Setting Up a Free Preview Lesson – Thought Industries

Any purchasable course can be configured to grant learners access to one or more free preview lessons—either to all learners, or to learners who will provide an email address. This allows potential learners to preview a sample lesson before purchasing the course.

Where do I find this?

To set a lesson as a free preview:

Content > Actions > Edit

To add the preview link to the course detail page:

Content > Actions > Settings > Catalog

How do I do this?

To set a lesson as a free preview:

From your homepage, select Content.
Click the Actions drop-down next to the course you want to alter and click Edit.
Locate the lesson that you would like to make available as a preview and click the pencil icon (next to the padlock icon which indicates the current setting as either locked or unlocked).
Select a preview option:
- Open to learners only
- Open to everyone
- Open to everyone with email capture
Click Save and don't forget to publish your changes!

To add the preview link to the course detail page:

From your dashboard, select Content.
Click the Actions drop-down next to the course you want to alter and click Settings.
From the left menu, select Catalog.
Locate the Sample Lesson field and click the drop-down to choose the lesson where the preview should begin. Any of the lessons that you previously set to "Open to everyone" or "Open to everyone with email capture" will be available. If you have multiple lessons set to "Open", we recommend that you choose the first one.
Click Save.

What else do I need to know?

It's possible to set multiple lessons as part of the preview, as long as they are consecutive lessons. You cannot currently select random lessons throughout a course to compile one preview.
When Open to everyone is selected, anyone with a link to that free preview will be dropped directly into the first open lesson and will view any open content within the course interface.
When Open to everyone with email capture is selected, clicking the preview link from the course detail page will display the email capture page prompting the learner for his/her email address. The learner will then be taken to the preview lesson within the course interface.
Once a learner views all pages within the preview lesson(s), the paywall page will appear prompting learners to purchase the full course. We encourage all clients to customize the language on these pages when this feature is enabled. To do this, go to Content > Actions > Settings > eCommerce. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Advanced. Here you can edit the Email Capture Paywall Text and Paywall Text.
Sample lessons do not work well when a course has Force Linear Progress enabled, unless you only plan to open one page as your free preview. In preview mode, there's no way to record "completion" for a learner on any given page which means learners won't be able to move forward to view additional pages.