Drip Content

This article goes over how to use the Drip feature to release curriculum sections by a specific date or amount of days after enrollment, as well as set up email announcements for your dripped content. Drip is available for schools on the Basic plan or higher.

Overview

You can choose to release (i.e. drip) your published curriculum sections on a specific date, or a specific amount of days after a student enrolls. This means that a student will not be able to access this section until it has been "dripped" to them.

If a section is to be dripped on a specified date, or a specified amount of days after enrollment, it will be released at midnight/0:00 UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) of the specified date/amount of days after enrollment. Email announcements—if enabled—will be sent out at 3:00PM/15:00 UTC (15 hours after the section drips). To see what UTC time would correspond to in your local time zone, use this UTC time converter. 

When a section has not yet been released because of its drip schedule, students will not be able to access the section, but will see a message about when the content is scheduled to be available.

Drip by Date

When setting up a Drip schedule by date, please keep in mind that one date in UTC may be another date in your local time zone. 

For example, if I set my section to be released on 1/8, that means my content will release at midnight (12:00AM/00:00) of 1/8 in UTC. However, if I am located in New York, UTC is five hours ahead of my time zone. This means my lesson content—in relation to my local time in New York—will release at 7:00PM/19:00 of 1/7.

With this in mind, to set up a Drip schedule by date, follow these instructions:

1. Select a Course from the admin sidebar, or click View All and choose a course.
2. Inside the individual course area, click Drip in the submenu.
3. From there, locate the section to be released on a specific date. Click Specific Date.
   
4. Click the date box to open a calendar. From there, specify the date on which the section is to be released. Please note that in order to drip a section on a specific date, the drip date must be set and activated at least 48 hours before the intended drip date.
   
   For example, if you wish to release a section on April 5th, the section must be activated to drip on this date by April 3rd. 
   
5. Click Activate.

To cancel a drip schedule for a section, click Deactivate. When a drip section is deactivated, the content will be available to students as soon as they enroll in the course. 

Drip by Days After Enrollment

When setting up a drip schedule by days after enrollment, the drip content is released to students based on the date they enrolled in the course.

For example, if a student enrolls in a course on January 1st, and you set a section to be released to a student “3 days after enrollment,” the content will be unlocked for that student on January 4th.

Please note that we calculate student enrollment dates and times in UTC. This means that if a user enrolls in a course at 9:00 PM EST on January 1st, this converts to 1:00 AM UTC on January 2nd. Therefore, the date of enrollment for drip purposes would be considered January 2nd.

With this in mind, to set up a Drip schedule by days after enrollment, follow these instructions:

1. In a Course's Drip section, locate the section to be released on a specific amount of days after enrollment. Click Days After Enrollment.
   
2. In the box, specify the number of days after student enrollment that a section will release. Then click Save.
3. Click Activate.

To cancel a drip schedule for a section, click Deactivate. When a drip section is deactivated, the content will be available to students as soon as they enroll in the course. 

Set Up an Email Announcement

School owners have the option to set up automatic email notifications that students will receive 15 hours after drip content is released. Drip email announcements must be set and activated at least 48 hours before the intended drip date.

To activate email announcements, follow these instructions:

1. Press the Set Email Announcement button and fill out the email form to schedule an email that lets students know when the course section will become available to them. Once finished, click Save Email Announcement.
   

To save your email announcement as a draft, keep the Email Subject field clear. Doing so will allow you to put whatever you’d like in the Email Body field without having it send to your students—however, make sure to fill in the subject field once you’d like the announcement to send (otherwise the email will remain a draft).

In order to disable email announcements, simply clear the email subject and email body fields. Afterward, the template will revert to its default unfilled state.

Grant Students Full Access

Granting Full Access to An Individual Student

Once a student is granted full access to your course, they will be able to view all of the course's content and will stop receiving drip email announcements. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Visit the Users area and select a student enrolled in a course with drip enabled.
2. Click Enrollments from the admin sidebar and scroll down to the Enrollments section.
3. Click on the … button (under Actions) next to the course that you want to give the student immediate access to and then select Grant Full Access from the drop-down menu.

Granting Full Access to All Students

To grant full access of a course to all enrolled students:

1. Inside a course's page, click Drip in the submenu.
2. Click Grant Students Full Access.
   
3. Click OK. 

To restore the drip schedule of students who have been granted full access to your course, click Restore Students Drip Schedule. Students who previously had access to all sections of a course (through the Grant Students Full Access button) will be reinserted into the course's drip schedule in accordance with their initial enrollment date. 

For example, if you have a section scheduled to drip five days after student enrollment, and you restore the drip schedule of a full access student who has been enrolled in a course for four days, they will not be able to access that section until the 5th day after their initial enrollment—not when they were reinserted into the drip schedule.

Similarly, as another example, if you have a section scheduled to release on 11/25, and you restore the drip schedule of all the course's full access students before 11/25, they will not be able to access that course until it is released on 11/25.