first email course.
Write a course this week and watch lesson one land in your own inbox.
14 days free, from your first learner. No credit card required.