Courses have a new feature today: you can now make Courses have Page Content that is itself “completable”, i.e. able to be marked complete as an actionable step in order to progress through the Course.

Now, this is sort of a weird, very much niche feature, I feel a little self conscious even touting it with any real excitement.  So let me back up a little bit to explain why this is cool.

CA Courses, in contrast to the lion’s share of other course platforms, are meant to be highly participatory: with CA courses you can assign your clients Action items with reminders that will ping their phone or email, you can assign your clients Worksheets that they are mean to fill out and complete with real deadlines, you can have them track meaningful Metrics over the span of the course to see how real results are unfolding.

This is all quite opposed to just sitting back and consuming content, hoping for the best.

So for most online courses as hosted on most online course platforms, the only thing to do is read through, maybe watch a video or two, and scroll down and click the “Next” button or whatever.  (Or if it’s all video, the “auto play next” action will commonly just shuffle you right along through.  Passive consumption at its finest, yeesh!)

All of which is to say a client’s progressing though a CA Course has always been a matter of doing those real-life participatory bits, rather than just marking blocks of content “complete”.  With CA Course Pages, you can create blocks whatever content (including with videos embedded!), but there wasn’t a way for your participants to mark those complete.

But now there is!  Edging CA Courses yet a little closer to what is otherwise familiar and expected from a Course platform (while still retaining that unique, participation-centric vibe!), you can now set your Course Page Content as something that for participants to mark complete:

The ‘Enable clients to mark this content “Complete”‘ checkbox is the key!

When the page content is complete, the “Mark Complete” button will appear in the flow of the Cours as you’d expect it to:

“Mark complete” is a fine default, but you can make the button say whatever is fitting.

Completeable Course Content in Action

There are a couple of things worth noting about Course Content joining the ranks of “completable” items in CA Courses:

Step Based Course Progression: As is always the case, a course participant will advance to the next Step in a Step-based Course when there are no more completable items that remain to be completed (not counting, of course, those that are marked as “Can be skipped over”!).

So that means if you have portions of your Step-based Course that are heavy on content and lean on things for your clients to actually do, you can make the the Page Content itself completable to prevent clients from accidentally blazing through the steps when there is otherwise nothing to complete.

Progress Bars: When you make a Page Content item completable, AND have progress bars enabled, you can give it some non-zero progress weight, meaning the progress bar display for the participation can get filled up in response to marking those complete, just as other completable items.

No Due Dates or Deadlines: One aspect that is unique to Page Content is that, unlike Action items or Worksheets, there is never a due date.  This makes completable Page Content an handy stopping point for clients to take a break before continuing with real deadlines, allowing total control in going through a self-paced Course.  You can create Page Content items that precede actual assignments, like so:

This is a nice way to tee up a timed assignment: your client can start the clock when they’re ready.

Followable Items: As with other completable items, you can now drag items onto a Page Content item.  This allows you to make sequences to the tune of “When this item is complete, reveal the next” as long as you like:

This sort of daisy-chaining works in Day-based Courses, too!

And there you have it!  Courses now work just a little more like the conventional “consuming content is all you’re here for!” course platforms (making them truly more compatible with courses you may already have on another platform), while retaining the strong emphasis on actually doing the work to get results out of whatever one is learning (meaning your tried-and-true courses can now be imbued with real participation and accountability).

Enjoy!