Creating Effective Quizzes in Zenler: Grading, Secret Courses & Community Notifications

Learn how to create graded quizzes in Zenler, mark correct answers, set passing scores, and troubleshoot common community notification issues.

Topics Covered in This Educational Live Support Desk:

How to create graded quizzes and mark correct answers in Zenler
Setting up secret courses for beta testing without public visibility
Configuring subscription pricing with trial period options
Troubleshooting community email notification failures
The difference between inline discussions and standalone communities

Creating effective assessments separates passive content consumption from actual learning. Students need to test their understanding, and you need to verify they've grasped the material before they move forward.

Recent support sessions focused on the practical questions creators ask when building courses: How do I create a quiz where students get scored? Where do I mark which answers are correct? Why am I not getting notifications when students post in my community?

These aren't theoretical concerns. They're the friction points that stop course creation in its tracks.

Creating a Graded Quiz

Quizzes in Zenler work as a lesson type within your course curriculum. Go to your course builder, click Add Lesson, and select Quiz from the lesson type options.

This opens the quiz creation interface. First decision: graded or ungraded?

Graded quizzes calculate a score. Students need to reach a certain percentage to pass. You can require them to pass before continuing to the next lesson. This creates accountability.

Ungraded quizzes simply present questions without scoring. Useful for reflection exercises or informal check-ins where you want engagement but not formal assessment.

For graded quizzes, set the passing percentage. Seventy percent is common, though you can require higher standards. Decide whether students can continue even if they fail, or whether passing is mandatory for progression.

Now add your questions. Click to create a new question. Enter the question text.

Here's where confusion typically hits: "Where do I mark which answer is correct?"

The interface doesn't make this obvious. You add your answer options—let's say four multiple choice options. They appear in a list. Next to each option, there's a small icon. Click into the question settings. You'll see each answer option with a checkbox or indicator next to it.

Click the checkbox next to the correct answer. That marks it as correct. For multiple choice questions, you typically mark one correct answer. For "select all that apply" questions, you can mark multiple answers as correct.

The system grades based on these selections. Student picks the answer you've marked correct, they get points. They pick a different answer, they don't.

Setting Passing Requirements

After creating your quiz, you determine what happens based on results.

Enable "Pass quiz before continuing" if you want to lock students out of subsequent lessons until they've achieved the passing score. This creates a forced learning checkpoint.

Some creators worry this feels too strict. Others see it as necessary rigor. The choice depends on your course goals and student expectations.

For certification courses or professional development where competency verification matters, strict passing requirements make sense. For exploratory creative courses where the journey matters more than measurable outcomes, you might skip the enforcement.

You can also set the number of attempts allowed. Unlimited attempts means students can retry until they pass. Limited attempts—say three tries—adds pressure but might frustrate students who learn more slowly.

The quiz results appear in your Reports section. Go to Reports, then Quiz and Survey Results. Filter by course to see who's taken which quizzes, their scores, and how many attempts they needed.

This data tells you whether your quiz is appropriately difficult. If everyone passes on the first try, maybe it's too easy. If everyone fails multiple times, you might need to teach the material more clearly before the quiz.

Using Secret Courses for Beta Testing

Before launching a course publicly, testing with a small group catches problems you'd miss on your own. Video errors, unclear instructions, broken links—beta testers find these issues before your paying customers do.

The question: "How do I give beta testers access without the course appearing on my site?"

Make the course secret. In your course settings, there's a checkbox: "Make this course secret." Enable it.

The course disappears completely from your site. It won't show in course listings. It won't appear in search results. Your homepage won't display it. Even logged-in users who aren't specifically granted access won't see it exists.

But you have the direct course URL. Copy that URL and send it to your beta testers. They can access everything—watch videos, complete lessons, post in discussions—exactly as paying students would.

You can still attach a price to the course even when it's secret. This adds a layer of security. Or make it free for testing purposes.

When beta testing concludes and you're ready for public launch, uncheck the secret setting. The course appears on your site and becomes available for regular enrollment.

This method beats creating complicated discount codes or trying to manually manage a separate access list. Secret status gives you complete control over visibility.

Subscription Pricing with Trial Periods

Offering courses or memberships on subscription requires thoughtful pricing structures. Some creators want to lower the barrier to entry with a trial period—either free or at a significantly reduced price.

"Can I charge $1 for the first month, then full price after that?"

Zenler supports trial periods in subscription pricing. When you create a subscription pricing plan for a course, you set the regular recurring price—let's say $49 per month.

Then look for the trial settings. You can enable a trial period, set the duration (typically 7, 14, or 30 days), and set the trial price.

For a paid trial, you might set the trial price at $1 for 30 days. After 30 days, it converts to the regular $49 monthly charge automatically.

For a free trial, set the trial price to $0.

The trial gets people in the door at lower risk. They experience your content before committing to the full price. It's particularly effective for higher-priced subscriptions where the upfront monthly cost might create hesitation.

The risk: people sign up for trials with no intention of continuing. They consume content during the trial period, then cancel before the regular charge hits.

This happens. It's part of offering trials. The question is whether the increased sign-ups from lowering the barrier outweigh the losses from trial-only users.

Testing tells you the answer. Run a trial period for a few months. Track conversion rates from trial to paid. If enough people convert, the trial works. If most people cancel after the trial, either your content isn't delivering enough value or you're attracting the wrong audience.

Troubleshooting Community Notification Failures

One of the most frustrating technical issues: "I'm not receiving email notifications when students post in my community. I've checked all the settings. Everything's enabled. But I'm not getting the emails."

First troubleshooting step: check your spam folder. Notification emails sometimes get filtered incorrectly. If you find them there, mark them as "not spam" and add the sender to your contacts.

Second: verify the email address in your notification settings. Confirm it's the address you're actually checking. If you've changed email addresses but forgot to update your Zenler settings, notifications go to the old address.

Third: test with a different email address. Create a post in your community that should trigger a notification. If the notification arrives at a different email address but not your primary one, the problem is with your email provider, not Zenler.

If notifications are inconsistent—some arrive, others don't—that's harder to diagnose. It could be sporadic spam filtering, server delays, or a technical issue on Zenler's end.

For persistent notification failures, contact Zenler support with specifics: "I enabled notifications on [date], I'm not receiving them at [email address], I've checked spam, here are examples of posts that should have triggered notifications but didn't."

The more specific information you provide, the faster support can identify the issue.

The workaround while troubleshooting: schedule regular check-ins with your communities. Open the community feed daily or every few days. Review new posts. Respond to comments. Don't rely solely on email notifications to tell you when engagement happens.

Treat community management like you treat social media management—you open the app and check it, rather than waiting for notifications.

Inline Discussions vs Standalone Communities

When you enable discussions in your course, where do they actually appear?

If you turn on inline discussions (the checkbox in your lesson settings), students see a discussion option right within each lesson. They don't have to navigate away from the course content to a separate community section.

These inline discussions automatically create a course-specific community. Go to your Communities section and you'll see a community listed for that course, even if you didn't manually create one.

This community is private to students enrolled in that course. Only they can see it and participate.

The advantage: discussions happen in context. Students learning about a specific topic can discuss that exact topic right there, without losing their place in the course.

The disadvantage: if you have multiple courses with inline discussions enabled, you'll have multiple separate communities. Students in Course A can't interact with students in Course B, even though they're all your students.

Standalone communities work differently. You create them in the Communities section. You control who accesses them through pricing plans or manual approval. They exist independently of any specific course.

Use standalone communities when you want all your students across all your courses to interact in one space. Use inline discussions when you want course-specific conversations that stay focused on that course's content.

Many creators use both: inline discussions for course-specific questions and a standalone community for general networking, wins, and cross-course interaction.

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