Free courses and EdTech: rolling intake, trial, progress and the way back
Turn on the online course profile and the whole cycle appears: continuous intake with no deadline, a trial class, an online enrolment form ready to take payment, learning progress that never invents a number, the certificate, the next course and an invitation back for whoever stopped. Part of the Education vertical, optional and off until an admin turns it on.
The Free courses and EdTech block sits at the end of the Education screen. It does not add a new module: it turns on a profile and ties together what the other waves already built, which is why everything appears at once for a school that has been using the system for a while.
A rolling intake is a cycle with no deadline
Turning on the profile creates a cycle of type intake, open, with no application deadline and no acceptance deadline. The absence is the whole point: in a free course people enrol on the day they decide, and a deadline typed in just to fill the field would start producing expiry alerts for an expiry that never existed. If you later add a deadline to that cycle, the screen stops calling it rolling and says why: it became a dated cohort, which is a different thing.
Silence is not zero
Learning progress is read from the learning platform signals, through the neutral connector. It is work submitted over submitted plus missed within the last thirty days; with no activity signals it falls back to attendance, and it says that it fell back. When there is no signal at all, the column reads "not measured" and the rate is empty. It is never 0%.
There is a third answer as well. If no connector knows how to read the platform, the state is "cannot tell", which is not the same as "we looked and found nothing". The two sentences describe different worlds, and the screen keeps them apart.
Three answers, not two
Eligibility for the next course and for an invitation back is always one of three: yes, no, or cannot tell. Someone who finished a course is a natural candidate for the next one, and so is someone progressing well. Someone struggling with the current course is not: selling the second course to whoever is drowning in the first is like billing a renewal to a customer who opened a complaint this morning. And someone the school cannot measure gets "cannot tell", with the reason spelled out, so that a person decides.
Which course comes next
The recommendation reads your own enrolment history: learners who took this course also took that one. If no two courses have been taken by the same learners yet, the list comes back empty and says so, together with how many learners were looked at. Nothing is invented, and the screen tells you which course pulled each suggestion and how many learners are behind it.
Who left, and who went quiet
Leaving is a dated fact and needs no learning platform: a withdrawn enrolment is enough. Going quiet is different, because it only counts as quiet if something was measuring it. A learner with an active enrolment and no signal at all comes back as "cannot tell", stays on the list so you can see them, and is not invited on a guess.
The invitation goes out through the communication service
The reactivation journey is a journey like the others, and it is seeded switched off. Inviting someone back never sends an email from this screen: it hands the message to the education communication service, which decides recipient by recipient (the guardian gate, consent, each person's language, the cap per family) and records one line per person with the reason, including for whoever did not receive it. A journey that also sent on its own would be a second door with none of those locks.
Trial, payment and certificate
The trial class is an event of type trial class, with the check-in the events screen already records: never booked, booked, attended or no-show. The online enrolment form is created as a draft with payment switched off and no amount, because publishing it and charging for it are deliberate acts, and charging also needs your own payment gateway connected.
The certificate comes from completing the enrolment, never from a high progress bar: 95% is not a completion, and a certificate issued by progress bar is what costs a school its accreditation. If the certification declares a validity in months, the screen counts the expiry from the completion date; if it declares none, it says that no expiry was declared instead of inventing one.
One honest limitation: the system does not yet record which certification each programme grants, so you pick the certification when you want to see the expiry. Tying the two together would require a schema change, and this wave deliberately made none.