Building your course
Add a gate
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A gate holds learners at a step in your course until something happens outside it: a payment clears, a contract is signed, an account is set up for a new starter. Learners who reach a gate wait there. When the gate is unlocked, they carry on with the rest of the course.
Learners don't have to do anything at a gate. You can email them a short message when they arrive, so they know what is pending, for example with a link to your payment page.
Admins and editors can add gates to a course. Only admins can unlock one by hand.
Adding a gate
On the course's content page, choose Add → Gate.
Fill in the Title, which says what learners are waiting for, such as Payment. Your team sees it, and so do visitors to your public course page.
Check the Key, such as
payment. It is how your own system names this gate when it unlocks it. It follows the title until you edit it.Write a Message to learners if you want one. It is emailed when a learner reaches the gate. Leave it empty to send nothing.
Set the Send Delay, and choose its Track if your course has tracks.
Choose whether the gate has a Timeout.
Save the gate.
Changing the key breaks integrations
Once something is unlocking the gate by its key, renaming the key means calls that still send the old one stop working. Change the title as often as you like, but leave the key alone.
Unlocking a gate
By hand. Open the learner's enrollment and choose Unlock next to the gate. Only admins see the button.
From your own system. Call the API with a key that has the enrollments:update permission, naming the enrollment id and the gate's key:
POST /api/v1/enrollments/<enrollment_id>/unlock/
Content-Type: application/json
{"gate": "payment"}Only admins can create API keys. See Create and revoke an API key.
Either way, a learner waiting at the gate moves on straight away. The next content goes out with its usual Send Delay, counted from the unlock. If the gate was the last thing in the course, the enrollment is completed.
Unlocking early. A gate can be unlocked through the API before the learner reaches it. If they pay on day one for content behind lesson five, they walk straight through the gate when they get there, and never receive the gate's message. Unlocking a gate that is already unlocked changes nothing, so a retried call is safe.
Getting the enrollment ID to your page
Whatever unlocks the gate needs to know which enrollment it is for. The easiest way is a button in the gate's message, or in any lesson before it:
In the editor, choose Insert Button.
Give it a text and the address of your page.
Tick the learner details to add to the link: Enrollment ID, and Learner email if your page needs it.
Each detail is added to the link as it is sent, filled in for each learner. You can rename each one to whatever your page expects.
Example: a Stripe payment link
Point the button at your Stripe payment link, name the enrollment ID client_reference_id and the email prefilled_email. Stripe hands client_reference_id back when the payment completes, ready to pass to the unlock call.
The learner's email is passed to the page the link opens, so only tick it for a page you trust with it.
Timeouts
By default, learners wait at a gate until it is unlocked, however long that takes. Turn on a timeout to stop waiting after a number of days, counted from when the learner reached the gate, and choose what happens then:
When the timeout runs out | What happens |
|---|---|
Deactivate the enrollment | The enrollment ends, and the learner is emailed that it has ended and that they can enroll again. |
Continue past the gate | The learner moves on as if the gate had been unlocked. The timeline records that it was the timeout that let them through. |
What you and your learners see
In the learners list, filtered to a course, a waiting learner shows Waiting at gate: Payment instead of Active. The status filter has a Waiting option.
The learner's enrollment shows the gate under the course title, and its timeline records when they reached the gate, when it was unlocked, and by whom.
On your public course page, lessons behind a gate show a lock and a caption such as Unlocks after Payment, so people know what to expect before they enroll.
A waiting learner is still enrolled. You can still cancel their enrollment, and they can still unsubscribe.
Waiting learners don't count toward your plan
While a learner waits at a gate, they are not taking anything from the course, so they don't count toward the active learners on your plan. A course that sells its second half doesn't use up places on people who haven't paid yet. A learner who is also active on another course still counts.
Unlocking never checks your limit. A learner who has paid is never left stuck because your plan filled up in the meantime.
Changing a gate later
Unpublishing a gate lets learners pass it without waiting.
Reordering and moving between tracks works the same as for any other content. See Reorder your course content.
A gate can't send learners onto a track. Put it before or after the quiz or decision point that does.