There are many reasons why you might not have a date for a course:
- An elearning course where students set their own pace, they start when they join and complete when they have completed the assessments
- Prospective students outside of your normal location, where the delivery will occur once there is sufficient interest
- Topics of interest that have not got sufficient interest to warrant a scheduled course
- Students who have had to postpone a course, or been bumped off a course due to a cancelation but are unsure which dates or locations will suit them best.
In all cases we use private course dates scheduled into the future, eg 1 January 2100. As they are far in the future these course dates do not appear on the lists without filtering by the future date. Neither do the course dates appear on public website lists. However we can embed the registration forms into websites. The most basic set up is creating one course date along with a ‘pending’ or ‘prospective customers’ course category and course master. The other option is to use existing course masters to store more granular details of interest.
For example when working with prospective students outside of your normal location, and where the delivery will occur once there is sufficient interest:
Option 1
Set up a ‘prospective customers’ course master with one course date far into the future, say 1/1/2100, so it never expires (so interested students accumulate) and is private (so it does not appear on any public course lists). The registration form can be brief and include a pick list of the courses offered. While the course is set well into the future it can still be embedded in a website to gather interest. This will involve manually sorting through those interested in any particular course category or location all students are kept together and centrally managed. Once the list has sufficient numbers for a given interest area or location then a course can be scheduled, students are then transferred from the ‘prospective customers’ course date to the scheduled course. These courses can be set up with customised automatic emails, and optionally gather more information for the actual course upon transfer.
Option 2
Set up course dates on existing course masters but make them private and also far into the future, say 1/1/2100. The benefit of this is you can see, at a glance how much interest you have for a given location or course category. Like above you can transfer prospective customers to that course, entering them manually or embed on a website.
Other tips
- Have a ‘Book near my home’ (or similar worded) button beside the ‘Register’ and ‘Enquire’ buttons on each course date in a given list. This is like an enquire button, but can sends a different email, this promotes the option to select different dates or locations. Registers of interest will need to be moved to the pending or prospective customer course date following submission (or use javascript to send the registrations to the pending/prospective course date).
- If you have course dates for each course category group them into an event, so you can report (using registration lists) on interest across them all