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Drip Scheduling Your Online Course Content

2,349 views · Published 6 March 2016 · 4:19 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: Thinkific · 2016 · Education

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Scheduling out your online course content or drip releasing it can be really useful in a number of ways. It allows you to control the rate at which students consume your videos, thus giving them more time to understand your content and engage more. In this video we explain more about drip content and scheduling. 

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Transcript
So, drip content, or scheduled content just means that you're delaying the release of the content in your online course over time.  And there's a few reasons why you might want to do this.

One could be that you are not actually done creating the content, you're doing kind of a pre-launch or a pre sell or you're getting people into your course when only the first part of it has been produced and you’ve set some dates when the rest of it will be released. So you can actually set those dates in advance, even set up your placeholders for it and then start to insert the content as you grow out your course or as you build out the rest of your course. 

This actually allows you to launch a lot sooner and you can even pull in feedback from people who are already in the first part of the course to find out what to put into it the later parts of the course.

It's something to be careful with though because you don't want to get too far behind, you should have a really good idea and a plan and deadlines that you can meet if you're promising people that you're going to be delivering that content on particular dates.

Another way you can do it is, or you could use drip or scheduled content is on an evergreen course, where you want people to be delayed in the access to that content. So an ever green course just means people can access, it's up and it's running all the time, it's always green and people can access it and start at any time, but that drip schedule starts personally for them when they sign up for the course.

So if I sign up on January 15, my schedule starts January 15; if you sign up a few weeks later, that's when your schedule starts. So we each have our own schedules based on our sign up date. Now it's really easy to set up with the Thinkific drip scheduler.  

Another way you can do it is with cohorts. So with cohort-based scheduling, or based on a start date for the entire course, you can have a whole bunch of people start the course together and work through it together on that timeline.  And again, you can use this in the case of a pre-launches or early launches, but you can also use it periodically to do a series of cohorts throughout the year where everyone launches together.

That can be really good if you're wanting people to work through together, you want them to be part of a community or maybe participate in your Facebook group, that kind of a thing where they are interacting and going through the course at the same pace.

Another great thing, drip or scheduled content can be good for is if you want to slow down the absorption process or that learning process so you don't overwhelm people. So if you're giving them homework assignments that you know are going to take a little bit of time and you want them to go away and work on a project and come back and learn the next big thing, drip content can be a great way of doing that.

And finally, drip or scheduled content can be useful if you're charging a monthly subscription. So in this case, you may not want to release everything you have to them as soon as they sign up with that first month subscription. 

So I have seen some people who have a full year's worth of content laid out in a course and when someone new signs up on a monthly subscription plan, they just get that first month’s worth of content and then each month, new content is automatically released to them and it provides an incentive for them to stick around and keep paying those monthly fees.

So there's a lot of different ways that you can use drip and scheduled content in your online courses. These are just a few of them, I am sure you will find more but it’s definitely something worth considering. It doesn't work in all scenarios, in a lot of scenarios you just want to give them everything that they paid for as soon as they sign up for your course. But it can be useful in a number of different circumstances.

So if you haven't already checked out Thinkific’s drip feature, I think you'll find it very useful for all of those scenarios that we've painted today

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