Courses
Student Portal & Domains

Student Portal & Domains

The student learning portal is a white-labeled, responsive player interface designed for video playback, progress tracking, and custom domain delivery.

The Playback Experience

Students access their courses via a full-screen Course Player interface:

  • Responsive Layout: Features a dark branding header (displaying the student's name and workspace name), a collapsible lesson navigation sidebar, and a main content area.
  • Mobile Touch Containment (iOS Safari fixes):
    • Automatically locks scrolling on the background page when the course navigation menu is open on mobile devices.
    • Prevents elastic dragging or shifting of the header on iOS devices.
    • Adjusts text rendering and button interactions to ensure smooth transitions on mobile screens.
    • Ensures the keyboard behaves normally on mobile devices when inputting details, preventing inputs from shifting off-screen.

Video Player Mechanics

Gordon CRM monitors video player events:

  • Autoplay Gating on iOS: Safari's strict rules require video players to start paused when loading a page on iOS or iPadOS devices. The video player begins paused at your last saved position, and you can start playing it with a single tap.
  • Position Persistence: Restores your video playback position across pages, allowing you to pick up exactly where you left off.
  • YouTube Audio Muting: When fast-forwarding or scrubbing YouTube videos, the player mutes the audio briefly to prevent sudden static or audio pops.
  • Auto-Advance Rules:
    • Manual Click: Clicking the Complete & Continue button advances you to the next lesson immediately.
    • Video Completion: Completing a video triggers a visible 5-second countdown timer before auto-advancing to the next lesson.
    • Quiet Auto-Save: Reaching 90% video progress saves your lesson progress silently in the background.

Custom Portal Domains

Workspaces can deliver their courses through a custom web address (e.g. learn.yourbrand.com) using custom domain settings.

Setting Up a Custom Domain

  1. Navigate to Settings → Domains.
    • Note: This dashboard was renamed from "Sending" to "Domains" to unify email sending domains and portal domains under a single interface.
  2. Under the Course Portal Subdomain card, click Add Custom Domain.
  3. Input your subdomain. The system enforces subdomain-only validation (e.g. learn.yourbrand.com) to prevent registry conflicts.
  4. Click View DNS Records (which is always displayed on the portal card for easy access to your CNAME targets). Point a CNAME record in your domain registrar (e.g. Cloudflare, GoDaddy) to the routing target.
    • If using Cloudflare, configure the record as DNS-Only (gray cloud) to bypass proxy routing conflicts. A warning banner in the settings page highlights this to prevent validation errors.
  5. Click Verify. The server runs status checks: if verification succeeds, it saves the domain and registers it. If CNAME checks fail, the domain is marked as unverified.

Routing & Redirections

  • High Performance Routing: Automatically checks and resolves custom portal domain lookups in milliseconds for instant page loading.
  • Redirection Rules:
    • Legacy Links: Old portal links (e.g., app.gordoncrm.com/learn/...) automatically redirect to the new default portal.
    • Custom Domains: Links pointing to the platform domain for workspaces with custom domains automatically redirect to your custom portal, keeping students logged in.

Legal & Compliance Gates

To meet CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance guidelines, the student portal implements strict policy consent gates.

Workspace Policies

Administrators configure mandatory policies in settings:

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • Refund Policy
  • Cookie Policy

These policies use version tracking. Modifying a policy requires students to review and accept the updated terms on their next visit.

Fullscreen Consent Gate

Upon entering the student portal for the first time (or after a policy update), a fullscreen window requires your confirmation before you can continue.

  • Students must review and agree to all active policies.
  • When a student agrees, the CRM records the agreement details, IP address, and browser type for compliance records.

Related

Overview & BuilderOverview