How to Structure and Manage Large Courses on LearnDash

You’re uploading a lot of content on your LearnDash website in the form of courses.

That’s great!

But then, are you overwhelming students with the sheer length of your courses?

Well, it’s all about making sure your courses are correctly structured, thereby, making it easier for you to manage the content, student progress, and engagement.

Ready to dive deep? Let’s go.

3 Ways to Divide Lengthy Courses for Better Management

#1 Dividing a big course into smaller ones

Let’s consider that you have a course with several lessons. For example, a Chemistry course that covers Organic and Inorganic chemistry – the content of which, is divided between lessons. When you see the course content length increasing and spiralling out of control, you can go ahead and divide the giant course into 2 smaller courses.

While this seems like a rather straightforward strategy if you want to make sure that students complete both the courses to get a certificate, you’ll need to add one course as the prerequisite of another and then add a quiz for the second course that gives them the certificate.

Another option is to create a third course – the first two being the actual course content. The third course will be only a quiz that requires both the courses being completed as prerequisites and then the quiz containing questions from both the courses and a certificate at the end.

#2 Identifying required and supporting material

At times we overpopulate courses with content that may play a supporting role in educating the student. For example, say you’re offering a course on learning how to play the guitar. As part of the course, you also teach how to read musical notes. But there could be students who already know this and might choose to skip this lesson. What happens here is that the primary course content is about playing the guitar, and music basics or reading notes becomes secondary.

In such a scenario, instead of combining all the course content in one, you can extract content that simply offers a supporting role and create bite-sized courses out of them. These courses could be fit into other similar courses you create. They could be either added as prerequisites or could be optional courses that are recommended to students.

#3 Divide course content into batches

Controlling student progress is important when it comes to large courses. In schools and universities, this is especially important. At times, a single subject might be too large and make the course heavy. What can be done is to group elementary level content into a batch of courses and advanced content into a separate batch. Students would need to complete both these batches to move on.

All of the three scenarios mentioned above make up for a much more manageable distributed course structure. By employing any of these course setups you have:

• Easy Course Content Management –  It becomes much easier for you to chalk out the course plans, different course paths, and manage your course content in line with the course pattern you’ve decided.
  
• Consistent focus of students – Having a properly laid down plan makes it easier for your students to focus on one topic/lesson at a time instead of rushing into everything. It also helps in reducing the pressure growing in their minds.
  
• Optional lessons/topics – Offering some parts of your course as an optional lesson/topic will come across as providing extra value to your students which can be beneficial when it comes to the value proposition.
• Control over student progress – Making it mandatory to complete a batch of courses before moving on to the next one gives you more control over how your students are progressing and gives you time to evaluate and fix the gaps in your course paths.

Setting up and Managing Large Courses on LearnDash

Elaborate courses demand twice as much attention and management. Hence, having help is always good. Instructors or Subject Matter experts can ease content maintenance and help track student progress. And with the latest update to WISDM Instructor Role plugin, instructors can automatically enroll students into related courses (using WISDM Group Registration), to improve the student learning experience.

You can empower your Instructor to directly enroll their students into courses as a group thereby, reducing the students’ burden of going through the course signup process all over again.

If your Instructors are course authors who’ve created and are teaching related courses then they can enroll students directly into that course. Also, if supporting course material is extracted from the main course, it can be a common element across several courses. Instructors can enroll their students in these courses as and when needed.

Also, WISDM Instructor Role includes a professional and customizable Instructor Profile page that can be used to share all the necessary information about instructors on your site. Instructors can use this space to add details such as their photo, bio, expertise, qualification, courses created, ratings, and so on.

Profile pages give instructors credibility and help them showcase their personality. The profile page can also be used to share contact information.

Endnote,

Having a better structure for large courses will act as a helping hand to increase students’ focus and give you more control over your students’ progress. This combined with the right tools to make the learning experience seamless will give you fewer headaches and happier students.

What are your thoughts on such a structure? Is there anything you’d like to share with us? Shoot us a comment right away, and we’d be happy to discuss it.

• eLearning, LearnDash
• With tags: Group Registration for LearnDash, Instructor Role, learndash