There is a reason why LearnDash became and remains the most popular LMS in WordPress space – because it’s more feature-rich and flexible than any other LMS that’s out there.
It has got all the necessary features that make life easier for course creators, and even for those in-built features, it has also got 3rd party extensions as well that can be used to further extend the functionality of those features as per the requirements of the site owner.
The functionality of Groups and Group Registrations is also one such feature.
LearnDash Groups allow site owners to create various groups of students with a group leader in charge of managing those students. This functionality can be used to conveniently accomplish a number of tasks related to the daily operations of your e-Learning site.
In this article, we’ll take a look at 6 major benefits of LearnDash Groups, and 3 ways (both native as well as 3rd party extension based) to enable them. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started
Advantages of using Groups and Group Registration in LearnDash
There are many advantages of using LearnDash Groups and Group Registration, but for the sake of time here we’ll take a look at 6 of them only. Here they’re:
1. Easy bulk enrollment
With LearnDash Groups, it’s easy to manage bulk enrollment of students on your e-Learning site. Once a group has been created and a group leader assigned, you can allow the leader to enroll all members of the group to any of your courses with the help of group registrations functionality.
Payment can also be made for all enrollments at once. That way a large number of students can be enrolled quickly to any particular course, thus saving time while boosting your revenue at the same time.
2. Better student tracking for larger classroom sizes
LearnDash Groups can make life quite easy for you if you’re a teacher or tutor who teaches tons of students in their online school.
By creating Groups of students who belong to the same grade allows you to track their progress easily, which can be of tremendous help in planning future lessons and helping students who are having difficulties. This works perfectly especially, when you’re running large online classrooms.
3. Smoother communication
Communicating anything to your students also becomes very easy with the help of LearnDash Groups. All you need to do is to communicate your message to the Group Leader of the concerned group through a Group Email and the Group Leader can then convey it to all of the students in his/her group.
In this way, you don’t need to take the efforts of manually sending out emails to all of your students or a particular section of your students.
4. A clear chain of command
With Groups, the chain of command in your e-Learning site also remains very clear. There remains a person responsible for tracking the performance of students in every single group, so you can easily communicate with them to figure out how your course content is being consumed by the students and how they are responding to it.
If there are no group leaders, however, it can become tricky because you’ll have to personally analyze the performance and activities of every student to figure out the quality of your course content.
5. Division of responsibility
With LearnDash Groups, you also do not remain the only person responsible for everything on your e-Learning site. You can split the responsibilities of student groups among their Group Leaders who can manage the course progress as well as track the performance of every individual student.
As you can imagine, it will open up the opportunities for you to focus on more productive and important tasks related to the expansion of your e-Learning business.
6. More sales options
LearnDash Groups also open new sales opportunities before you. You can run many new types of offers by enabling Group Registration on your e-Learning site, like offering Group Discounts for larger groups, special offers for one particular group, and various other creative offers that can boost your sales.
You can also sell group memberships to organizations, which can enroll their workers to get skilled from your site. All these new opportunities can significantly boost your sales.
3 popular ways to create groups in LearnDash
We just took a look at the various benefits of LearnDash Groups. Now we’ll take a look at how these groups can be created with the help of various methods available. Let’s take a look at the 3 most popular ways and their pros as well as cons.
1. Native LearnDash Setup for Groups
First of all, we have the native Group feature included in LearnDash. It’s the simplest way to get started with LearnDash Groups because it doesn’t require you to install any 3rd party plugins and it’s also so simple that all its functions are self-explanatory. Here are some of the major group features included in LearnDash:
- Create unlimited groups with as many members as possible. Your students can also be the members of as many groups as they wish
- Group email feature – send any communication easily to the group members
- Complete control over group content, certificates, and everything else. Inbuilt functionality, so you can get started right away.
However, the simplicity of not installing any plugin comes at a cost. The features included in the native LearnDash Groups setup are not as extensive as you can get from some 3rd party plugins, as you’ll see below.
2. WISDM Group Registration Plugin
Created by WisdmLabs, WISDM Group Registration plugin allows you to create groups, assign group leaders, manage course subscriptions, and track student progress in an easy manner. The key features of this plugin are as follows:
- Automatic creation of Group Leaders. The bulk buyer is assigned the role of Group Leader automatically.
- Front-end management of groups – Group Leaders don’t need access to your backend because they can manage their groups from the front-end itself.
- Separate progress reports for every group so your group leaders can track the progress of students easily.
As far as drawbacks are concerned, there’s no major one that can make you feel bad about it. The only major drawback is that it costs $80 per year, which becomes a drawback only if you can’t afford it at the moment.
3. Uncanny Owl Group Registration Plugin
The Uncanny Owl Group Registration plugin is another powerful LearnDash extension that can be used for utilizing the power of LearnDash Groups. It allows you to do all of the stuff that’s included in the native setup of LearnDash groups, plus:
- Front-end group management similar to WISDM GR plugin
- Custom group licenses – you visitors can create a group of their choice with desired courses, and then pay for it to enroll the desired number of students
- Modify any element of your Group Management pages to provide the desired functionality to group leaders
However, the cost is also something that may deter a lot of people – its single site license for one year costs $149.
Choosing the best option
Now, you may be wondering which of the aforementioned options is best for your eLearning site. Well, both WISDM Group Registrations and Uncanny Owl Group Registration plugins can provide full-fledged functionality of groups to your LearnDash site.
But, if we had to choose one, we’d pick the WISDM Group Registration plugin since it is economical and budget-friendly.
Conclusion
By now you might have understood the power of LearnDash Groups very well. In addition to that, you also know which extension you can use to get started with this robust feature on your e-Learning site.
If you still have any questions in this regard, feel free to ask them in the comments and we’ll try our best to answer them at the earliest. And if you’ve any other thoughts in your mind about this subject, do share them as well 🙂
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