You can watch every lesson of a free course without enrolling, and without being signed in at all. Nothing is blocked, so most people press play and never touch the button. What is missing is the record. Until you enrol, nothing you watch is written down, and the course sits at 0% however much of it you have seen.
Enrol first. On a free course it is one button and no payment.
Enrolling on a free course costs nothing
Open the course page and select Enroll for free. If you are signed out the button reads Sign in to enroll instead, because an enrolment has to attach to an account. There is no payment step and nothing to wait for: the button returns and you are enrolled.
Courses that are paid, membership-gated or institutional need that entitlement before the button will work. The enrolment itself is the same one-step action.
What enrolling turns on
Everything UNI records about your time in a course hangs off your enrolment. Without one, none of this exists for you:
- Lesson completion and the course percentage. A video lesson marks itself complete once you have watched 90% of it. A reading lesson completes only when you press Mark complete; reaching the end of the text does nothing on its own.
- Your resume position. Enrolled, a lesson you finished is remembered as finished. A lesson you stopped partway through is not: the player only records a position once you pass most of the way through, so leaving halfway means starting that video again. Un-enrolled, nothing is recorded at all.
- Quizzes and the final exam. Starting an attempt requires an enrolment.
- Assignment submissions.
- Reviewing the course. A rating or a written review can only be left by someone enrolled.
- The certificate, which is issued on completion.
Progress made before you enrol is not backfilled
This is the part worth acting on. Watching while un-enrolled does not park a record somewhere that gets claimed when you enrol later. It stores nothing at all, so there is nothing to backfill.
If you work through thirty lessons without enrolling and then enrol, you start at 0% and those lessons still read as not done. To make them count you have to go back through each one. Enrol before you press play, not after.
Being signed out has the same effect even if you enrolled on that account earlier. The lessons still play, but the account is not attached to the request, so nothing is recorded against your enrolment.
What completion actually means
A course counts as complete when every lesson in it is complete and, if the course has them, the final exam is passed and every graded assignment carrying a pass mark is passed. Reaching that point issues your certificate automatically, with nothing to request. Course certificates covers where to find it, what it shows and how to save a copy.
If you are only sampling a course to decide whether it is for you, watching without enrolling is a reasonable thing to do. Enrol at the point you decide to take it seriously, and accept that the sampling does not count.