To drip course content without locking most of the course away, release enough on day one that the student gets real value in their first week, then pace the rest by days since enrolment, by fixed dates for cohorts, or by completion of a prerequisite lesson. Keep every wait short enough that a paying student can see the next unlock coming.
That’s the whole idea. The rest of this post is why it matters, and how to build each schedule in Learnomy without painting yourself into a corner.
Why long locks make students feel cheated
Picture the buyer’s side. Someone pays for a course, logs in, and finds one open lesson and forty padlocks. The sales page said “40 lessons”. What they hold today is one.
Nothing in that experience is a bug. The seller chose it. But the buyer reads it as a bait and switch, and the first thing they look for is the refund button. Dripping is a pacing tool, and a long lock turns it into a waiting room.
Some hosted community platforms apply fixed, lengthy locks by default, and it’s a common complaint from the people who pay for those courses. You don’t have to copy that. On your own site you decide the pacing lesson by lesson.
When dripping actually helps
Dripping earns its place in a handful of situations, and they have one thing in common: the schedule serves the student, not the seller.
- Skills that need practice between lessons. A language course or a fitness program gets worse if someone races through week six on day one.
- Cohorts that move together. A live class with a shared start date needs everyone on the same module at the same time.
- Courses that depend on a weekly rhythm. Accountability groups and challenges only work if there’s a reason to come back.
- Stopping binge-and-refund. If the whole course unlocks at checkout, someone can consume it in an afternoon and ask for their money back. A modest schedule makes that harder.
Notice what’s missing from the list: “so people stay subscribed longer”. A drip designed to stretch out billing is the one students see through.
When dripping backfires
The same tool goes wrong in predictable ways.
A drip backfires when the first unlock is far away, when a student who is motivated today can’t move forward until next month, or when the schedule has no connection to how the material builds. It also backfires on self-paced courses with an evergreen audience, where the people most likely to finish are the ones who study in bursts.
There’s one more. If you lock content that the student already needs for the first assignment, they get stuck and write to support. Every locked lesson should be one the student doesn’t need yet.
A useful test: read your own schedule as the buyer. If the honest summary is “I paid for a course and I can use a tenth of it”, shorten the waits.
Four schedules that work
Most good drip setups are one of four patterns, or a mix of them.
Release enough up front
Open the first module completely. That usually means a short welcome, the core concept and a first practical exercise rolled into one lesson. A student should finish their first session with something done, not with a progress bar stuck at 5 percent.
Then drip the rest. A good ratio depends on the course, but if more than about half of the lessons are locked on day one, ask yourself what the lock is protecting.
Days since enrolment for evergreen courses
For a course people join any day of the year, count from each student’s own start. Lesson five unlocks seven days after they enrolled, whenever that was. Everyone gets the same pacing, nobody joins mid-course and finds half of it already closed, and you don’t have to babysit a calendar.
Keep the gaps small. Seven days between modules is plenty. A fourteen-day gap on a short course starts to feel like punishment.
Fixed dates for cohorts
When a group starts together, use calendar dates. Module two opens on a Monday for everyone, whether they enrolled a month ago or yesterday. This is the right model for live classes and for any course where members discuss the same week’s material.
The catch: someone who joins late finds earlier modules already open, which is usually what you want. Someone who joins early waits for the start date, so say that on the sales page.
Unlock on completion, not on a timer
The fairest schedule of the four is the one with no clock at all. Lesson six opens when the student finishes lesson five. A fast learner moves fast, a slow one isn’t left behind, and order is enforced without making anyone wait for a date.
This works well for skills that build on each other. It’s the schedule least likely to produce an angry email.
How Learnomy handles each of these
Learnomy covers all four patterns, but they don’t all live in the same place, and it’s worth knowing which tier each belongs to.
Free: a fixed date per lesson. Every lesson has an Available date field with a date and time, entered in your site’s timezone and stored in UTC. Leave it blank and the lesson opens on enrolment.
Sections can carry their own date as well, and a lesson’s own date wins over its section’s. The section date is set through the REST API. The lesson editor has no field for it, so treat it as a developer route. For a plain cohort schedule, the lesson field is enough and needs no Pro licence.
Pro: the Content Drip module. The rest needs Learnomy Pro, and the module ships switched off. Turn it on under LMS Settings > Modules, or its screens won’t appear and it will look like the feature is missing.
Once it’s on, open any saved lesson and you’ll find a Release schedule card with four options:
- Immediate (unlock on enrollment): the default, no rule.
- After enrollment: a number of days, which starts at 7 and can’t be lower than 1.
- On a fixed date: a date picker.
- After a prerequisite lesson: pick another lesson from the same course.
A lesson holds one Pro rule at a time. Choosing a different option replaces the earlier one. Course authors with the drip capability can set these, and so can administrators; the built-in instructor role has it by default.
The card doesn’t appear for a lesson you haven’t saved yet, so save first. A read-only table under the Content Drip card in Pro Tools lists every lesson in a course with its rule and whether it’s dripped. You can’t edit from that table; it’s an overview.
The full walkthrough, with screenshots, is in the Content Drip docs.
Details that decide whether it feels fair
A few behaviours are worth knowing before you build a schedule.
- The days clock starts at the enrolment timestamp. Learnomy adds your number of days to the time the student enrolled, in UTC. Enrol at 11 PM, and the unlock lands at 11 PM, N days later.
- Pro’s fixed date is a date, not a time. It’s read as midnight UTC. If you need an exact hour in your own timezone, use the Free Available date field on that lesson instead. If both are set, both apply and the student waits for whichever is later. The editor says so on both cards.
- Prerequisite means completed. The lesson opens when the student’s progress for the prerequisite is marked completed.
- Admins and the course author bypass the lock, so you can preview the whole course without waiting.
What a locked lesson looks like
A student who opens a locked lesson gets a card that reads “This lesson unlocks on” followed by the date and time, shown in the site’s timezone, with a countdown beneath it. A link back to the course sits below.
That covers days and date rules. A prerequisite lesson has no calendar date, so the card falls back to a plain message that the lesson is currently locked. It doesn’t name the lesson they need to finish. If that matters for your course, say it in the lesson titles or the course description.
Notifications when something unlocks
When a student enrols in a course that has days or date rules, Learnomy schedules their unlock times in the background through Action Scheduler. An hourly job then fires a “lesson unlocked” event, which sends the student an in-app notification and an email built from the lesson-unlocked template. Prerequisite unlocks don’t get a scheduled notice, because there’s no moment to schedule.
Because the job runs hourly, an unlock notice can arrive up to about an hour after the lesson opens. The lesson itself is available the moment its time passes; only the message is on the hourly tick.
Setting up a fair schedule in practice
Here’s a worked example, with made-up numbers, for an evergreen eight-module course.
- Leave module one entirely on Immediate.
- Set module two to open 3 days after enrolment.
- Set modules three to eight to open 7 days apart, counting from enrolment.
- On the final project, use a prerequisite rule: it opens when the last lesson of module eight is complete.
A student who joins on a Tuesday has a full first module that day, a second module by Friday, and a new module every week after. Nothing is more than a week away from where they are. Compare that with a single locked block released at day 30, and the difference to the buyer is obvious.
For a cohort, swap steps two and three for fixed dates and open module one the day before kickoff, so people can log in, find the room, and get oriented.
Mistakes to avoid
A few things catch people out on any platform, Learnomy included.
- Dripping the whole course. If every lesson after the first has a rule, you’ve built the waiting room. Leave at least the first module open.
- Stacking two schedules by accident. A Free Available date plus a Pro rule on the same lesson means the later one wins. That’s intended, but it’s easy to forget you set one months ago.
- Prerequisites that point at a missing lesson. If you delete the prerequisite lesson, the schedule table shows it as deleted, and students can’t satisfy a rule that points at nothing. Check the table after restructuring a course.
- Forgetting existing students. Rules apply to enrolled students as soon as you save them. If you add a rule to a lesson people already finished, test it on a copy first so no one gets locked out of something they’ve seen.
- Using dripping as a retention trick. If the schedule exists to keep the subscription alive, students will notice. Let the content earn the renewal.
What needs custom work
Some things aren’t a setting. Learnomy’s admin has no bulk-assign tool for drip rules; to schedule many lessons in one go, you’d script it against the REST API. The Release schedule card is for lessons; the REST API also accepts quizzes as an item type, but this post doesn’t rely on that. And a new lesson can inherit a default rule only through the learnomy_pro_default_drip_rule filter, which is for developers, not a screen you can click.
None of this blocks a normal course. A typical academy sets its rules once, by hand, in the lesson editor.
Next steps
Start from your course outline, mark what the student needs in week one, and open all of that. Pace the rest with the shortest gaps that still serve the learning. If you’re unsure which type of unlock fits a module, pick completion over a timer.
To see how access and enrolment fit together before you add pacing, read access and enrollment. If you’re weighing Learnomy against a hosted platform where locks are fixed, the Kajabi comparison lays out the differences, and the Free vs Pro page shows which tier covers which schedule. If you’re still shaping the course itself, how to create your first online course in WordPress is a good place to start.