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How to Publish Your Courses on Heartbeat

  • Updated

✨ Try this with Pulse

Pulse can guide you through the publish checklist. Open Pulse →

Once you've built your course, publishing it makes it visible to your community so members can enroll and start learning.

Steps to Publish a Course

  1. Go to the Courses tab on your left sidebar.

  2. If you haven’t created a course yet, click Create Course in the top-right corner and follow the prompts.

  3. Select your course and click View.

  4. Locate your first lesson — it will show as Draft.

  5. Click the dropdown next to the draft label and choose one of the following:

  • Publish – Makes the lesson live immediately

  • Schedule Publish – Sets a specific future date/time for release

  • Drip Publish – Releases the lesson X days after a member starts the course

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Once at least one lesson is published, your course is considered live, and the “Unpublished” banner will disappear.

💡 Tip: Publish just your first lesson to launch, then drip or schedule future lessons to give yourself time to build while students begin learning.

What Members See

  • Members will only see published lessons

  • Draft or future lessons remain hidden from them

  • They can see the titles of scheduled future lessons and assignments, but not the content
  • This lets you build your course while students are taking it, without showing incomplete content

Does Unpublishing Stop Enrollment?

No. Publishing controls whether lesson content is visible, not who can join the course. Members can still enroll while your lessons are unpublished if any of these are active:

  • An offer that grants access to the course group

  • A course group set to Joinable (members can add themselves from the Directory)

  • A shared course invite link

  • A workflow that adds members to the course

This is also why your Progress Stats may show enrolled members at 0%. They have joined the course, but with no published lessons there is nothing to open or complete, so Last Lesson, Last Completion, and Total Progression show None or 0%.

🔒 To fully close enrollment:

  • Archive or unpublish the offer that grants the course

  • Set the course group to Invite only

  • Disable any invite links or workflows that add members

💡 Tip: To track progress instead, publish at least one lesson. Once a lesson is live, members can complete it and progress starts recording automatically.

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