Andres and Kevin,
With my experience there is no way to avoid the 'start course' button. What you can do though is:
- In the settings change the text of 'Start Course' to something that is more appropriate so that this phrase is not duplicated (this is done through Labels in Settings). In the past we have changed it to various things such as 'start lesson'
- Change the course navigation to 'Restricted' > choose not to show the sidebar > turn off lesson count.
Doing all these steps will make the course '1 page' as the learner will never know there are multiple lessons and cannot navigate around.