Front End Course Creation for LearnDash: Tutoring Made Easy

Administering an e-learning website running LearnDash is an uphill battle. There could be a million details that require your attention, be it something as trivial as approving an assignment or a task as vital as publishing a new course.

It’s a given that when you consider large scale e-learning platforms, you have several individuals administering course contents. But not all of them can have Admin privileges: publishing rights or access to customization settings. It wouldn’t make sense.

It’s crucial for a LMS to have a role that lets a user author Courses and Lessons and also view detailed reports of learners enrolled in his Courses, but limits access to other content and Admin settings at the same time.

LearnDash by default has no such user role; which is why WisdmLabs came up with the Instructor Role Extension for LearnDash. It adds a user role of ‘Instructor’ to your LearnDash LMS.

An Instructor can author content from the back-end of your website i.e. create Courses, Lessons, Quizzes etc and sell them online. Additionally, he can also view detailed reports of all the user activity pertaining to his Courses, and earn commission on every sale.

But what if you want to completely restrict back-end access for an ‘Instructor’ and yet have him author Courses and other content? Sounds a little too far-fetched?

It’s real, and it’s happening.

Front End Course Creation Plugin

Front End Course Creation is yet another addition to our list of LearnDash utility products, and it lets you do exactly what it’s named after- allows courses to be created from the frontend.

Front-end Course Creation adds a ‘Course Author’ user role with a special set of privileges. A Course Author creates and manages Courses, Lessons, Topics and Quizzes just like an Instructor, but only from the front-end. He/she does not have backend access.

The FCC plugin automatically creates and adds Content Creation pages, such as ‘Create Course’, ‘Create Lesson’ or ‘Create Topic’, using which the Course Author can create his own content.

These pages have the same settings you would find in the backend. A Course Author has to be logged in to create course content.

To provide a single point of management, FCC has to be operated alongside BuddyPress. The plugin provides a quick link option named as ‘Listing’ right on the Course Author’s BuddyPress profile page, for easy course content creation and management.

Here’s what a Course Author’s profile page would look like:

Optionally, an Admin could link Content Creation pages from the main menu, to provide direct access to these pages.

Publishing can done in one of two ways: an Admin can choose to auto publish content created by Course Authors, or save it as a draft for reviewing and publishing manually.

Saving it as a draft would let the admin review the content, make any changes if required and publish it at their leisure.

It’s simple, useful and does exactly what it’s meant to: gives you control over the ins and outs of your website. No longer will you have to worry about unwary users accidentally changing the settings and customizations to your website, or having to set it right again and again.

Interested? Take a look at the complete feature list, user guide and the pricing right here.

Happy Publishing!