Closing a course before you sell places in it

If a course is open to anyone, anybody who finds it can enrol for free. Sell fifty places on that course and you have sold fifty things that were already being given away.

So before an invitation goes out, every course it covers has to be by invitation.

Grapevine checks this for you

When you create an invitation, it looks at every course covered — including every course in a bundle — and if any of them is open to anyone, it tells you before you finish.

It also offers to close them for you, there and then. Take the offer. It changes each course’s enrolment setting from “anyone” to “by invitation” and nothing else.

What closing a course does

• The Enroll button disappears from the course page.
• Nobody new can join except through an invitation, or by being added by hand.
• Everybody already on it carries on exactly as before. Nobody is removed, nothing is lost.

It is reversible: set it back to “anyone” whenever you like.

Doing it yourself

Course settings → Enrollment → by invitation. See Who may enrol, and how.

The case the check cannot see

The check runs when you create an invitation. If somebody opens a course back up afterwards, nothing re-checks it — the invitation is already out and the course is free again.

So if you sell places on a course, it is worth telling whoever runs it that its enrolment setting is now load-bearing. The person who opens it up is usually doing something entirely reasonable for a different reason.

A quick way to check

Look at the course page as somebody who is not signed in. If you can see an Enroll button, so can everybody else.