WooCommerce Memberships can be used with
Sensei LMS to restrict course and lesson access for learners unless they have an active membership.
When using Memberships with Sensei, courses should not be tied to WooCommerce product purchases. This causes a conflicting situation in which Sensei says the user has access, but Memberships does not. Allow Memberships to control access to the courses completely.
When you set up your courses and want to control access via the membership, you’ll need to check your Sensei LMS settings, the course setup, and your membership plan setup.
Ensure that any courses and lessons you want to control access to via Memberships
are not tied to WooCommerce products.
Now you can restrict your course and lessons via your membership plan.
To restrict courses and their associated lessons and quizzes, create a content restriction rule for the course only. The course access rules will trickle down to the lessons and quizzes.
If you’d like to restrict lessons independent of the course, then you will need to create a content restriction rule for each lesson:
This will allow Memberships to fully control who has access to the course and lesson content, and only give them access while the membership is active.
When customers purchase a membership product that grants access to a course, they can be automatically enrolled as soon as the course is available to them based on the course pre-requisites and plan settings.
If the course has one or more prerequisite(s), members will be auto-enrolled once they have met the prerequisite requirements.
To auto-enroll members:
-
- Go to WooCommerce > Memberships > Memberships Plan, and select a plan.
- Then go to Restrict Content, and enable Auto-enroll for any courses or course taxonomies that you’d like members to be automatically enrolled in:
- Upon purchase of the membership plan, members will be auto-enrolled in the selected courses.
When you let Memberships handle content restriction, the Sensei course and lesson content will only be accessible for as long as the membership is active.
When a non-member views a course-overview page, the course, along with lesson content, will be restricted and display the membership “restricted” notice.
Courses will show the same notice, removing videos or other course details.
When a member who has purchased access logs in, they’ll now see access to the courses they have, and can view lessons within the course.
If a member has access to a lesson, all lesson details are shown to the member.
If the member doesn’t have access, or will have access in the future, lesson details, such as the video and quiz links, will remain hidden.
When using Sensei LMS with
Teams for WooCommerce, team owners and managers can see the course progress of team members when their membership plan is associated with at least one course or lesson.
To enable progress reports:
- Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Memberships > Teams page.
- Under the eLearning section, select whether owners, managers, or both can have access to learner progress reports.
- Click Save changes.
Once the learner progress reports are enabled, team owners and/or managers can access progress reports by logging into their membership account. This is the same account that they would log into via the frontend of your shop, usually located on the
My Account page.
To view learner progress reports:
- Once team owner / manager has logged in, go to My Account > Team > Learner Progress tab.
- Click View to access the progress report for a particular member.
- The team owner / manager will then be able to see the learning progress and completed courses for each member.
One special case worth mention are
course videos. By default, these are pieces of public content to allow you to sell non-members on your course. As such, they’re shown to members and non-members alike.
If you’d like to hide the course overview videos, you can do so in 2 ways: by changing the way you add the video with a shortcode, or by adding an additional code snippet.
If you want to restrict specific course videos to your members, you can use the
content restriction shortcode to do so. However, if you do use this shortcode, you can’t use a plain URL for the video — you must use the full embed link instead.
First, get the full embed code for the video. If you’re using YouTube, this will be under Share > Embed for example.
Then, when you paste this into the “Course video” box, wrap the restriction shortcode around your embed link.
This will ensure members can see the video, but non-members don’t see the overview. The shortcode method is helpful if you want to delay access to the overview video specifically as well.
If you’d like to restrict all course videos, you can enable “Restrict course video” in the Sensei LMS settings. Access to this option will require the
WooCommerce Paid Courses extenstion. This will hide all course videos from non-members rather than using them as a free preview:
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Return to the Memberships overview.
Now you can restrict your course and lessons via your membership plan.
Courses will show the same notice, removing videos or other course details.
If a member has access to a lesson, all lesson details are shown to the member.
If the member doesn’t have access, or will have access in the future, lesson details, such as the video and quiz links, will remain hidden.
Then, when you paste this into the “Course video” box, wrap the restriction shortcode around your embed link.
This will ensure members can see the video, but non-members don’t see the overview. The shortcode method is helpful if you want to delay access to the overview video specifically as well.
