Hello, Courses. What’s Up, Discount Codes.

We've been hard at work over the past few weeks and think its time to show you two awesome things we've been working on: Courses and Discount Codes.

Single classes are a great way to get your toes wet in a subject or even drill down into a specific advanced topic. However, to really pick up and master a new skill your students may need to learn over the course of a few classes.

To help, we’re introducing Courses as a feature. Here’s what we came up with:

A course is a series of sessions

Courses contain much of the same information as classes: description, teacher bio, and the other meta data associated with a listing, but a course also contains two or more sessions. Think of a session as a class that makes up the larger course. Each session has its own title, description, date & time, and location.

Your course can have as many sessions as you need to teach your skills.  Four sessions over 2 weeks? No problem. We're even seeing some really in depth courses like Avi Flombaum's Become a Ruby on Rails Developer: An Intensive 5 Week Course.

In addition to courses, we've pushed a few other goodies to our Class/Course Creator.

WYSIWYG

No more writing html! You can now format your descriptions and teacher bios without having to write any code. We've included a bunch of formatting options like bold/italic, bullets/numbers, and even hyperlinks.

Difficulty Level

Teaching an advanced workshop on Ruby? You can now clearly define what level of expertise your class or course is aimed at. You can also add pre-requisites so your students can have an idea of what they need to know before enrolling.

Class Type

To help your students know what structure you're using in class, you can now add a class type to individual classes and course sessions. We're launching with four types: Workshop, Lecture, Q&A, and Study Session.

To help our teachers promote enrollment and make their classes and courses more accessible to students, we're also introducing a way for teachers to offer discounts on classes.

Discount codes are a great way to jumpstart enrollment

We know the first few tickets are always the hardest to sell, or sometimes you'd like to be able to offer a discount to students who attend your intro class then sign up for a longer, more expensive course. Now you can. To create a discount code, simply visit your class manager screen. Right below the financials section, you'll find discount codes.

Feel free to experiment with how you use discount codes. One tactic we're seeing is early bird specials: 20% off for the first 5 students that buy a ticket. As always, don't forget to share your code on Facebook/Twitter or even include it directly in your class description.

That's all for now, stay tuned for more updates and new product announcements. As always, we love hearing how you're using Skillshare and our new features, feel free to shoot us any feedback, bugs, or suggestions to help@skillshare.com or on twitter.