How to give temporary access to your courses

Naturally, when students pay for a course, instead of a subscription, they get access to the course for a lifetime,

However, course creators often need to grant temporary course access to students for various reasons; whether it is to continuously update the course, or encourage their students to finish the course within a given timeframe.

This is why OnlineCourseHost has created an avenue for course creators to create temporary access to their courses.

To do this, login to your platform => click Courses => Edit the course in question => Price and Coupons => tick the box for Time Limited Access => set up the timeframe you want => and Save Changes.

Afterward, click Courses again, and View Course, to see how the temporary access will be shown to your students when they go to your Course Sales Page to purchase the course.

Note: The time limited access only applies to paid courses, so it cannot be activated for free, and hidden/private courses that do not have price tags.

After a successful payment, there will be a count-down on your student's view of the course sales page, which will show how long the student has left to access the course.

Note: if you change the access period after some students have purchased the course, they will bound by the old access period. This means that the change in access period is only effective for new course purchases.

How do I know how long my student has to take a course?

To be privy to this information, login to your platform => click Admin => Manage Students => Search for the affected student => click his/her name => and scroll down their dashboard to Courses. There, you will see a list of all the courses they have access to, and when each would expire.

Note: If you manually assign a course to a student from the manage students' screen, the temporary access would not apply to them, as the manual enrollment gives lifetime access to a course unless it is manually removed. The temporary access is solely dependent on a purchase by the student.

What happens when my student's access gets expired?

The Time-Limited Access runs a batch job every day by 7 AM, UTC+0, to check students whose access would be expiring for the day.

This means that your student's access to the course will be automatically removed on the day the course expires, and the student will receive an email regarding this. This email will also contain a link to re-purchase the course, if they want to.

Can I use the time limited access if I am receiving payment outside the platform?

If you are making use of an external payment button, and you add a price to your checkout page, you will be able to use the temporary access.

However, the batch job will not work for this, so after the access period expires, you will need to manually remove your student's access from the manage students' screen.