How are full, drip, and partial content access types different?

In this article, you’ll learn about the different content access options for your courses.

What you'll need:

A systeme.io account
A course

There are three ways you can provide registered students access to your course:

Full access: With this option, students will have instant access to all modules and lectures. Any delays set between lectures are ignored.
Drip content: With this option, students will progressively have access to modules and lectures, according to the delay you have set.
Partial access: With this option, students only have access to specific parts of the course (i.e., to specific modules selected by the instructor).

Here is an example of how to set up a delay for courses and lectures:

We will configure a course to provide access to a new lecture every day.

When creating the lecture, you can specify how long to delay before it becomes available to the student. The delay is in days and begins after viewing the previous lecture (number 1 in the image).

When creating the first module, we set a delay of 0 days to its first lecture.

This way, the student will immediately have access to the first lecture as soon as they register for the course.

For every lecture that follows, we will set a delay of 1 day.

In this way, a new lecture will unlock for the student every day.

Note: Make sure the lectures are activated.

We recommend reading the following article to learn how to activate the lectures. Click here.

Note: When providing drip access to a course, it's not possible to set an expiration delay. Expiration delays will only work for courses that provide full access.

To learn more, we recommend reading How to sell an online course.

Modifying access delays: what you need to know

When the access type is set to Drip content, if you modify the delay of a lecture before it is unlocked, the system automatically recalculates the remaining waiting time based on the new delay.

Example:

A module contains 3 lectures, all initially configured with a delay of 1 day:

Lecture 1: Delay of 1 day
Lecture 2: Delay of 1 day
Lecture 3: Delay of 1 day

Let's assume it has been 2 days since the student enrolled. The status would be:

Lecture 1: Unlocked
Lecture 2: Unlocked
Lecture 3: Not yet accessible, as only 2 days have passed since the student enrolled. It is necessary to wait another 1 day for lecture 3 to be unlocked.

At this point, the instructor modifies the delay of lecture 3 from 1 to 5 days.

Result:

Lecture 1: Still accessible
Lecture 2: Still accessible
Lecture 3: Since the delay was increased from 1 to 5 days, this lecture will now unlock 5 days after Lecture 2.

Notes to remember:

Our system automatically updates the schedule based on the new value, as long as the lecture has not yet been unlocked.
Even if access is imminent, a change in the delay can postpone the unlocking date.