Student Access

Selling the course is the easy half. Getting the student into it, on the phone they are holding, six weeks after they bought, is the half that generates support emails. This page explains exactly how access works so you can answer those in one line.

What happens right after somebody buys

As soon as a purchase is confirmed, TribeNest emails the student. Which email they get depends on whether they already have an account with you:

• They already have an account. They get an "Access to [course]" email with an Access Your Course button that takes them straight into the lessons.
• They are new. They get a "Claim your access to [course]" email with a Claim Course Access button. That link takes them to a short form where they set a First name, Last name and a Password of at least 8 characters, then click Claim access. They land in the course, already signed in.

The claim link is good for 14 days and is sent to the address they bought with.

Free courses work the same way. There is no payment step, but the student still gets their access email.

Where a student finds a course they bought

A student does not have to keep the email. Once they are signed in on your site, everything they have bought is on their account page, and courses have a tab of their own.

1. They sign in with the email address they bought with.
2. They open their account area and choose the Courses tab.
3. Every course they hold is listed by title, with a line underneath saying where they are: Start for one they have not opened yet, Continue where you left off once they are part way through, and Completed when they have finished it.
4. Clicking a row opens the classroom, at the lesson they were last on.

A row never sends them back to the page that sold the course. Somebody who already owns it has no use for a buy button, so the only place a row goes is into the lessons.

Cohort places show up here as well, and open that cohort's own material rather than the self-paced version of the course.

Signing in with the right address is enough

A student who never got round to clicking Claim Course Access still owns their course. When they sign in with the address they bought with, TribeNest matches the purchase to their account, and from that moment the course sits in their Courses tab like any other.

Two things follow from that, and both save you work:

• An expired claim link stops being a problem. Tell the student to sign in instead. There is usually nothing to resend.
• The address is the thing that matters. The match is made on the email they bought with, confirmed on your site when they set their account up. Another address, even one belonging to the same person, matches nothing.

Access belongs to the account, not the email

Once a student has claimed their access, or simply signed in with the address they bought with, the course is tied to their TribeNest account. It is not tied to the email address they happened to type at checkout, and it is not tied to the link in the email.

That is the right thing for everybody:

• The student can sign in on any device and find their course, instead of hunting through their inbox for the original link.
• A link forwarded to a friend, or leaked into a group chat, does not hand out your course.
• Their progress, their place in the video and their certificate all follow them, because they follow the account.

What a student sees if they are signed out

They see a screen titled Sign in to open this course, with two buttons: Sign in and Create an account. Whichever they pick, they are brought right back to the course afterwards. Nobody dead-ends.

What a student sees if they are signed in as somebody else

This is the case worth knowing by heart, because it is the one that reaches your inbox.

If a student buys with one email address and then signs in with another, they see This enrolment belongs to a different account. The screen names the address they are currently signed in as, and offers one button: Sign out and switch account.

The fix is always the same: sign in with the address the enrollment was sent to. That address is the one the course is attached to. Signing in with a different one, even one that belongs to the same person, is a different account as far as anything can tell.

If a student cannot remember which address they used, look them up on the Students page. Their email is right there in the Customer column.

Older links still work

If somebody bought a course before access was tied to accounts, their original link keeps working. Nobody was locked out.

When they open the course from that link, a friendly bar appears at the top inviting them to Secure my access: add a password to the address they bought with, so they can reach the course any time without digging out the email. They can also Sign in if they already have an account, or dismiss the bar and carry on watching. It is an invitation, not a gate, and the dismissal sticks.

Resending access

Try signing in first. A student who lost their email almost never needs a new one: signing in with the address they bought with puts the course back in their Courses tab. Resend only when that has not worked, or when they never had an account to begin with.

If you do need to send a fresh email:

1. Go to Courses, then Students.
2. Find the student's row. (Only Confirmed enrollments can be resent.)
3. Click the three-dot menu at the end of the row and choose Resend access.
4. Confirm. The dialog names the exact address and course, so you can double-check before it goes.

Occasionally nothing is sent, and TribeNest tells you why:

• The student's access was revoked.
• There is no access record for that course.
• The course itself is no longer available.

Progress and access

A student's progress is saved against their account. If they are watching on a link that is no longer valid, or signed in as the wrong person, they see: "We could not save your progress. Sign in with the email this course was sent to and we will keep it."

Nothing is lost when they sign in correctly. Their completed lessons and their place in the current video are still there.

Cohort students

In a cohort, the Students tab shows an Account column with one of two labels:

• Claimed, meaning they have set a password and can sign in.
• Pending claim, meaning they have bought a place but have not finished setting up their login yet.

A run with a lot of Pending claim rows a week before it starts is worth a nudge, though the claim link is not the only way in. Signing in with the address they enrolled with brings the cohort up in their Courses tab, and opening it from there settles the place onto their account, which is what the group chat and the cohort page read.

Related guides

• Managing students for the full students table, statuses and filters.
• Cohort courses for the cohort roster and its claim states.
• Live calls for what students need in order to join a session.
• Certificates for what a student gets when they finish.