When you’re delivering a course, you’re telling a story. Topics build upon one another, leading to a final outcome or takeaway for the learner.  

As a teacher or learning instructor, sometimes you have to slow down or speed up the storytelling process to maintain engagement or promote retention. Dripping your course content allows you to tell a better story to your learners. 

Drip-feeding is a tactic that gives course creators more control of the learning materials they share with students online. Drip-feeding is all about timed delivery: Your learners get the course material in stages, gaining access to content like lessons, quizzes, and assignments at a set time. Drip content is a great alternative to on-demand learning.

Let’s explore a bit more why drip content might be the best way to deliver your course. 

What is the difference between on-demand and drip courses?

On-demand learning means that all of your course content is available immediately—learners don’t have to wait for new content, and they can skip around to any lesson or topic they’d like. It’s a bit like going to a class and having all of your homework assignments handed out to you right when you arrive. 

While on-demand content allows learners to see all of the material at once, it’s not always a preferred learning style. For some students, the sheer amount of work looming ahead can cause learner paralysis and may even demotivate learners. 

Rather than allowing access to all content at once, a drip schedule is set up so that course content is made available gradually over a period of time. For many people, this is a preferable learning experience. 

Benefits of Drip Courses

Drip courses offer considerable learning benefits and can help build community and increase retention within your customer base. 

Build learner/customer engagement: The gradual delivery of lessons allows learners to follow their own pace instead of being overwhelmed with course materials all at once. This keeps students engaged and gives them a reason to keep coming back, with new content to look forward to.

Create more trust: Instead of receiving all of the course materials in one day, a drip method gives potential customers the assurance that you’ve thought carefully about your course design and that you’ll be there with them along the way, This can help cultivate better retention and repeat purchases.

Provide alternative purchase options: Instead of selling courses individually, you can offer them as packages and differentiate content in terms of ability and level of knowledge (e.g. beginner’s level, intermediate level, expert level). Packaging your content into bundles to meet learner levels adds credibility to your expertise and provides more options to tailor your content to the needs and existing knowledge of your learners.

Creating drip courses with LearnDash

Drip content can be complex, but a tool like LearnDash can help.

We’re happy to share that LearnDash’s 4.2 update added drip content support for all your content. With this latest update, not only can you drip entire lessons, but you can also drip topics and quizzes within specific lessons, too.

Here’s a one-minute primer on how to set up drip:

Our KnowledgeBase article on drip delivery can walk you through how to deliver drip material through topics, video progression, timers, assignment uploads, and release schedules.  

Ready to try it out for yourself? Take the LearnDash demo for a spin with two unique demo options for you to explore.