Courses

Overview

What can courses include?

How to create a course

How to manage, sign off courses and chat with volunteers

Awarding Qualifications and Groups

Linking courses to qualifications

Video Tutorial

Courses are a collection of modules, forms, and bookings that make up a qualification. Think of Courses as the building blocks behind your onboarding journeys or a tool to help you with your qualification renewals. You can mix and match them across multiple journeys and reuse them individually to renew qualifications.

Whether you’re welcoming new volunteers, delivering training, or collecting key information, Courses make it simple to keep everything organised in one place.

Top tip: Keep Courses short and effective. The shorter the Course, the better.

Bite-sized Courses are easier for volunteers to complete, easier for teams to manage, and much more flexible to reuse. Shorter Courses can be combined as part of a wider onboarding journey, or they can be enabled for qualification renewals. Instead of one long process, think in smart, reusable building blocks.

Every course can award a volunteer a qualification and/or a group(s).

Courses can include the following elements:

Courses can include your Volunteero application form(s) and other forms, streamlining the collection of key onboarding and compliance information such as documents, agreements, references, emergency contacts, and policy acknowledgements.

Each form is automatically linked to the volunteer’s profile and securely stored upon completion, eliminating the need for manual onboarding of the form.

Volunteers can progress seamlessly from one form to the next. This can be fully automated or configured to include staff review and sign-off where required.

Here is an article on how to create forms on Volunteero.

You can add booking links to your courses. Empower volunteers to manage their own schedules by allowing them to book interviews, inductions, training sessions, or check-ins at a time that suits them.

Courses integrate seamlessly with the tools you already use, making it simple to manage availability without switching between systems. Reduce the back-and-forth of arranging interview times and create a more convenient experience for everyone.

Supported booking page providers include:

Simply click on Add Booking. Insert the title you want the booking to have, any instructions and details and add the URL to your booking page.

Create engaging e-learning content that guides volunteers step by step, ensuring they complete all essential training before starting and progressing to their first missions.

Courses can include one or multiple modules, combining videos, reading materials, quizzes, and role-specific guidance to support different learning needs. For more details on building modules, see this article on how to create modules.

When assembling a course, you might include content such as safeguarding training modules or role-specific preparation modules. These form a key part of the onboarding journey and can also be reused when volunteers need to renew their qualifications.

For this reason, it’s best practice to keep courses focused and concise. For example, a safeguarding training course can be built using modules such as videos and quizzes, and then reused at renewal intervals (e.g. every 6 or 12 months) when the qualification expires.

Go to the onboarding section on your dashboard and click on courses

After this, click on + Course and give your course a name and description.

You can also choose to enable reminder notifications to nudge your volunteers to continue their progress.

You can now start adding forms, modules, and booking links to your course.

As mentioned before, a course is a building block, and we would recommend small courses to make them easier to reuse and manage.

You can preview what your courses look like to your volunteers when you click on the preview button.

For each course element, you can decide whether:

Additionally, you can decide whether the volunteer needs to complete the curriculum in order, or they can decide what they complete first.

Once you have selected your curriculum, you can decide which qualifications and groups should be awarded for completing this course. More information in the next section.

When all of this is finalised, and you are happy with the course. Press Publish.

Volunteers can now enrol in your course. They can complete it as part of a structured journey (see more about journeys here), or take it as a standalone course, either by manual assignment, automatic enrollment through being linked to a qualification.

You can now also click on enrollments all the volunteers currently enrolled on this course.

If you want to track volunteer course progress, please navigate to the Course Volunteers Section. You can have full visibility over all course progress, and you can filter by course and status.

You can now get a complete overview of all volunteers enrolled on a course. In the course volunteers section, simply click on any volunteer to view their progress, including everything they have completed and any outstanding steps.

Where required, you can also sign off on individual steps.

The Sign Off column highlights any courses that require staff approval. To complete a sign-off, select the volunteer, navigate to the relevant step, and review the details. Once you’re ready to proceed, click Approve & Sign Off.

On each course step, you also have a notes section, in which you can leave internal notes; the volunteer can't see these notes.

If you have any questions for the volunteer while they are doing a course, you can click on the message button, and the chat will immediately show up as a window on the side.

Each course can award a qualification and/or assign volunteers to certain groups. This depends on the course content and the actions you would like to take once it has been completed.

If you would like volunteers to be added to a specific group after completing the course, simply select the relevant group.

If you would like volunteers to gain or renew a qualification after completing the course, you can select the qualification and set an expiry date if required. This will then be automatically added to the volunteer’s profile once they complete the course.

You can link courses to a qualification to help manage renewals and ensure your volunteers’ qualifications remain up to date.

To get started, go to the Volunteer Dashboard, open the Qualifications tab, and either create a new qualification or select an existing one.

If you want volunteers to be able to self-enrol and automatically renew, make sure the qualification is set to be discoverable. You can then set up automation by linking a course to the qualification and defining a renewal period. The renewal period determines how many months before a qualification expires a volunteer can retake the course, and this is also when they will receive a notification.

For more information on qualifications and how they work, please refer to this article here.

Not sure where to start when it comes to modules, courses and journeys? Sign up to our webinar series here and we’ll guide you through step-by-step -

Please sign up for one cohort; each cohort contains two live sessions.