an ILT course is basically made of 2 parts...the course and the sessions. You can create the course and allow users to enrol when there are no sessions. Once you have enough users enrolled, you can then create some sessions and if enabled, send the users a notice that a session has been added.

Only thing is users cannot access content if there are no sessions so you could potentially make use of the demo material if you want allow users to access something like the course syllabus.

It’s a little more user-friendly with the new course player.

I agree with @lrnlab, this is more user-friendly in the new course player. An additional tip is to put a statement like, “Interested in this course, enroll now to join the interest list. We will notifiy you when sessions become available.” Make sure you turn on the new notifications that LrnLab suggested. 

I like the idea of adding the statement… 

Are you able to have people land on the course info tab instead of the sessions tab. I don’t love that people are seeing the “Whoops” message when there are no sessions scheduled on an ILT course.