Squarespace Courses: Tracking Student Progress
In August 2023 Squarespace launched its Courses feature which can be used to create and sell professional online learning content. With Courses you can provide a gateway for your clients to access your video and learning content; via paid or free plans (or a combination of both). This provides a great opportunity for health and wellness professionals, yoga teachers, fitness instructors, artists, chefs, photographers, etc. to share their knowledge and generate income.
Using Squarespace Courses you can:
organize content into lessons and chapters (including lesson content such as text, images, videos and downloadable resources);
take payments for the Courses with Squarespace’s built-in e-commerce functionality;
provide your students with a positive experience that reflects your brand and is part of your main Squarespace website.
Within Squarespace Courses, students can track their progress on the lessons and chapters visually through the progress bar. However, the tracking of student progress isn’t visible to the website owner / content creator at this time (we will continue to monitor this and once the feature becomes available we will update this blog post). The inability to view student progress by the website owner makes it difficult to monitor student progress; especially when a certificate needs to be issued for course completion.
Until Squarespace provides the ability to monitor progress, we have a workaround using Notion (one of our recommended resources for keeping track of tasks and projects and overall is a great productivity tool).
With Notion you can ask your students to update a Notion shared checklist as each lesson/chapter is completed, they can also upload any images/documents that you may require to confirm that they have completed the lesson/chapter.
Notion can also be used to send them reminders to complete tasks, or to give them encouragement as they progress through your course.
If you don’t already have a Notion account, create your Notion account here —>.
If you’re experienced with Notion, create a dashboard and checklist to track the course activities/progress for your students all in one place.
If you don’t have experience with developing dashboards and checklists in Notion (admittedly we don’t know how to do this), there are plenty of free and/or paid dashboard and checklist templates available that you can use, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Notion themselves offer a suite of tools and templates for their users are part of your account.
We like Creative Market for their volumes of Notion dashboards and checklists, there are many generic ones but there are also niche dashboards and checklists available (often as bundles). As a niche example, we are using a bundle we purchased from Creative Market to manage our website design projects, with a checklist that we use with each client to track their website project’s activities. The dashboard gives us an overall view of all of our projects and their various statuses in one place, automatically updated each time a task is completed.
The workaround isn’t perfect, but it provides a way to monitor your student’s course progress in an efficient way.
