June 16, 2022

Because we use Notion to host Notion Mastery, we get a lot of questions about using Notion as a course platform.

Notion was not created to host online courses, so before you decide it’s the right fit for you and your course, it’s important to consider a few things.

1. How comfortable are you with Notion?

Using Notion as your online course platform is a very advanced use case. We do not recommend considering this until you are extremely comfortable with Notion. This includes being very comfortable using all of Notion’s features (especially sharing and permissions, and linked vs source databases), as well as confidence in creating aesthetic and easy to navigate dashboards and pages.

It’s one thing to use Notion personally, and a whole other thing to be designing spaces that others (who may or may not be familiar with Notion) are going to navigate!

If you are fairly new to Notion, it’s going to be much easier to use a tool that was created specifically for hosting an online course. You will be able to input your curriculum into an existing structure right away, rather than having to build that structure in Notion first, and then input your material.

2. Members, guests, or other, oh my

The nuances of sharing and permissions in Notion can be complex. Figuring out the best way to grant and revoke access to your Notion workspace to (hopefully) many people each time you run your course – that’s complicated!

Here are some options:

👥Guests

Guests in Notion are anyone who has been invited to access specific pages (or sub-pages), but who do not have access to a whole workspace.

• Guests are free
• You can adjust individual levels of access when you invite Guests:
  • Can edit: They can edit the page’s content, but they can’t share the page.
  • Can comment: They can only read and comment, not edit or share.
  • Can read: They can only read the content, and can’t share it.
• Requires all your students to have a Notion account.

Guest permissions are cascading: if you provide a guest “Can comment” access to a Notion page they will also inherit “Can comment” access to any sub-pages nested on that page.

You can also manually adjust permission levels on sub-pages (eg. changing “Can comment” to “Can read”).

If you are working with a small group, sharing resources, and want your students to be able to view information and/or be able to interact with you on a page, Guest-access is a handy (and affordable!) way to achieve this.

The downside is that inviting guests to pages (and revoking their access later) is all done manually. And, wrapping your head around what they can/cannot see (especially if you have any linked databases on your pages) can be confusing.