Releasing modules on a schedule

A course can hand out its modules over time instead of all at once. Set it in the course settings, under Release.

The two ways

Paced from each start

Counted from the day each person enrols. Everybody gets the same run whenever they join: module 2 opens on their seventh day, whether that is March or September.

For: a self-paced course that people join continuously and that you want taken over weeks rather than in an evening.

Fixed dates

One calendar for everybody. Module 2 opens on 20 October for all of them.

For: a cohort moving through together, where the dates are something the group talks about.

Setting the schedule

The whole schedule is one table — a row per module, in outline order — rather than a setting buried in each module. You can see the shape of it, which is the point: a fortnight’s gap in the middle is obvious in a list and invisible one module at a time.

1. Choose the mode. The table appears.
2. Fill in each module’s timing: days in for a paced course, or a date for a cohort.
3. Save the course.

Two shortcuts sit under the table. Space them N days apart → Fill the column fills the whole schedule evenly, which is what nearly every drip is, and spares you typing 0, 7, 14, 21, 28 by hand. Open everything now clears the schedule when it turns out to have been a mistake.

Reading the right-hand column

It answers the question the numbers do not. “14 days in” is easy to type and impossible to picture; the same row says Tue, 27 October for somebody enrolling today, which you can check against a term or a trip.

On fixed dates it becomes a status column, and says so when a date is out of order or missing.

Checking it before anybody sees it

You cannot check a drip by browsing the course: staff see every lesson, always, because you cannot build what you cannot open. So the Release settings carry a preview — pick a day and see which modules are open to somebody on it.

Use it. It is the only way to see your own schedule the way a learner will.

Things worth knowing

It fails open. A module with no timing set is available. Switching a running course to fixed dates does not hide it — modules without dates stay open until you give them one.

A module somebody has opened stays open. Pushing a date out later does not take back something a learner has already started, and never strands work they submitted inside it.

Somebody joining a cohort late gets everything already dated, so they can catch up. If you do not want late joiners, close the course to enrolment — see Who may enrol, and how.

Copies do not carry dates. A relative drip travels to a copied course; a cohort’s calendar does not, because last term’s dates on somebody else’s site is a failure nobody would check for. See Copying a course.

Grapevine does not yet email anybody when a module opens. A paced course leans on learners choosing to come back, so the dates are worth saying out loud at the start.