Adding and managing beta testers in Open edX

Beta testers are effectively just students who get early access to content. Let's look at adding them and managing how they get that access.

How early?

The first question we need to answer is how many days early do we want beta testers to access the content? To define this we follow these steps:

1. Set your course start and end dates. This is where Open edX counts back from to decide if they have access to content.
2. Decide on a number of days. Try to define this instead of just giving them '10,000 days' to get immediate access, as if this number is too high it can break their access to your course.
   For example, If your course begins in 2 months but you want them in immediately, make it 90 days (All the days you need plus an extra buffer)
3. Now enter Studio for your course and go to Settings and Advanced Settings at the top of the page
   

   

4. Within this page, search or scroll until you find the field labelled Days Early for Beta Users. Enter your chosen date in this field.
   

5. Save your changes at the bottom of the page
   

Adding beta testers

Now that we've defined how early they can get in, let's add our beta testers.

1. In the LMS, head to the Membership tab of the Instructor Dashboard
   
2. First, enroll your beta testers by entering their email addresses in the first box on this page and hitting Enroll. We recommend not sending them an automated email about it just yet, but they will need to have activated their account before the next step will work (if their account does not already exist). You may want to email them about this manually instead.
   

   

3. Now take those same email addresses down to the next box, and simply repeat the process by hitting Add beta testers. You may want to send an email to them at this point, either automatically or manually. The choice is yours, so long as they use the same email address you've given permissions to. Remember: Their account must exist and be activated before this step will work.
   

4. Once these users have access to the course, they will have access to any content with a release date as many days early as you previously specified. To remove them as beta testers, simply press the Remove beta testers button instead of Add beta testers button after copying their email addresses into the box.