Create an interactive course: Workflow recipe

Need to create an interactive course, where the student must watch each lesson before the next lesson appears? That's possible using workflows.

In this Workflow Recipe, we'll show you exactly how to set up this style of interactive online course.

Looking for detailed reference docs for Workflows? That's here.

Goals for this workflow

Here's what we want to achieve with this workflow:

We're going to create four course lessons (videos) and save them as templates in our library.
When the student starts their course, they should only see the first lesson video.
The second lesson video should display only after the student has pressed play on the first lesson video. The third lesson should display when the student has played the second video, and so on through all four videos.
(optional): If we want, we can build in a delay of one week in between each lesson in our course. Or we can drip out each lesson immediately after the student watches each lesson.

How to set it up:

Let's walk through the setup, step-by-step:

Step 1: Create four lesson videos as message templates in your library

You'll want to start by creating your four lesson videos as four message templates in your library.

There are two ways to create a message template:

Recommended: Click "Library," then click "New message template," then record your lesson video and save the message template.
Alternatively: Create a new conversation > Record a lesson video as a message > Open this message's settings menu > click "Create a template..." to turn this message into a message template in your library.

Step 2: Create a workflow on the first lesson's message template

After you've created four message templates for your four lesson videos, now you'll want to go into each of them and add a workflow. We'll start by creating the workflow on the message template for lesson #1:

Go to your library and view your message template for lesson #1. Click "..." to open its settings menu, then click "Create workflow."

Select the trigger for this workflow to "when this message is viewed."

Since we only want this workflow to run once (to display the next lesson for this student), we can leave the "frequency" setting set to its default setting, which is "Only once."

Now you can go ahead and click "Create Workflow".

Step 3: Add a step to display the next lesson's video

Now click "Add step" to add the first (and only) step in this workflow.

This step will be the action that automatically displays the next lesson (in this case, lesson #2) after this workflow is triggered by a person viewing lesson #1.

Set the "step type" to "Send a reply in this conversation."

Then for "Message type", select "Use a message template." Select the message template you created for lesson #2.

If you want the next lesson to display immediately after the student has played the previous lesson, then you can skip this step, leaving the "Delay" setting set to "Immediately."

Alternatively, if you want the student to wait, say, one week before they can see the next lesson, click "Delay," then select "period of time" and set it to one week (or whatever time period you want).

Now we're finished creating the workflow for lesson 1, which will display lesson 2 after lesson 1 has been viewed.

Step 5: Create workflows on lessons 2 and 3

Next, we're going to repeat the above steps to create similar workflows on our message templates for lessons #2 and #3.

Again, on each of those message templates:

Create a workflow
Set its trigger to "Message viewed"
Create a step in the workflow
Set the step type to "Send a reply in this conversation"
Set the message type to "Use a message template"
Select the message template

When setting up the workflow on lesson #2, you'll want to select the message template for lesson #3 (so that viewing lesson #2 causes lesson #3 to display).

When setting up the workflow on lesson #3, you'll want to select the message template for... you guessed it... lesson #4 (so that viewing lesson #3 causes lesson #4 to display).

Step 6: Create a course and share it with the student(s)

Now that your lesson templates and the workflows are all set up, you're ready to deploy them in a course and share the course with the student(s).

There are a few different ways you can go about this:

Create this course with our courses feature, which can be run repeatedly with multiple students.
Set up an intake page, where anyone can submit a message to "request" a copy of your course, which will generate a new conversation and can automatically trigger lesson 1.
Create a one-off conversation, insert lesson 1, and then share it with a single student.

For simplicity, we'll cover the third option here: Creating your course as a one-off conversation, inserting lesson 1, then sharing with a single student:

Create a conversation
Create the first message and select "Library", select your message template for Lesson 1, then post that message in the conversation. It has its workflow already built in and ready to run.
Share the conversation with a student: Click the participant icons > "Link" > "Email" > send to your student's email address.

And there you have it! A fully interactive course that drips each lesson out in sequence as a student views each lesson.

You can build on this further and even create course "modules" by using threads, and turning entire threads (with multiple videos) into thread templates. There's no shortage of ways you can create learning paths here.