As an e-learning instructor, have you ever wondered if you are leveraging your LearnDash LMS to its utmost potential? There’s always that thought at the back of the mind, right – how can I make the learning process simpler for my students? You try a lot of things, making the content more engaging, dividing the videos into bite-sized lengths, providing a ton of reference material, you name it. But the one thing you don’t focus on, and which is actually the threshold for your course, is course enrolment and registration management on your LearnDash website.
A lot of times, when it comes to choosing between two equally good courses, smoother enrolment processes and better registration perks clinch the deal. For instance, if a student has to sign up with his team for an introductory course in Physics, he would much rather prefer a course that allowed him to bulk enroll students than one where he had to add them individually to the list.
There are many such small hacks that can up your game in the e-learning world and make enrolment management much, much easier for you as well as the user. Take a look!
8 Hacks to Empower Your Students
Have a Single Transaction for Enrolment of Multiple Students into Multiple Courses
One of the main problems students have while enrolling into multiple courses is that they are billed for each course separately. To add to this, consider a scenario where they are supposed to enroll multiple students into the course, say their friends or classmates, and there’s a recipe for mass confusion. How many email addresses, how many invoices, and how many registrations are they going to keep track of?!
To make this process smoother, you can consider allowing students to bulk enroll in multiple courses simultaneously and generate a single invoice for the complete transaction. The Group Leader can then purchase multiple course licenses for multiple courses and enroll all participants in one go. Could save a lot of time, eh?
Let Admin Create Fixed Group Packages
In an ordinary case, the Group Leader is free to create a group of however many people he/she chooses – 2, 5, 8, 17 – whatever. Even if you set a maximum license purchase limit, it can still be difficult to manage groups when they are of uneven numbers.
In such a scenario, you can think of setting up fixed license packages to avoid confusion. For instance, say you set up a package of two licenses for your Psychology 101 course. Now, the students will be able to enroll in the course only in sets of two. This streamlines your headache to a great extent, as you have effectively halved the number of licenses you need to keep track of. You can take this package to 5, 8, 10, as necessary, depending on the popularity and scope of your course.
Allow Multiple Students to Register Using a Common Email Address
For bulk registrations, sourcing and maintaining all the email addresses of group members can be a nightmare. Many a student has missed important course-related communication because the email was misspelled (a fair possibility, considering the fantastic email addresses people have), or they forgot the password to their accounts, or didn’t sync their account with their smartphone; you get the idea.
Instead, it is much more convenient for the Group Leader to simply register all group members using a common email address, which can be accessed by all of them. Goodbye, ‘I didn’t get an email about the assignment’ excuse! A more efficient way of registration and management, don’t you think?
Let Admin Restrict Course Access for the Group Leader
Usually, the Group Leader is enrolled by default into the course for which he/she is purchasing licenses. However, what if the person does not want to enroll in the course? Or the Admin wants to restrict course access for the Group Leader?
A better idea is to let the Group Leader add his/her own name and email address during the bulk purchase exactly the same way they are doing for the other users.
Enable the Group Leader to Manage Passwords in a Variety of Ways
This hack actually contains a world of possibilities. Passwords are the Waterloo of students these days, as it is extremely difficult to remember dozens of different passwords they set for different accounts. So, how can this process be made better, or easier? Here are a few options:
- Allow the Group Leader to see a list of usernames and passwords of all the members in the group, so, in case some member does forget his/her password, the Group Leader can check and remind the person in question.
- If we follow-up on the ‘same email address’ idea discussed above, the Group Leader can reset the passwords for the entire group in one go, by selecting the single email address for which the password is to be changed.
- Usually, there are two kinds of password settings upon enrolment – one is where the user sets the password himself, and two, where the user receives a system-generated password. Besides, in cases of group registration, the Group Leader enters the passwords for all enrolling members. For all three scenarios, you can force the user to reset the password the first time they log in to the course, as a proactive security measure.
- In continuation of this idea, the user can further be authorized to conditionally hide passwords from the Group Leader. In such a case, the Group Leader will not be able to see the password once it has been reset by the user.
Allow Admin to Re-invite a Group Leader/Student Who has Been Removed
Sometimes, a Group Leader or student may have been removed from a course on account of their inactivity or any other reason. Usually, in these cases, there is no option to re-invite the removed student, other than them having to enroll again.
If such a re-invite option were to be included, it would make the work of the admin much easier as it eliminates the need for the re-enrollment process. The Admin could simply send a re-invite email containing the link to rejoin the course and the user would be able to login to his/her account.
Let Group Leaders Add Other Users as Group Leaders
Within a group, there is only one Group Leader, but in cases of larger groups, having just one leader might prove to be an inadequate point of contact. Instead, you could enable the Group Leader to add other users as Group Leaders, within that group. Sort of how a WhatsApp Group Chat has multiple Admins.
Allow the Group Leader to Suspend/Activate a User Account
In ordinary cases, only the Admin has the authority to remove a user from the course. However, in cases where there are hundreds of enrolments, the Admin could authorize the Group Leaders to Suspend/Remove a group member without waiting for Admin approval. Of course, this task would have to necessarily be handed to trustworthy Group Leaders to ensure that the authority was not abused, but nevertheless, it would be an effective method of delegating tasks that the Admin cannot spend time on.
Endnote
These were some of the ideas on a LearnDash website we thought could be useful in streamlining the group registration and user management process. The idea is to make the process as frictionless as possible, to help the users have a great user experience. As course authors or website administrators, implementing these hacks can go a long way in reducing drop-offs during registration.
Admittedly, there are a lot of group registration plugins for LearnDash out there that do a good job of enrolling and managing students, but there’s always scope for improvement, right? Besides, most of them have none or few of these functionalities, as of now. Simple customizations, however, can get them to work the way you want.
What do you think of these hacks for empowering e-learning users we’ve mentioned? Would you like to get these functionalities for your website? Or perhaps, add a few hacks of your own?
Drop a comment to let us know!
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Peter Carqueville :
I have some question about using a common E-Mail-Adress to register several students:
– how do you achieve this? I thought WordPress disallowed this?
– Could this potentially be used to allow anonymized user databases, where individual users receive a randomly generated user key (=wp username) and. The admin would in this case create a form that only asks for the key, but with hidden values that provides WordPress with a password always the same E-Mail-Adress. A similar form would allow Logins later on. The students could log in using only their keys. Complete anonymity inside of WordPress.
Arvind Agrawal :
Very well written post. Thank you so much for the insights. Very helpful.