Unlocking New Content Through Community Activity – Worth Considering?

Hi,

I came across something interesting over the weekend that I hadn’t seen before. I joined a group on Skool.com and noticed how they incentivise community engagement. As you participate more in the community, you move up through Levels (starting at Level 1 and going up to Level 9). Right now, I’m on Level 1, but as I continue to engage, reaching Level 2 will unlock new learning for me in their “classroom” area.

What’s clever is that this classroom area has extra content and learning opportunities, some of which you can pay for, so it’s a blend of free and paid access, all linked to your engagement in the community.

Has anyone else seen this kind of approach before? Could a system like this work in Heights, where higher levels of engagement unlock additional content, resources, or opportunities?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Catherine

Hi Catherine!

We're planning an option to allow your students to unlock certain content with points. This could be points they've earned from course or community related features.

This year we also added the ability for creators to manually adjust a student's point value to prepare for this.

Technically, this is possible if you wanted to do it manually now but deducting a student's points manually and granting them a certain product, but we'd like to allow students to be able it do it on their own through your checkout if you allow it for a certain product.

Any specific way you would imagine using this inside your program?

Thanks for the update and the insight into what’s coming next!

Just to clarify, what really stood out to me about Skool.com is that the extra value, the unlocked content and progression through levels, is specifically tied to actual engagement in the community. While points for completing lessons are great, simply clicking ‘Lesson Complete’ shouldn’t carry the same weight as contributing to discussions, sharing insights, or helping others in the community. Although lesson comments could be given additional points in Heights as that is also about engagement.

On Skool, the unlocks only happen as a reward for being actively engaged. That approach seems to really encourage meaningful participation, rather than just passive course completion.

I’m a little unclear about the part using the checkout. On Skool, everything is automatic: when you reach a certain engagement level, new content is just unlocked, there’s no basket, code, or checkout. That’s what makes it feel motivating and easy for learners.

Could you clarify how the future system in Heights might work for automatic unlocks based on engagement, rather than purchases or admin processes? I’d love to see community engagement directly rewarded in this way, as it feels like a real win for both learners and creators.

Thanks again for taking this feedback on board! I think I would use this particularly for a 'Digital Product' and a short 'Course'.

For anyone curious what this looks like in action, here’s a screenshot from my own Skool.com account. You can see how your level increases based on your engagement, and how leaderboards track top contributors over different time periods. Each new level unlocks additional content, in this case, reaching Level 2 opened up the “AI Beginners Bootcamp” course for me. I think it’s a really motivating and transparent way to encourage meaningful participation in the community. It's also really simple and required me to do absolutely nothing apart from participate.

Thanks for the details Catherine!

Inside Heights members also receive points for votes on their project posts, and while they don't yet directly receive points in the community, we do track their posts and with Heights AI's student engagement score system we are tracking their community engagement as well.

Right now, apart from receiving the "Community Supporter" badge for posts, you are correct that the progress and points students see isn't directly tied to their community participation.

If we gave points for community posts, would you want the ability to assign the number of points received for each post made as a default, or would you be okay with us choosing a default number? For example on lessons you can choose any number you want right now, but for project post votes it is a default of 15 points per vote.

Thanks for the clarification and for keeping track of engagement behind the scenes! I appreciate that members already earn points for votes on project posts. Assigning points to community posts could help encourage more meaningful participation.

Personally, I'd prefer a combination: a sensible default number of points per post, with the option for creators to customise this if needed. This way we can highlight special channels or initiatives without having to adjust everything manually.

Also, are learners informed about their engagement scores or how their activity is being tracked? I'm keen to understand how transparent this system is.

We made some big updates to this with the release of the Heights Community Algorithm and you can read about how the algorithm works here:

We plan to update your creator dashboard soon include which students are in which cohort, as well as show you on individual students if the student is cold, warm, or engaged.

We don't yet show this data to students but if points are added for making community posts, a great way for students to show this off would be if you enable the leaderboards feature (shown at bottom of this page):

The combination of a default with the option to customize sounds great! Thank you for that feedback!