Courses vs. Memberships
The differences between courses and memberships
Courses are the core of LifterLMS and Memberships can be used to allow course creator’s and LMS administrators to organize their courses and other online content into groups of content.
A Course is made up of any number of Lessons and Quizzes which are organized within that course in Sections.
A Membership is made up of any number of Courses, pages, and posts.
A membership is not required in order to sell a course. Courses and Memberships can both be sold individually.
When is a membership useful?
There’s a few key scenarios where Memberships become an extremely useful tool. If you’re just getting started you might find it useful to ignore Memberships all together. If you have a course you wish to offer, create it and offer it for sale (or for free) and don’t worry about having a Membership.
I want to sell multiple courses together at a discounted rate
As your LMS grows you might begin adding more courses and find that you’d like to give your students the ability to buy several courses together at a discounted rate. A membership is perfect in this scenario.
Imagine you offer 3 courses for $25.00 each, you can create a membership which grants access to these same three courses and set the price for the membership to be $50.00. Those who purchase the membership will get one course for free. Visitors can still buy courses individually at $25.00 each.
I want to create multiple payment options for a course or a group of courses
LifterLMS allows you to create only two payment options for a Course (a single payment and a recurring payment). Sometimes you wish to have a few different options and you can do this by restricting your course (or group of courses) to multiple memberships. Each membership can have a different single and/or recurring payment option. You can create more robust pricing structures for your content in this scenario.
You could create three memberships: “Monthly,” “Yearly,” and Lifetime. Each membership would have one payment option and all offer the same courses. Users can then decide which payment option is best from them.
I want to offer courses to a specific group of students, not to everyone who visits my site
By setting the price of a course to $0.00 and restricting that course to a membership, that course becomes available only to users who have purchased that membership. This allows you to create courses exclusive to this membership.
What is the difference between memberships and LifterLMS Groups?
This video explains how memberships are for creating course bundles and protecting non-course content. LifterLMS Groups gives you the ability to offer courses and memberships to groups with additional group management features and a new group leader role.
