The sudden spurt of users in favor of online learning has resulted in a relative increase in the number of learning management systems available in the market. There are themes and plugins such as Learndash, Sensei, WPLMS that are dedicated towards the concept of e Learning in the WordPress domain. The one requirement that remains consistent across the various systems is that users want a functionality using which they have an option of selling courses as well as individual lessons in the courses.
Why is there a need to Create Paid Lessons?
Very often the courses that are provided in an Online Learning Management System are extensive courses with many lessons associated with it. A user who needs needs access to only a single lesson from the course would not be in favor of buying the entire course as it would be an unnecessary outlay. This usually results as a loss for both the course provider who loses a potential customer and the user who does not get access to the the specific lesson in question.
In order to bridge this gap and convert it into a win-win situation for both the e Learning provider as well as the student there is a need to include a feature which allows online education providers to create paid lessons which can be sold individually while keeping the current format of selling an entire course intact.
A Work Around
As there is no feature to create paid lessons at this point of time, users can create individual lessons as courses in order to be able to sell them individually. However, this is not an ideal solution as there would be a need to connect all the lessons of a single course to each other. Also, the number of courses created would be needless resulting in an overhead for website administrators.
How to Create Paid Lessons for your LMS ?
So, if not the work around, how do we incorporate the paid lessons functionality into online learning management system?
Link Lesson ID with Product
- Well, to enjoy the functionality at it’s best, the learning management system being used, needs to be customized. The customization would mainly involve associating the lessons with products. A lesson ID is generated every time a lesson is created in the learning management system. This lesson ID should then be linked with the products in your eCommerce shop. Also, an additional step that should be taken is that the user’s access to lessons other than the one’s which have been purchased should be restricted.
Product Page in Dashboard
- Now, the website administrator can check the Create Paid Lessons checkbox as shown in above image if he wants to create a paid lesson.
- The admin will then select a course from a list provided on the product page in the dashboard. Based on the course selected by the admin the list of lessons that belong to the particular course will be fetched and populated in a separate list meant for lessons.
- The administrator will now select a lesson from this list which will be displayed as a product on the shop page. Other attributes such as price, course description, product image etc can be added as usual.
- One thing to note here is that if the administrator wants to create a course as a product instead of a lesson he should keep the Create Paid Lessons checkbox unchecked.
User View on Course Page
- As shown above, on the course page a purchase button should be provided to the users against every paid lesson in the course that has not been purchased by the user.
- Now, a user can buy a particular lesson from any course by clicking on the button provided against the lesson the user will be taken to the product page that has been created for the lesson. Once the user buys a lesson the user’s information for that course will be updated and he will now be able to take the lesson that has been purchased.
So, users of your LMS system will be able to buy individual paid lessons while the option to buy the course as a whole remains intact. This feature not only saves the web admin from creating numerous courses – which are lessons in reality – in the LMS but also provides students with an option to buy only the sections in the course which they require.
Images by freepik
