Let people watch one lesson free
The free preview is your course's shop window. Everything else sits behind enrolment; this one lesson plays for anyone — no account, no payment, no email address demanded first.
How it works
- Pick the lesson that shows you at your best. Usually the introduction, but a mid-course lesson that delivers one real, complete result can work even harder.
- Ask. "Put the intro lesson free to watch." Bernard flips it, relabels the syllabus, and updates the course's machine-readable markup so the free lesson is advertised as free (How do I make Google and AI search understand my pages?).
- Approve. Like every change, it lands on your live site when you say so.
A good preview does two jobs at once. Humans get a genuine taste of your teaching. Machines get a signal: this course has a free, watchable sample — exactly the kind of concrete fact AI assistants favour when recommending where to learn something. The rest of the course stays gated to enrolled learners (Let learners in without accounts or passwords).
The prompt
“Make the [lesson name] lesson of my [course name] course the free preview.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Log in to bernard → your site → Edit with AI → copy your access prompt, paste that into your AI first, then ask the above.
Questions people ask
- Why give away a lesson for free?
- Because nobody buys a course from a stranger. A free taster lets someone hear how you teach before they pay — and it's the single strongest thing on a course page for turning a browser into a learner.
- How many free lessons can a course have?
- One. That's deliberate — one clear taster keeps the offer simple. Marking a different lesson as the preview unmarks the old one.
- Do search engines know the lesson is free?
- Yes. The preview lesson is labelled free-to-watch in your course's invisible markup, so when an AI assistant answers 'where can I learn this?', it can say there's a free lesson to try. The change drafts privately and goes live when you approve it.