The course access settings allow you to define a set of criteria for how a user gains and maintains access to your course. We’ll go through all the options, some of which include a one-time payment, recurring payments, free access, prerequisites and more.

Locating Course Access Settings

1. Navigate to LEARNDASH LMS > COURSES
2. Click on the course you want to edit
3. Click on the Settings tab at the top of the page
4. Locate the section titled “Course Access Settings”

Access Mode

Access mode is how you determine the way in which someone can gain access to a course (completely free, free with registration required, one-time payment, recurring subscription, etc.). LearnDash has 5 course access modes to choose from. By default, the course will be set to Free.

Open

The following rules apply to Open courses:

• Free & open to anyone visiting your site
• No registration, login or payment is required for access
• Must be registered/logged in to track course progress
• Linear Progression does not apply

NOTE
If you have Open courses on your site, as soon as someone registers an account, they will automatically gain access to all Open courses.

Free

The following rules apply to Free courses:

• Must be registered/logged in to access
• No payment is required
• “Take this Course” button is shown to users not yet enrolled. They are sent through the registration process. If you’re using LearnDash’s customized login & registration, the button will say “Login to Enroll.”

By default, the course will be set to Free. The Free access mode is a good choice if you want an administrator to manually enroll students into the course.

Buy Now

The following rules apply to Buy Now courses:

• Must be registered/logged in to access
• Requires a one-time fee to be paid (no free access)
• Only works with the following payment methods: PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay & 2Checkout. Visit our Payments page to learn more about setting up payment methods.
• Do not use if you’re selling courses via a shopping cart or membership plugin (see Closed below)

The Buy Now access mode does not allow you to use discounts/coupons. Consider using an ecommerce or membership integration, along with the Closed access mode.

When using the Buy Now mode, you need to enter a price in the Course Price field.

1. First, select the Buy Now access mode
2. Then, enter your price in the Course Price field

Enabling the “Buy Now” access mode also allows you to let your users use their achievement points to purchase a course. Here’s how to do it using the Achievements Add-on.

NOTE
For both “Buy Now” and “Recurring” access modes, the user will be automatically enrolled into the course upon a completed payment.

Recurring

Recurring is very similar to Buy Now, except for recurring payments (as opposed to one-time payments).

The following rules apply to Recurring courses:

• Must be registered/logged in to access
• Requires a recurring fee (choose a billing cycle in X days, weeks, months or years)
• Only works with the following payment methods: PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay & 2Checkout. Visit our Payments page to learn more about setting up payment methods.
• Do not use if you’re selling courses via a shopping cart or membership plugin (see Closed below)

To set up the Recurring access mode:

1. Select the Recurring option
2. In the Course Price field, enter the amount you’d like to charge
3. Enter the amount of days/weeks/months/years on which you’d like the user to be billed again
4. Choose either day(s), week(s), month(s) or year(s) from the dropdown

NOTE
If choosing day(s), you must provide a number between 1-90.

You also have the option to control the recurring subscription with the following fields:

• Recurring Times – determines how many times the billing cycle repeats after the first cycle has been completed, leave empty for unlimited repeats
• Course Trial Price – fill this out if you want to have a trial period for the course with a special “trial” price
• Trial Duration – determine length of the trial period. After the trial is over, the normal course price billing goes into effect.

Course Enrollment URL

This field allows you to set a per-course redirect on your courses. Fill this out with the URL where you want your users to be redirected to after registration or enrollment.

You may have courses that you want to upsell, other offers, or even other course materials you want the users to download first, this setting will help you redirect the users to those pages after enrollment. They will also be automatically logged in and registered if they register on the native LearnDash Registration page.

NOTE
This option is only available for the “Recurring” and “Buy Now” options.

Closed

The following rules apply to Closed courses:

• Must be registered/logged in to access
• Allows you to sell your course via an ecommerce or membership add-on
• Enables a custom Button URL field, which sends users to a custom sales or checkout page (a button is only shown if you enter a URL)
• Manually enroll users into the course, or add them via group enrollment

When you choose Closed, you are essentially telling LearnDash to restrict access to your course, but don’t do anything else. You either let an ecommerce/membership add-on handle course access, or manually add users yourself. You can also add users to the course via group enrollment.

To redirect the Take this Course button to a custom URL:

1. First, select the Closed access mode
2. Then, enter the URL where you’d like the button to go

Course Prerequisites

Prerequisites allow you to choose another course (or courses) that a user must complete before taking this course. When selecting a course(s), you have two options:

• Any Selected (default)
  If a user has completed any one of the selected courses, they will be able to access this course.
• All Selected
  The user must complete all selected courses in order to access this course.

 

To add a course prerequisite:

1. Next to Course Prerequisites, toggle the setting on
2. Choose either Any Selected or All Selected
3. Click in the box to search for a course. Add as many courses as you’d like.

To remove a course prerequisite:

1. Click the x next to the course name

Course Points

Course points are a simple way to incentive your users. They can also be used as a prerequisite for another course.

To enable course points:

1. Next to Course Points, toggle the setting on

Required for Access

This is the number of points a user must obtain before gaining access to the course.

For example, let’s say you have a few beginner-level courses that each award 50 points upon completion. You might also have an intermediate-level course. If you want the student to complete at least 2 beginner-level courses (2 courses x 50 points/ea. = 100 points) before taking the intermediate-level course, you could set the required for access setting to 100 points.

Awarded on Completion

This is the number of points a user will receive for completing the course. In the above example, all of your beginner-level courses would set this value to 50.

NOTE
The provided examples are just to explain how course points work. You can use any numbers you’d like, and customize the course points to fit your learning curriculum.

Course Access Expiration

With course access expiration, you can choose to provide access to a course for a limited time period, based on the user’s enrollment date (aka: when they signed up for the course).

1. Next to Course Access Expiration, toggle the setting on
2. Enter the number of days the course will be available for
   • This will automatically count that many days from the user’s enrollment date
3. Choose whether or not you want the user’s course & quiz data to be deleted when access expires

WARNING
Once data is deleted, it is gone forever. If you choose to enable the Data deletion setting, we recommend you make a backup first.

Start Date

The start date feature allows users on your site to enroll/purchase a course like they normally would, however instead of being able to start working on the course right away, they are prevented from progressing through the course until the defined start date.

NOTE
Whether using a free course and a user clicks the enroll button or a paid course and they make a purchase, the user is considered as enrolled into that course at that point. For example, when generating a user course data report, users would show up as enrolled into that course even though they are unable to start accessing the content itself.

End Date

The end date feature determines when access to a course ends for all users enrolled and does not require the course to have a start date. Useful for ending access to a course for all students on a particular date instead of X days from enrollment time like the course expiration feature offers.

Course Pre-Sell

Combining a paid course and the start date feature you can sell users a course before they are allowed to start progressing through the course itself.

Student Limit

Allows you to limit the amount of students that can enroll into the course overall. When this is set and the user views a course page, they will see the limit displayed in the infobar.

Once the limit is reached, users will no longer be able to enroll into or purchase the course dependent upon the access method you are using. In the event that additional users need to be added into the course above the limit, you can manually enroll them into the course.

Cohorts

In using both the course start and end date features above, you can run cohorts for you users. Useful for when you want to have a course being run multiple times for a different set of users each time ( Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter as an example ).

Once you have the first course setup and ready, you can easily clone the course then change the start and end dates for the cloned course.

Course Users

This section allows you to see which users are currently enrolled in the course. You can also enroll users into a course, or remove them from the course.

To enroll users in the course:

1. Click the user(s) on the left that you would like to enroll in the course
2. Click the right arrow to move those users into the right window
3. Click the Update button at the bottom of the page

To remove users from the course:

1. Click the user(s) on the right that is already enrolled in the course
2. Click the left arrow to remove those users from the right window
3. Click the Update button at the bottom of the page