Keeping a resold course up to date
The hardest thing about reselling courses, stated plainly: a copy is a fork.
When you copy a course to a customer’s site, they get a complete and independent course. Improving your original does not improve theirs. There is no link back, and nothing tells them an update exists.
What that means in practice
A course sold to six customers is seven courses — yours and six copies. A correction means seven edits, and six of them are on sites you have to remember to visit.
There is no sync today. This is known and is on the roadmap as a parent-child relationship between courses, where a source course would drive its copies. Until then the management is manual.
Managing it until then
Copy late
The single most effective thing. A course still being revised should not be copied yet — wait until it has been run once and the obvious corrections are made. Copying on the day of sale rather than the day of signing costs nothing and saves most of the problem.
Keep a list
Which customer has which course, and which version. Grapevine records where a copy came from, but it will not tell you which of six copies predates a correction. A spreadsheet is enough and nothing else currently does it.
Decide what counts as worth pushing
Not every change needs to reach every copy. A useful split:
- Factual corrections and broken media — push everywhere, promptly. These are the ones that embarrass both of you.
- Improvements and additions — offer them, and let the customer decide. Their copy may have been edited, and overwriting it would discard their work.
Tell them before you change anything
If you are going to edit a course on a customer’s site, say so first. Their administrator can edit it too, and two people editing the same lesson without knowing about each other is how somebody’s afternoon is lost.
Re-copying is not updating
Copying the course again produces a second course on their site, not a newer version of the first. Their learners’ progress stays on the old one.
If you do replace a course that way, make the old one inactive rather than deleting it — its records are the only evidence of what people completed.