When to Use Open Courses Versus Free Courses

By: Rachel Kolman December 8, 2022
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Depending on your motivations and goals for offering a course, there may be times you’ll want to offer a course for free. Setting your courses to open and/or free grants a user immediate access to your course materials. 

The appeal of using open and free courses is to attract users to your course and ultimately, to your business. When deciding if an open or free course is a good fit for you, consider the following questions: 

  • Are you teaching learners how to use or understand your product?
  • Are you trying to monetize your content? 
  • Are online courses part of your overall business income stream?

If you’ve answered yes to the first question, then open and free courses are a good fit – but they can work great for anyone as a lead magnet. 

Let’s explore how and when to use open and free courses to attract learners to your courses. 

When to Use Open Courses

Open courses in LearnDash don’t require registration, so customers can start learning without any additional steps. These types of courses work well for trainings and tutorials that supplement a paid product.

Open courses work great for digital product creators. Imagine you’re a web designer that makes website templates. A customer downloads the website template and has access to an open course that shows them how to customize the template.

As a real-world example, two of our LearnDash Customer Spotlights – Schedulicty and ShowIt – use open courses to teach customers how to use their software. 

Schedulicity is a booking platform for service-based businesses and their customers. Schedulicity uses open LearnDash courses to teach new clients how to use their scheduling platform. By creating open training courses, they’re making sure customers don’t get lost in the onboarding and adoption process. This converts more users to their software and grows their business. In Schedulicity’s use of LearnDash, open courses make sense. It eliminates the friction of remembering passwords and logging in to learn how to use the product.

Showit is a drag-and-drop website platform that provides creative freedom over website layout and design. Showit takes a similar approach by using LearnDash as a training tool for its users to learn their platform.  Their tutorials page displays a grid of open, short courses. Users can jump and skip around to the topic that applies to them to quickly learn the ins and outs of Showit. The Course Grid add-on is a perfect addition for displaying an overview of multiple open training courses at once. 

When to Use Free Courses

Free courses require registration with an email address. You can collect email addresses from your learners and contact them when you’re ready to release other content.

Because free courses need registration, your learners can save their progress and easily pick up where they left off when logging back in. This helps track progress and motivates a learner to return to the course to finish.

Free courses also work great as a lead magnet. For example, a free mini course can ask for an email so you can build your mailing list and market your paid offerings. You can build an email campaign for those who took your mini course to keep them engaged.

A mini course is a tightly-focused course on a single subject. Typically two to three hours in length, a mini course focuses on helping your audience solve a specific problem or achieve one result.  You can build a mini course from your existing content to create a free course that shows users what you’re about. However, make sure your mini-course has a clear takeaway or transformation to be truly valuable. 

How to Set Your Course Access Setting in LearnDash

Whether you’re going to set your courses to open, free, or paid, LearnDash can support multiple course access types. 

To set your courses, you’ll head to your LearnDash Course Access Settings. Follow our knowledgebase instructions for full details on your course access settings. 

LearnDash has five course access modes to choose from: open, free, buy now, recurring subscription, or closed.

When setting a course to ‘Open,’ the following rules apply:

  • Open to anyone visiting your site
  • No registration, login, or payment is needed for access
  • There’s no way to track course progress
  • Linear Progression does not apply

When you set a course to ‘Free,” the following rules apply:

  • A user 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.”

Keep these rules in mind when setting your course access to determine if open and/or free courses will work for you. 

Create Open and Free Courses with LearnDash

Ready to see how courses can enhance your business? Try making your own course in the demo first to see how it works. You can export your demo progress to a copy of LearnDash when you purchase. Every purchase comes with a 15-day money-back guarantee, so there’s no risk to starting now.

What courses will you create first? 

Rachel Kolman

Rachel Kolman has over 10 years of experience writing and editing for a variety of clients and brands. She is passionate about education, social change, pop culture, and video games. She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and two cats.