Courses Procedures

Policies and procedures for Courses by the Extension Foundation - the payment, enrollment, and course-delivery service the Extension Foundation provides to its member institutions, covering courses.extension.org and its Moodle backend at learn.courses.extension.org.

Fee-based courses and the storefront

A fee-based course published on Courses by the Extension Foundation appears automatically in the public storefront - there's no separate listing request to submit.

To have the Extension Foundation collect and process fees for your course, email courses@extension.org and complete the Request for Extension Foundation to Collect Fees for Fee-Based Courses form. Pricing options currently available include bulk seat purchasing (a different per-seat price for multiple seats) and discount or voucher codes - see the Instructor FAQ for how each works.

Platform responsibilities

Students and learners

Learners are encouraged to maintain a single account and avoid creating duplicates - a duplicate account can cause access, enrollment, or completion issues. If you think you may have more than one account, contact courses@extension.org.

When reaching out for support - to an instructor or to us - include your email address, the course name, and a clear description of the issue (screenshots or error messages help). Questions about course content, assignments, grading, or expectations should always go to the instructor - support can't answer those and will redirect you to them.

Instructors and course owners

Instructors own their course content, instructional design, and configuration - creating and organizing materials, defining completion criteria, managing certificates, and getting the course ready before launch. Instructors are the primary point of contact for learners on anything content-related, and are responsible for interpreting their own enrollment and transaction data (available directly through the Transactions view). Instructors are responsible for authoring, publishing, and supporting any third-party tools or video hosting they use in their course. Instructors don't manage platform-wide settings, other people's accounts, or payment configuration.

Extension Foundation

The Extension Foundation operates and maintains the platform day-to-day - user accounts, enrollments, course categories, access controls, registration, and payment integration - and provides first-line support for access and enrollment issues. For fee-based courses, the Extension Foundation reconciles course sales, including per-course totals and individual transaction records. The Extension Foundation doesn't design or customize course content, configure course-level completion settings, or provide instructional design services.

Infrastructure support

Hosting, system performance, backups, security, and platform upgrades are handled at the infrastructure level, escalated from the Extension Foundation's own support. This covers platform bugs, server-level issues, and payment gateway failures - not course content or third-party authoring tools.

Course and account maintenance

Courses are expected to be actively maintained by their instructor. A course that's no longer offered or maintained, and abandoned without notice, may be archived at the Extension Foundation's discretion - which can mean restricting enrollment, removing it from the storefront, and disabling learner access. If you're no longer offering a course, or if it needs a new instructor, let us know at courses@extension.org.

To maintain platform security, accounts with no recorded activity for 3.5 years are removed from the system. As a non-degree-granting organization, the Extension Foundation doesn't maintain long-term academic records the way a college or university would.

Getting an account

Create an account directly at courses.extension.org/account/signup. One account covers the whole platform - once you're signed in and enrolled in something, you're taken straight into the course on our Moodle site without a separate sign-up there.

Anyone employed by an Extension Foundation member institution can offer a course - it's provided as a service to member institutions at no cost to the instructor. The underlying Moodle platform provides the usual full range of course delivery tools: pages, video, books, lessons, assignments, forums, chat, certificates, databases, glossaries, quizzes, and competency frameworks, along with the ability to share resources with other course developers.

"Course" is Moodle's term for a container holding a set of learning objects - it doesn't have to be a full semester-length class. A few learning modules packaged together works just as well.

Terms of use - special circumstances

Conference presentations

Papers presented at an Extension Foundation or Extension Foundation-affiliated event remain the intellectual property of their presenters and authors, even once published on the site. Copies may be printed or shared for non-commercial purposes as long as the title and authors stay attached - republishing in any other form needs the authors' written permission.

Publications

Authors keep the copyright to their intellectual content; the Extension Foundation holds copyright to the presentation itself (as a journal article, book, or monograph). Authors may publish the same material elsewhere, and others may redistribute it electronically as long as the original publication is credited. The Extension Foundation may edit material to meet its own standards.

Discussion and community areas

Where the platform provides chat, forums, or similar tools, they're meant for communication appropriate to that space. These areas aren't actively monitored, but the Extension Foundation may review and remove content that doesn't fit that purpose, and may restrict access for anyone who repeatedly disregards these terms.

Submitting a fee-based course

By submitting a fee-based course, you warrant that you hold the full rights to it - including all intellectual property rights - needed to let the Extension Foundation offer it to platform users. The Extension Foundation will remove a course within 7 days of a written removal request, and no later than 10.

The Extension Foundation remits course fees quarterly, for fees collected in the three months before each payment date, net of credit card processing and transaction fees only - the Extension Foundation does not retain any additional percentage of course revenue. Any future change to that arrangement would be communicated at least 90 days in advance, taking effect at the start of the next calendar quarter. Alongside each payment, you'll receive a written report covering enrollment, the gross fees collected, the transaction fees, and the net amount paid out. Reports and payments are issued within 30 days of the end of each calendar quarter.

Paid content and billing