With its scalability, collaborative features, and a wide range of LMS integrations and plugins available, Moodle is perfectly suited for running small group courses to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) with thousands of learners.
Today, we’ve seen a rise in online courses to meet growing demand from teachers and students unable to attend classes physically. Organisations and individuals around the world are turning to eLearning software to offer free MOOCs and courses to bring knowledge to a wide range of learners who would not otherwise be able to access the expert content provided.
However, if you’re an educator who has developed a MOOC or is planning to offer free online education courses, you might have spotted a problem:
Free MOOCS and online education courses cost money!
While your teaching materials might be free to access, and while you as a facilitator might be happy to run live sessions (for example using BigBlueButton), your site hosting and your planning time need to be paid for.
Somehow, you need to recoup costs while still keeping your MOOC free of charge.
That’s where this month’s cool Paypal Availability plugin can help! This plugin was developed and maintained by long-time Moodler Daniel Neis Araujo, co-founder of Brazilian Moodle Partner Adapta Learning.
In short, the plugin allows teachers to restrict access to course content until a participant has sent money via Paypal.
How to monetise your online courses
Because the Paypal availability plugin enables you to restrict access to the content that you choose, this gives you many options to monetise your courses, such as:
- Setting up paid certificates. You can give your content away for free but ask for payment if your learners want a certificate to show proof of their learnings.
- Offering paid gated content. You could offer some content for free to attract course participants, and then release more in-depth or advanced content after payment.
- Delivering a ‘free trial’ of your online course. Rather than providing MOOCs, why not create your Moodle course with a few ‘taster’ activities at no cost and then activate the Paypal availability plugin to open up the rest of the course once payment is made?
How does the plugin work?
If you want to start using the Paypal availability plugin with your courses, talk to your Moodle Administrator, who can download it from our Moodle Plugins Database and add it to your Moodle site.
Then, in your course, from the Restrict access section of the certificate, specify that the participants must have completed all required activities AND must make a payment via Paypal.
You’ll have to complete some monetary details which only you and your organisation will know.
Then, once a participant has completed the course, the certificate will appear with a condition:
The link leads to the Paypal button – the participant pays – and all that’s left is to find a nice frame for the certificate that appears for download!
Please note: This is not the same as the standard Paypal enrolment plugin, which restricts access to a whole course until payment has gone through.
We believe this plugin is a win-win situation for all course developers. To find out more about how you can use our eLearning software to host your online courses, explore all of Moodle LMS’s key features here.
