Courses overview

Last updated: June 24, 2025

Courses are a great way to offer your community members the most immersive and engaging learning experiences!

Courses empower you to deliver engaging and structured educational content within your community. With flexible course types, lessons, and quizzes, you can create a dynamic learning environment that fosters collaboration and growth.

Courses are created as spaces just like any other space type in the community, making them easier to manage and keep together with other spaces under the same space group to provide great value to your members.

For example, you can create a space group that includes:

• A course space.

• Post type spaces for announcements, general guidelines, FAQs, or resource libraries.

• Event space for course-specific events and live coaching sessions.

• Chat space to allow students to have an open discussion with each other.

Courses are available for communities on Circle’s Professional plan or above. Since courses are available as a space, the number of course spaces you can create depends on the number of spaces available in your plan. 

Circle offers a comprehensive suite of features to enhance your educational offerings. Let’s take a look at the key features of courses:

• Course types: You have the flexibility to choose how you deliver your course. Within your community, you can create self-paced, structured, or scheduled type courses.

• Sections: Organize your curriculum into clear, manageable sections. These sections help you systematically present both lessons and quizzes, making it easier for students to follow along.

• Lessons: Create engaging content using a variety of rich media, including featured media, videos, images, documents, and embeds, to create dynamic and interactive lessons. Using lesson settings, you can also enforce the order of lesson/quiz completion and ensure featured media is viewed at least 90% before students can complete the lesson.

• Quizzes: Create quizzes within course sections to test knowledge and reinforce learning. You can create questions with a multiple-choice format that can have single or multiple correct answers.

• Course progress: Monitor your student’s course progress and view detailed progress information from the course dashboard.

• Comments: Allow students to comment on lessons and quizzes, promoting discussion and deeper understanding. As a course creator, use comments to provide feedback, answer questions, and encourage peer-to-peer support, creating a collaborative learning environment.

You have the flexibility to choose from three types of course spaces:

• Self-paced: Grant your students immediate access to all course content upon enrollment. This allows them to learn at their own pace without any restrictions on when they can access the course content.

• Structured: Gradually release course sections based on student enrollment. In structured courses, you can drip course sections after certain days relative to each student’s enrollment date.

• Scheduled: Set a predetermined schedule for the release of each section so that sections drip on a specific date for all students.

Please check out the following articles to get started with creating your dream course!

1. Setting up a new course space

2. Customize course space settings

3. Utilizing the drip feature for structured and scheduled courses

4. Building a course curriculum

5. Create course content using the lesson editor

   • Embed media into lessons

   • Add images and GIFs in lessons

   • Manage downloadable files in lessons

6. Set up quizzes

7. Preview your course as a member

8. Gate spaces behind paywalls

9. Understanding course publication

10. Publishing a course

• Tutorial: Set up your course space

• Playbook: The course launch confidence playbook

Check out our Public roadmap for a list of features that we plan to work on in the current quarter.