How to Create Paid Lessons or Modules on your WordPress LMS

November 21, 2018 by Shreya Reddy 1 Comment

The spurt of users over the years in favor of online learning has resulted in a relative increase in the number of learning management systems available in the market. In the WordPress domain, there are themes like eLumine, EducationWP, WPLMS and then there are plugins like LearnDash, LifterLMS, WP Courseware and Sensei that are dedicated to the concept of eLearning and are constantly innovating. With the ever-growing competition in the industry, businesses are readily investing in high-tech features ranging from the implementation of AI and VR to e-learning mobile apps and all the other latest eLearning trends. But let’s face it, it’s not always feasible to offer a certain feature or functionality in your LMS because it’s trending. However, this doesn’t have to affect the growth of your business. Your LMS may not necessarily need a complete overhaul. A couple of ingenious minor tweaks in your system could have a significant effect on your sales. One such tweak that definitely deserves to be talked about is lowering the barrier to enrollment and creating micro-learning programs by offering paid lessons or topics, instead of solely offering paid courses. Let’s discuss this in detail.

What is it?

Very often, the courses that are provided in an Online Learning Management System are extensive and have many lessons associated with them. What we’re suggesting here is that instead of having your students pay for the entire course, you could charge for certain lessons, topics or modules within the course.

Why Would You Need to Offer Paid Lessons?

Well, there are quite a few reasons:

#1 Create More Value for You and Your Customers

A user who 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 and the course taker. One loses a potential customer while the other doesn’t get access to the specific lesson in question. Bridging this gap helps you convert it into a win-win situation for both the content provider as well as the student. All you need to do is add a feature in your LMS which allows you to create paid lessons that can be sold individually while keeping the current format of selling an entire course intact.

#2 Market your Course

Have you been able to focus on marketing courses individually on your LMS? Not very practical, is it? Especially once your LMS exceeds a certain number of courses. Your website may have the best of courses and your content may be far better than what your competitors are offering, but what’s to stop your users from purchasing their course over yours? You need to showcase your offering well. A great way to market your courses is to introduce their first few lessons for free. Your course takers can check out the initial lessons and then make a more informed decision about enrolling. Now, your prospects may not always convert, but they could prove to be great influencers and reel in users who would.

#3 Monetize your Free Online Course Website

If you’re running a free online course website, and advertisements are your primary source of income, here’s a great way to add to your revenue generation. You could lay out your course content for free while you charge your users for the quizzes and certification. You can maintain your existing business model and add to your monetizing strategies.

#4 Acquire Better User Insights

It’s always good to get to know your users. The more you know about them, the better your remarketing and recommendations get. When you let your users explicitly purchase the lessons they’re interested in, you know exactly what they’re looking for. This gives you an immense opportunity in terms of recommending relevant courses to your users and consequently improves their chances of enrolling.

A Work Around

As there is no LMS plugin that offers the feature to create paid lessons at this point in 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 needlessly resulting in overhead for website administrators.

How to Create Paid Lessons for your LMS?

So, if not the workaround, how do we incorporate the paid lessons functionality into an online learning management system? Well, to enjoy this functionality at its best, your WordPress LMS needs some tinkering. We had the opportunity of customizing LearnDash and Sensei to make lessons paid. The customization mainly involved associating the lessons with products. This is how it went. Once you figure out an e-commerce platform to use, we customize the related course options to add lessons, so that you could select the specific lessons within a course and convert them into paid lessons. Your page settings page would then look somewhat like this:

Product Page in Dashboard

To create a paid lesson, you would have to:

Check the ‘Create Paid Lessons’ checkbox as shown in the above image.
Next, select a course from a list provided on the product page. The list of lessons that belong to this particular course is fetched and populated in a separate list meant for lessons.
Then, 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 you want to sell an entire course in some cases instead of individual lessons, you would have to keep the ‘Create Paid Lessons’ option unchecked and sell courses as usual.

User View on Course Page

As shown above, on the course page a purchase button would 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 then 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, he’ll be able to take the lesson that has been purchased.

So, the users of your LMS 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.

Wrapping Up

Simple customizations could take you a long way ahead in meeting the needs of your students and acquiring a wider set of audience. Offering paid lessons on your WordPress LMS might not seem like a big deal, but the advantages are multi-fold. Are you considering adding this feature to LearnDash or Sensei? What are your reasons to do so? How have you thought about going through with it? Let’s get the conversation started!

Do You Need a Mobile App for your LearnDash LMS? Yes.

October 9, 2018 by Shreya Reddy 1 Comment

Ever heard the phrase “there’s an app for that”? (There’s a ‘Guess that Phrase’ app too). This phrase – coined by Apple’s ingenious advertising agency, and used as a smart a$$ response to a problem – is true. With mobile phones becoming ubiquitous, it’s no surprise that they are the most preferred way we consume content today. While a lot of eLearning websites are doing great for themselves, having a strong mobile presence may not be a matter of choice anymore. Let me just back that statement up with a couple of Stats and Facts.

So, yes. Establishing a mobile presence is imperative. Especially if you want to get ahead of your competition and offer a stellar learning experience to your course takers. But we all know it’s not a low hanging fruit. There’s a ton of factors that come into play and a lot of concerns you probably have as a business owner. So, I’m going to go ahead and try to address a few of them for you.

Do I need an app? Won’t a mobile-friendly Website do?

Your “mobile-friendly” website could be a responsive or an adaptive one. A Responsive Website is designed to fit its content into any screen. Whether it’s a 17-inch Laptop or a 3-inch Mobile Phone, the content can self-adapt to the size of your user’s screen. Adaptive Websites, on the other hand, are built bearing in mind a few and specific screen sizes. While these mobile-friendly sites save you a great deal of time, effort and money, they may not be suitable for your eLearning Business. That’s because it’s about the purpose they serve. A responsive site works just fine if you have a website that your prospects are meant to just ‘read and go’. But when it comes to eLearning, your audience is meant to access your content on a regular basis. You want to keep them engaged and help them learn and retain your content. Since the eLearning Business genuinely warrants the need for a student-centric layout, the answer is, Yes. You need a Mobile app. You need to go from mobile-friendly to mobile-first.

Why would someone download the App when they can access the same content from my Website?

A Mobile App is convenient. It’s as simple as that. Your students don’t need to remember a website name, type it in, search for it, or log in every single time they visit. An app opens your e-learning portal in one step. It saves your users a great deal of time and effort, and who doesn’t like handiness?! According to surveys conducted by Akamai and Gomez.com, 40% users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. I mean, if page load speeds can have such a great deal of impact on bounce rates, image how much good the sheer, ‘user-friendliness’ of your App can do for you! And that’s not it! A Mobile App allows you to create a personalized experience for your students, customize your course structure and offer micro-learning content. Is it really that hard to imagine why anyone would pick a Mobile App over its Website?!

Is it the right time for me?

Honestly speaking, now’s as good a time as any. Mobile apps are one of the hottest mobile learning trends driving the market today and a lot of businesses are readily pumping money into app development. If you don’t have a good Mobile App or haven’t considered building one yet, chances are, your competition is already a few paces ahead of you. The world has gone Mobile and you can’t afford to stay behind. But it only makes sense if you take the right approach towards this. You need to figure out, what does and doesn’t work for you. Understand how your website is currently performing, what kind of traffic you’re dealing with and chart-out your key performance indicators. Once you know exactly where your LearnDash Website stands, you’ll be able to pin down the purpose of your Mobile App and understand what you expect from it. You may want your App to help you reel in more users, boost course completion rates, get ahead of your competition or you probably want to explore an untapped business opportunity. Depending on whatever it is you’re looking for, you can pick an option that suits you best. Which brings us to the next question…..

What are my options?

Before we deep-dive into what’s best for your LearnDash Website, you should probably get acquainted with the different Types Of Mobile Applications. Each of the 3 types of Apps – Web Apps, Native Apps, and Hybrid Apps – come with their own set of pros and cons. Strictly speaking about LearnDash, you can pick from these 3 possible options. You could choose: An App Builder Platform- An app builder is an online mobile development tool that lets you bypass the generic mobile app development process. You can get your app up and running within a short period of time and with minimal or no coding knowledge. The downside here is that you can’t really expect much from it. It’s going to be a pretty ordinary app with generic design elements. It’s not necessarily geared towards student-engagement, you can barely customize it and there’s probably a hundred other apps out there that’ll look like yours. A Custom Solution– You can have your app built to suit your specific business requirements. A well-designed custom app can offer an unbeatable user-experience and get you the kind of results you’re looking for. But then again, like all custom software, an app like this comes with a hefty price tag. It’ll easily be a couple of months before your app sees the light of day, and that is if you hire the right and experienced technical partner. A Midway Option– A hybrid app that covers the best of both worlds. Both of the above options are on the extreme ends of the spectrum. So, we’ve come up with something in-between – A one-of-kind Mobile app for LearnDash, that completely redefines traditional layouts with it’s clean, unique and modern design. You don’t have to worry about getting your hands dirty with the ideation, wireframing, interface designing and user-experience analysis. Each element of this app is thoughtfully crafted to help you offer an unparalleled learning experience to your users. And to top it all, it’s extremely customization friendly! Whether it’s customizing your logo and splash screen or adding a custom functionality that is specific to your business, this app can deliver. The best part is, your app will be ready a lot quicker than a traditional custom application and is cost effective too! If you think this App’s the one for you, you can get to know it better.

Will I be able to afford it?

Costs for developing a custom mobile application may range anywhere between $10,000 and $200,000. Also, you can’t overlook the recurring post development expenses – for maintenance and updates. Good mobile apps are expensive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t afford one. You may not have thousands of dollars to shell out on an app just yet, and that’s perfectly alright. You have quite a few options to choose from. And besides, you don’t have to begin with an extravagant tailor-made application with an expectation to hit it big right from Day 1. A more sensible approach would be to look for a scalable solution. A solution that helps you effectively explore the mobile market, let’s you figure out what works for you and then allows you to scale accordingly if need be. It’s difficult to slap a price on online development tools, but most of them may cost you about $500 to $2000 to start with, and there’s an added monthly or yearly charge for maintenance. Some of them charge on a ‘per-user’ basis. However, such apps aren’t always future-ready. And by future-ready I mean, your app may require certain changes due to new features introduced in the Mobile OS, you may have to accommodate more and more users as your business grows or you might want to get your UI/UX improved as per the latest trends. We strongly recommend thorough research before you pick a solution just because it seems more ‘pocket-friendly’.

What about support for my App?

No matter what kind of an app you choose to work with, you’re bound to invest in support. Support usually includes – maintaining control over the app’s day-to-day functions, operational level support, security patches, improvement in the application interfaces or upgrades to support upcoming OS and device releases. Generally, a technical partner that builds the app for you, supports it as well. They usually charge a recurring fee. If your initial development cost is about $40,000, you can easily expect the maintenance costs to range anywhere between $6000 and $10,000. Another option you have is to hire an agency that specializes in Mobile Application Maintenance and Support.

Wrapping Up

Having your LearnDash App developed is a significant milestone and a decision that can be game-changing for you. Your Mobile App can significantly boost student engagement and allow your users to learn on the go. With the increasing adoption of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Policy, a lot of businesses and corporate training companies are investing in mobile technology. The best way to make your investment worth it would be to figure out the purpose of your app, the functionality you want to see in it, and then pick the best option that fits your budget. As I’ve mentioned earlier, there are a lot of cost-effective options out there for you to pick from, and they can perform just fine. I hope this article helps you make an informed decision about going mobile. And if you’re still unsure about it, you could always get in touch!

The Be-all and End-all Guide to Creating a Supreme LearnDash LMS

September 12, 2018 by Harsh Shah 1 Comment

“What’s next?” In any business (or life – but that’s a discussion for another day) there’s always a time when you stop and wonder about your next steps. All’s going well, you’ve got your e-learning website setup on LearnDash, you’ve created your courses and uploaded them, you’re waiting for students to sign up – what’s next? Marketing? Ah yes, marketing! You read guides, start blogging, start posting on social media, you’re getting some traffic. But, are you doing all you can do? Is your LearnDash website all it can be? How can you take your LearnDash website to the next level? No! Scratch that! Not the “next” level, but the absolute-most-supreme level? You’ve got to work towards it one step at a time, and this guide will tell you how. Whether it’s:

Increasing course sign-ups – getting more traffic on the site, increasing conversions
Increasing student engagement – increasing interaction, making courses fun, driving conversations
Improving your courses – by analysing data and student feedback
Simplifying site management – reducing administrative tasks
Optimizing your website – by improving the performance

… or, all of the above, this guide has all the answers.

We’ve got the research done, so that you don’t have to!We’ve been working with LearnDash over a while now – a little more than a while to be honest. In fact, building e-learning solutions is an area of our expertise with a focus on LearnDash. We have a suite of LearnDash extensions and a comprehensive get-started LearnDash Extensions Bundle to our name and have been credited as LearnDash experts. This guide stems from the extensive research we’ve done over the years, along with feedback from the LearnDash community that we’re proud to be a part of. We’re trying to solve problems LearnDash-ers like you have with one go-to reference guide. We’re sure you’re going to learn something new here that’ll add to your business success.

Ready to begin? At any point if you think the content gets too exhaustive to handle, we’ve got a PDF version you can download. As a bonus, the PDF version includes a cheat-sheet version containing a list of plugins you need.

Let’s get started!

#1 How to Increase Course Sign-ups on LearnDash

Getting traffic on your site is essential to the success of any online business. You want potential customers to find and reach you. But it doesn’t stop there does it? You want them to buy into whatever you are selling or offering. In this case, it’s your courses. You want potential students to come on the site and enroll to your courses. You need to start by being discoverable. If you’ve heard of the conversion funnel, you’ll know that enrollments are a percentage of the traffic that comes to your site, which means, more the traffic, more the chances of enrollment.

Making it Easy for Potential Students to Find You

As silly as this may sound, not many business owners are aware of how tough it is for potential audience to reach you. Having a website, a social media page, or even an app, are not enough. You’ll want students to be able to easily discover this website through search engines (namely Google), or through e-learning directories, or through web-ads, social media participation, and the like.

Ranking for search terms using Search Engine optimization

Given that Google accounts for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic, it’s important that your website ranks well when someone searches for a related term. For example, let’s say you offer a “The Ultimate Guide to Movie Creation” course. You need to make sure that when a potential student searches for “online movie creation course” or “study movie creation” or related terms, your course is the #1 search result or at least on the first page of search results.

It’s not easy, but there are a few basics you need to take care of:

-Use an SEO Plugin

Start by using an SEO (search engine optimization) plugin, namely Yoast SEO– what this does, is help you figure out how to improve your content to better target search rankings. Once you install and activate the plugin on your LearnDash site, make sure you fill in SEO titles and meta descriptions for all your courses, along with a focus keyword (a short term summarizing the course). The SEO plugin will do its job by telling you areas to improve upon, like adding proper headings and subheadings (better structure for your course), if the sentences are too complicated, if the content matches the focus keyword, and so on. To rank high in search results, you’ll also have to make sure you create the best darn course ever! You see, Google uses an algorithm to match a person looking for a particular term, with content that’ll benefit him/her the most – if you’re course is in fact the “ultimate guide to movie creation”, Google will find you and list you when someone’s looking for the course. Yoast’s plugin helps you check all the boxes during the optimization process.

-Maintain a Blog

Invest in creating and maintaining a blog. You’re on WordPress, which is great, you’ve got the platform advantage. You do not need an extra plugin. Your articles will help you drive in the audience. Talk about things related to your course, the benefits of your course, or related courses students can take up. The more related content you add on the site, the better it will be to help reach your audience. Google also favors websites which are fast and mobile-ready, so take a look at the website optimization section of this guide, if you want to truly go all out. SEO is not something you can learn overnight, but every small change matters. Yoast has got some great SEO tips on their blog, be sure to check them out. A Pro Tip from us, is that it always helps to make your content as specific as possible. So if your course is specific to “stop-motion animation”, it helps to use this keyword in the course’s title and meta description.

Gain followers by creating a brand for yourself

In today’s day and age, you’re lost if you do not have a distinct brand. Just like that distinct 3D plane “U”, the blue color, has Udacity written all over it; similarly, you need a style – not only colors, but voice, images – that can help you build your own brand. Your marketing channels, social profiles should use the same branding.

-Creating a Seamless Experience

Now, as you know LearnDash layouts stick out on certain themes and break the branding experience. You need a theme like eLumine or Social Learner that allows you sufficient customization control (options to upload your own logo, change the site colors), and offer a seamless interaction experience by blending in LearnDash layouts.

-Custom layouts with Page Builders

If you want complete customization control, you might want to check out page builders like Divi or Elementor or Thrive architect. What page builders do is give you the flexibility to create your own layout for your courses or lessons without the need of a developer. -Page Builder Features:-

Divi	Packaged along with an elementary theme Supports both frontend and backend editing of pages Drag and drop interface Includes pre-built layouts Supports custom CSS
Elementor	Library of ready-to-go page templates Offers mobile, tablet preview when editing pages Supports custom CSS Compatible with multilingual plugins WPML and Polylang Front-end visual editor
Thrive Architect	Works with all WordPress themes Better selection of elements Full page templates and sections Improved user interface for easier content editing

Make sure the page builder works well with your LearnDash theme of choice. eLumine offers its own page builder. Social media marketing like running and maintaining a Facebook page, participating in relevant Facebook groups, putting up videos on YouTube, participating on Quora, commenting on forums, can increase brand awareness.

Drive traffic through Partners and Affiliates

Getting listed on e-learning directories or partnering with other websites can help you drive traffic to your website. For example, guest posting (posting a relevant article on some other popular website with an author link to your site) can make people aware of you and your courses. Start by finding websites in your domain. You could also feature a course on a fellow e-educator’s website or upload a course on a learning marketplace.

-Paid Advertising

If you’ve got the budget go for paid advertising. Google ads are popular but you need in depth keyword research to get desired results. Consider running ads on Facebook. Facebook campaigns can help you target the relevant audience while being easy on the pocket.

-Affiliate Marketing

You can sign up industry bloggers as affiliates too. An affiliate helps promote your brand on your behalf and earns a commission on every sale. Striking a partnership with influencers in your domain (I’m talking about the domain of the course), can be beneficial even if you have to pay a partnership fee.

Increasing Course Enrollment Rate

This one’s kind of tricky. You’ve got traffic but how do you convert it to enrollments. If your course is the best course out there or is the only one-of-its-kind, has great feedback from past students, good rating, you’ve nothing to worry about. But chances are, you have competition. So, to stand out, here are some tactics you can use.

Getting rid of enrollment-barriers

It might be surprising to note that course authors take course details and description way too lightly. Having solid course content is not enough. Presentation is important too. Anything that makes the course look shoddy, or incomplete is an enrollment-barrier. For example, courses are virtual, and most course authors skip adding an image. But having an image (preferably of a student, or a relevant illustration) can help make the course seem professional, can help connect with the student and influence conversion. “If I’d have to pick one single thing that would sell a product online, it’s images.” – Peep Laja, ConversionXL You need to also add a detailed course description – what is the course about, what will the student achieve upon completing the course, how can the course benefit students, next paths, and so on. A sample lesson or sneak-preview of course content can give students a glimpse of the course and get them hooked. Consider adding more courses related to popular or best-selling courses or courses by guest authors or instructors. This increases the number of courses on offer and can increase sign-ups. You could also add a course inquiry form or a live chat option to answer pre-enrollment questions. The fewer the barriers the better the enrollment rate.

Playing with the Price Point

The price of a course plays an important role and can be the deciding factor in the purchase process. There is no rule to pricing except that you have to keep on testing different price points to decide which can get you the most conversions. Offering a free course helps too. A free but good course can help students understand the course quality and can encourage them to sign up for a paid course. For high-priced courses, you can offer added services like personal tutoring, webinars, to increase the course’s perceived value. Remember, a low price is not always the best price, you might be undervaluing the benefit of your course. It’s what the course is all about, how it will impact students, what else are you offering with the course (downloadable course material, one-on-one training) that should be the deciding factors when pricing your course.

Simplifying the enrollment process

A complicated enrollment process, one that has too many pages before checkout, or too many fields to be filled, can lead to drop-offs and purchase abandonment. You need to remove any possible hurdles like hidden charges or taxes that can reduce the chances of enrollment. To make things simpler, cater to the type of buyers you may have. For example, say you have parents, teachers or managers who want to sign up multiple students at once. Here’s where a group enrollment functionality can come in handy. With group enrollment, buyers does not have to purchase the course for each students individually. Instead, they can purchase the course for all students at once – they have to fill in their billing details only once – and can register all the students at their will.

Different Payment Options

Purchase options matter too. Although LearnDash offers payment gateways (with Stripe and 2CO being popular options), you might want to use a payment platform like WooCommerce or EDD to sell your courses. The reasons being that these platforms help you offer several payment options to customers based on region and currency. A payment platform makes it easy to integrate additional payment gateways and also offer other e-commerce features like coupons, bundles, sales, and more. If you’re looking to sell memberships instead of courses, you might want to look at Paid Membership Pro or Memberpress.

A side note:- Taking the paid courses or paid memberships route There’s often a debate on which is better and which students see more value in. The short answer is: it depends. The long answer is: it depends on the kind of courses you offer. If your courses are independent of each other, you want to consider selling per course, if your courses can be grouped together you can consider selling membership levels. For example, if you offer courses by multiple instructors, courses which are not related to each other – one on movie making, one on dancing – pricing each course is the logical approach. But say you sell multiple courses specific to a particular semester, you’d want to consider selling memberships. Each membership level can be linked to courses belonging to a particular semester.

Playing on Buyer Psychology

There are certain trust factors buyers watch out for when purchasing a course. For example, a positive feature image for the course, like that of a smiling student, has emotional appeal. A popular tactic is student reviews. Adding course ratings and reviews can convince students to opt for your course. I’m not saying the reviews will be positive always, giving student the options to post their feedback can be a double edged sword. However, the pros outweigh the cons. The good reviews boost sign-ups and the not-go-good reviews can give you some needed feedback about a student’s experience. Although LearnDash doesn’t allow reviews, the plugin for the job is Ratings, Reviews and Feedback. The plugin includes a reply option too, making it a two-way communication system.

Adding student testimonials or success stories are a great option too. Testimonials are reviews you ask for and add them to your site. You could ask students specific questions about feedback of the instructor, course support, and so on. You could also cover student stories in detail on your blog.

Running Limited Time Sales or Discounts

There’s no greater factor to convincing buyers to make a purchase like “urgency”. Time-bound sales or having limited seats for a particular course can play on a student’s mind and increase the chance of sign up. The WooCommerce Scheduler can be used in this case. If selling with Easy Digital Downloads or LearnDash itself, you’d have to control this manually. Selling courses as bundles or discounting prices on membership can help too. For example, if you’re selling courses using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, you can link a product to multiple courses and set a discounted price (less than the total price of the courses individually).

#2 How to Increase Student Engagement

This is a problem most edupreneurs are bugged with. You can see sign ups but most students don’t follow through the course or don’t end up enrolling for the next course level. The reason? Students continue to be distracted and disengaged. How do you tackle this? Well, student engagement is a problem educational institutions are battling. It’s not specific to online learning but conventional schools are reporting a problem too. In online learning, given that self motivation is an important factor that drives the learning process, you need to implement every possible tactic to keep students focused and engaged.

Making learning Fun with Gamification

A tried and tested strategy – gamification – appeals to all the brain’s pleasure centers and can optimize the learning process. With gamification you could have:

A points system:- each student earns x points on course completion or on completion of certain steps (such as the first lesson, or a quiz, or on scoring more than 50% in a quiz… and so on)
A leaderboard:- the total points each student earns are listed on a board arranged in the descending order of score (the more the points, the higher the rank)
Badges:- You could award students badges on certain activities – such as 5 courses completed, top ranked student, 10 quizzes completed, etc.

Gamification induces the spirit of competition in the learning process and uses the group’s performance as a whole to motivate individual students. LearnDash does include gamification capabilities such as a points system, badges, and certifications, but plugins like BadgeOS can also be used for extended functionality. Games can be a part of gamification too, you’ve got the Wisdm Games plugin to support you here. In all of this, do make sure your theme backs you up and seamlessly blends well with the plugins you use. For example, eLumine blends in LearnDash and its gamification features, if you were building pages yourself, make sure you take care that your changes do not break the layouts.

Create a Social Learning Environment

Online training can be an isolated learning experience for a student. While students can learn at their own pace, group discussions and collaboration can enhance the learning process. Groups offer a support system for students, they help improve a student’s communication and participation skills. Shared workspaces, forums, or a social network can be used to add group dynamics to the mix, While LearnDash does offer the option to create groups, using a plugin like BuddyPress that can create a sort-of Facebook like network can give groups an extra layer of collaboration. Discussion forums or student-teacher forums can be added using bbPress. Forums can be a great source of student feedback too, and can help you improve the course content. If you want to give students a full-blown social learning experience, consider a theme like Social Learner. While a theme like eLumine works well, Social Learner has a group, collaboration focused layout.

Create a Classroom like Experience

This is an extension to the social learning experience, but specifically when it comes to the student-teacher bond. You see, the advantage classroom learning has is the immediate accessibility to the teacher. Yes, online training can offer the same, but you would have to depend on the student to take the first step. You need to make it easy for students to communicate with teachers or fellow students or vice-versa. One-on-one sessions or live webinars, can play a role here. Other classroom like experiences include adding a note-taking functionality using LearnDash Notes, introducing an attendance system, adding course/lesson completion timers, etc.

Make learning a Two-way process

Online learning is one-dimensional. Course content is fed to students and students consume it – boring! But who’s ever said it has to be that way. Let’s flip that wheel and add a new dimension to the mix. I’m talking about interactive content. With traditional content provisioning methods, you have students spending hours reading text or watching videos. Now, imagine if students could interact with the content, could engage with it. It’s a motivational boost that could benefit students. Popular e-learning websites offer interactive content and with a plugin like H5P, you can easily add this functionality to your LearnDash content mix.

Making Learning Accessible

In today’s day and age, where nearly every student owns a smartphone, a mobile app can making learning accessible, can engage students and can be the difference between you and your competition. A mobile app means students can learn anytime and from anywhere at their convenience. It also means that students can complete the course sooner and be less resistant to the enrollment process. While mobile apps are an investment, a LearnDash student-centric app, WisdmApp makes the app affordable to an average LearnDash admin. What’s even better is that the app is specifically designed to increase student engagement with an appealing user-interface.

#3 How to Simplify Website Management

Administrative tasks such as creating courses, managing students, taking care of accounts, take up the most of your time. And while they are important, the effort involved is a LOT. Being able to shed-off some of these duties or by automating certain processes, you can focus on fewer tasks at a time.

Getting Instructors on Board to Create Content

Courses are central to your e-learning website. The content is what drives students to sign up and boosts your revenue. But let’s face it, creating and maintaining course content is not as easy. With e-learning websites popping up in every niche, it’s difficult to make sure your courses are better than similar ones out there. Supporting student queries for a related course or checking their assignments can also take up a lot of time. What’s also important is to consistently create new content, so that students can keep on coming back to your site. One option that can help is getting trusted and competent fellow instructors on board. With multiple instructors or guest course authors, you can offload course creation and management responsibilities. Instructors can help you add a diverse offering to students and can add to your revenue stream. Although LearnDash is built to be a single-instructor LMS, the Instructor Role plugin or the Front-end Course Creation plugin (which blocks backed access to course authors) can be used to transform your LMS into a multi-instructor website.

Maintaining the content Yourself

If you’re keen on maintaining the course content yourself, a tip we recommend is to use a “content refresher reminder” functionality to help you revisit each course and modify the content to keep it up to date. Also, with multiple instructors, you have the option to post content only on review, and we recommend, you use that. A plugin like LearnDash Gradebook can be used to simplify student progress tracking. The plugin offers a centralised dashboard on which you can check student reports and grades.

Setting up Automatic Backups and Updates

Apart from course content maintenance, website maintenance is a mammoth task. Your website contains all your data, and protecting that data is of prime importance. Backups are a must. A backup plugin, such as BackWPup, has the option to set up automatic backups. I would recommend automatic updates too for popular WordPress plugins like Contact Form 7, or Yoast or plugins by Automattic. However, it’s best practice to have automatic updates running when you have a site backup in place.

Opting for a Website Maintenance Service

If you want to operate stress-free and can afford to spend that extra $, I’d recommend hiring a professional to maintain your LearnDash website. You’d be surprised to know that website maintenance services are pretty affordable, and are certainly worth the investment. Maintenance services take care of plugin, theme and WordPress updates, backups, website optimization, security and down-time monitoring, and more. It saves you maintenance headaches along with your time!

Using Tools and Strategies to Market Your Courses

Ideally you need a dedicated resource to market your courses. Whether it’s on social media, or through email, you have to constantly engage with current and potential students to get results. If you’re the only one taking care of marketing too, tools can help you quite a bit. For example, using an email marketing plugin like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign can make it easy for you to categorize students into different lists based on their courses and to personalize your marketing strategies. A CRM plugin like Infusionsoft can be used to fine-tune a user’s experience when it comes to accepting payments or building email campaigns. Buffer is a great 3rd-party tool to help you schedule Facebook, Twitter posts.

7 Simple marketing Strategies for every Edupreneur

automatically posting updates on your social profiles when a blog is published,
sharing each course or positive student feedback on your social profiles,
asking students to share the course on their social profiles for a purchase-discount,
reposting blog content on Medium,
scheduling sales through plugins like WooCommerce,
bundling and selling courses for a reduced price,
drip-feeding emails on course purchase (informing a student about other related courses or premium one-on-one sessions)

#4 How to Optimize Your LearnDash Website

If you’re serious about driving traffic to your e-learning website and improving user experience, you’ll have to work on optimizing your LearnDash website. That’s because Google penalizes websites that are either too slow or not mobile optimized, which means, the chances of your website ranking high in search results is reduced; which in turn means, it’ll be difficult for students to reach you. Not good! A slow website can affect your courses purchases too. Stats say that cart abandonment rate increases by 75% and loyalty reduces by 50% on a slow website. You need your LearnDash website lean and fast. Your website’s page speed can be tested using tools such as Google Page Speed Insights or Pingdom. You want to work on the feedback these tools give you, or talk to a developer to help you put. The causes of slow speed can be many – poor hosting, heavy pages due to heavy media content (large images, videos), poorly coded plugins, a not-so-optimized database, etc. Let’s take a look at few.

Picking the Right Hosting

More often than not, hosting is the cause for poor performance. When you’re starting out you’re strapped for cash, and a low cost hosting plan seems tempting. It works because you don’t have a heavy flow of students from Day 1. But what happens as your website grows, when you have a lot of content and multiple students performing several actions at the same time? Your website turns slow and sluggish. God forbid it crashes. A good hosting solution is a must. When picking the right hosting, you should be aware of certain specs or at least ask about them:

Server Specs, Memory, And Storage: You might have to do a bit of reading (or question-asking) to get to the bottom of this one. What kind of machines does the hosting company use? Are they top-of-the-line, out-of-the-box new machines, or are they cobbled together from what might be spare parts and rusty wires? If the hosting company doesn’t say what kind of servers they use, you’ll want to ask, since hardware can affect the performance of both their servers and your site. Now, WordPress or LearnDash does not have a high-demand on specs, so if the hosting provider offers WordPress hosting, you should be in the good.
Hardware Ownership: You may have heard about hosting companies offering ‘dedicated’ servers. What they mean is the hosting providers will offer dedicated servers which will be owned by the host. This is a highly secure form of hosting.

But, there is also Co-location based hosting. In Co-location services, the server hardware is owned by the companies who have their websites and other data placed onto the servers. The companies have the flexibility to manage, secure and take care of maintenance of their own servers. With dedicated server hosting, you get complete access to the server except that you are not the owner of the hardware. Whereas, in Co-location Hosting, the hardware is owned by you, therefore you need to bear initial set-up cost. In addition to that there is an additional charge for housing the hardware in the datacenter of the web hosting provider. If you are starting out, we recommend dedicated hosting. But if you are a WordPress veteran, you can go for co-location hosting.

Disaster Readiness And Recovery: Web hosts will state they are available 24/7, but this isn’t always the case. The worst thing is to have a website that is down on a Friday night and not get a response until Monday morning. That can mean two full days of lost traffic to your site. Find out if the support is actually there for you round the clock by asking exact questions.
Infrastructure Design: As your website grows, you may need to increase the size of your hosting package to meet bandwidth demands or to add more space. Your infrastructure design will vary greatly based on your website’s requirements. You will have to consider traffic, response time and additional services and applications which can help scaling your site. All of these considerations need to be taken into account when designing, building, and maintaining a multi-server hosting environment. Your infrastructure plan doesn’t need to be set in stone, but it should be clear and forward-thinking enough to be used as your infrastructure grows and changes during the lifetime of your site.
System Security: You only need to understand basic security terms, such as SSL and Firewalls to make sure they have some protections in place. However, you should also inquire about the backend of your site. Will other people hosted on your server have access to your files at any point? How will the web host ensure they do not?
Backups: Look for a web host that backs up the site at least once a day. Also inquire about where backups are stored and whether you can access them through your cPanel. Make sure you have an easy recovery option in case of an unfortunate incident.

Once you get answers to all these questions, you could choose any of the 3 trusted hosting providers from the list below:

SiteGround: The most popular and widely used hosting provider, SiteGround is really fast, considering its cost effective plans. If you are just starting out, then you cannot go wrong with SiteGround. They have three main plans for their shared hosting and the top-tier plan will only set you back $12 a month.
LiquidWeb: As a top-tier option you can expect top-tier service with LiquidWeb. One great feature they have is that their platform will update your plugins automatically. If it detects an issue on your site then that plugin be automatically rolled-back to the previous stable version. Say goodbye to plugins breaking on updates!
WPEngine: Arguably one of the more popular names in regards to WordPress specific hosting, WPEngine is a fantastic option for your LearnDash powered program. Where they excel is in their support which is critical when it comes to hosting platforms. If something is wrong with your site then you just need to hop onto chat.

Picking the Right Theme and Extensions

Now, apart from hosting the extensions that you use have an effect on the speed of the website. A badly coded plugin that isn’t optimized can slow down operations. When choosing a LearnDash extension make sure you checkout the reviews for any indication on poor performance. If there’s a demo site available try it out. But usually plugin/theme owners optimize the demo site and it’s rarely an indication of the plugin/theme’s performance. You LearnDash theme which is central to the user experience has to be picked wisely too. From the many themes available a few that we recommend are:- eLumine– A LearnDash specific theme which is popular due to its focus on ease of creating courses. You can use styled LearnDash modules to add your courses, take advantage of the custom quiz layout to test your students, and integrate your network with various social media via leaderboards. The theme is also compatible with WooCommerce, BuddyPress and bbPress for even more advanced features. Social Learner– If you are looking for an elearning site that is rich in its social capabilities, then Social Learner is the theme for you. It has a great interface. It integrates flawlessly with LearnDash and all its add-ons. It also has an extensive Admin Panel to control all activities of your e-learning ecosystem. True to its name, Social Learner adds a social touch to your website, making it interactive and easily shareable for your learners. This has the added advantage of automatically increasing your social network, thereby improving your market reach to the target audience. Academy Pro– A theme that puts the buyer in focus is Academy Pro. Academy Pro is a WooCommerce theme that’s compatible with LearnDash. It provides an engaging shopping experience and has various features to build your online training business. Academy Pro offers a simple and clean design, has a custom pricing page (in case of membership prices), and has fast-loading capabilities for quick navigation. It’s the quintessential store-centric theme.

Optimizing Course Content and Media Files

Media files (images, videos, presentations) are heavy in size. If media files are central to your course content, you need to make sure they are optimized for faster loading. For example, running a test on Pingdom will tell you the size of your webpage. Ideally, your page should be less than 1MB. This means, your images/media files should be in KBs. Not always possible when you’re talking about video content. The solution in this case, is to use video hosting services (Youtube, Vimeo) or a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN acts as a cache to optimize content loading. As far as caching plugins are concerned the ones we recommend are:-

W3 Total Cache : One of the most popular caching plugins W3 Total Cache offers a range of features and is recommended by several hosting providers. It supports caching for pages, posts, feeds, search results; it’s compatible with shared hosting, virtual private/dedicated servers and clusters; it offers support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
WP Super Cache : From the creators of WordPress itself, WP Super Cache is a formidable caching plugin. It offers 3-methods to serve cached files based on the settings you choose. It integrates with your CDN and supports cache rebuild on-demand.

To optimize images you can use an image optimization plugin like EWWW Image Optimizer or a service like Kraken.io.

Mobile Optimization

Given that Google wants you to optimize your website for the mobile viewer (and it’s good for you too since nearly 60% of search happens from a mobile device), it’s important to make sure your LearnDash website is ready for this mobile viewer. This not only means having a responsive theme- every possible theme is responsive in today’s day and age – but also considering building Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Accelerate Mobile Pages strip down styling to deliver pure content to the viewer and reduced page-download time. Your caching plugin, or a AMP specific plugin can help you here. Does mobile optimization mean owning an app? Not exactly. But if you do own a LearnDash app, make sure it’s lightweight and easy to interact with.

Optimizing the Content

Well, a final PRO tip here – optimizing the website also means optimizing the content. Your courses, however good they are, can be better – and it’s analysis, research and student feedback that can make them better. Setting up a reviews and ratings option, or a feedback forum, can help you collect reviews from your students. You working continuously to update the content can make a difference. Make sure stats are up-to-date, any changes in regulation are added, your high-traffic blog posts are updated, non-performing content is either fixed or removed, and so on. Be sure to be always testing traffic and the effect of any changes on Google Analytics. A positive change should be an increase in sales, page sessions and a decrease in bounce rate (not as easy, we know, but something you to invest time into). An ideal waiting time to see any results, is 3 months. Google Analytics lets you run AB tests too. You could consider getting in an SEO and analytics specialist to help you out in these aspects.

Wrapping Up

A Supreme LearnDash site is void of shortcomings, but getting there is a continuous process. You’ve got to take things one step at a time – if you’re starting out, focus on getting in the traffic – if you have more than a handful of courses, take measures to simplify the management process. You have to keep researching, keep analysing, and keep making improvements to move ahead. It’s all there for the taking, it’s your turn to take center-stage, and we’re always there to help you out. Happy “LearnDashing” your way to success! Get the “Cheat-Sheet” version of this Guide sent to your Inbox with Bonus Tips and Tricks!

10 Powerful LearnDash Themes to Upgrade Your LMS in 2019

January 30, 2018 by Harsh Shah 1 Comment

LearnDash has established itself as one of the most widely used WordPress LMS (Learning Management System) plugins, making it a popular choice amongst colleges, schools, businesses or any institution which requires an online educational portal. Choosing LearnDash is an easy decision to make. However, you aren’t just done yet. The difficult choice is to pick a theme that best suits your requirements; given the fact that there is a wide range of themes available and most of them are pretty cool! Well, worry not! We have compiled a list of 10 Best LearnDash Themes to help you nail down the perfect theme for your LMS in 2019! Coming up in 3…..2…..1!

1. eLumine

eLumine is the most promising LMS theme for WordPress built with contemporary layouts. It is a learner-centric theme, that is to say, its layouts are specifically designed to assist the learning process. Its elegant design can be easily customized, making this theme admin friendly too. Primarily designed for LearnDash, it provides custom layouts for LearnDash course, quiz, and archive pages. eLumine seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce and social networking plugins like BuddyPress and bbPress to adequately support peripheral requirements. Lastly, the theme provides various other benefits like a drag & drop page builder, support for Font Awesome icons and more, to help you completely revamp your course content.

Highlighted Features:

Drag & drop visual page builder
Readability focused layouts with dynamic sidebars
Multiple color schemes
Custom LearnDash and WooCommerce templates
Extensive LearnDash quiz module customization
Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms support

Pricing:

eLumine is the latest theme developed by us at WisdmLabs and is priced at $99 for a single site license.

2. Social Learner

Social Learner is a classy theme created explicitly for LearnDash. As the name suggests, it helps you build a learning system infused with a social network on your website. This gives Social Learner the advantage of being a collaboration-friendly theme, making course material easily shareable by students and peers. Social Learner provides a profile-first look making the user-interface unique. Built by a team that specializes in BuddyPress, there are no points for guessing this theme is completely integrated with the plugin.

Highlighted Features:

Support for groups and collaboration based learning
Memberships and membership levels customization
Integration with WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro
Consolidation with over 25 social websites
Fully integrated with all BuddyPress plugins

Pricing:

Social Learner is developed and maintained by BuddyBoss and costs $179 per site with support and updates for a year.

3. Divi

Divi is a multipurpose theme that’s recently released a LearnDash compatibility package. Divi comes packaged with a real-time editor and multiple content elements to help you build just about anything with ease. Divi is highly customizable allowing you granular control without having the need to code.

Highlighted Features:

Real-time and responsive editing
40+ content elements
20+ pre-built layout templates
Access to library of Elegant Theme plugins

Pricing:

Divi is built by Elegant Themes which sells all their themes and plugins for an $89 yearly license.

4. University

A theme whose purpose is quite evident from its name – University. University is an LMS in itself but provides complete LearnDash support. The differentiating factor is the support for events. University allows event creation and management, the sale of event tickets and sports a cool event calendar along with providing comprehensive course management tools.

Highlighted Features:

5 homepage variations
Facebook + Disqus comments integrated
Unlimited colors and layout
Multi-column Menu Dropdown
Visual composer included
Event management ready

Pricing:

Built by CactusThemes, University is priced at $59.

5. Fernando

Fernando is a child theme that is based on Genesis and hence has become a favorite for Genesis theme aficionados. Fernando has multiple options to promote online talks, speaker programs, and subscription lists, proving to be an effective marketing platform. When it comes to the price point, however, being a Genesis child theme, Fernando does turn out to be a slightly more expensive buy.

Highlighted Features:

iThemes Exchange Online Store
TubePress support
Related posts
Email list builder
Call to action options

Pricing:

Fernando sells at $79.95 for a single site annual license (price of Genesis framework not included)

6. Invent

Invent is a LearnDash theme that offers massive functionality to support schools, colleges, universities or communities! It has over 35+ page building elements and shortcodes which help you build and customize your LMS content easily. Invent is quite a simple theme and perfect if you are looking for a theme with minimal functionality to support your underlying content.

Highlighted features:

60+ shortcodes with premium shortcode builder
8+ Custom Post Types
Portfolio and gallery support
Retina ready icons and Google fonts included

Pricing:

Invent is available for purchase on ThemeForest for $59

7. Education Centre

The Education Centre is one of the most vibrant and colorful WordPress themes for LearnDash. Built on the ThemeRex framework, it provides a custom theme options panel, a shortcode builder, a visual page builder, and integrates an option for reviews and rating. The numerous color settings outnumber settings provided by any other theme. If the user-interface is your primary mode of attracting and converting your students, this is a good option for you.

Highlighted Features:

Multiple layouts and header styles
Shortcode builder
Inbuilt ratings\review mechanism
Custom widgets and shortcodes included

Pricing:

Education Center is priced at $59 for a single site license.

8. LearnPlus

LearnPlus is a LearnDash theme which provides a comprehensive list of features right from 10 different homepage styles to mega menu support. It is getting increasingly popular owing to its cool features like slider revolutions, one-click import, and WooCommerce plugin readiness, and many more. LearnPlus also allows for event management with support for the Events Calendar plugin.

Highlighted Features:

Drag & drop page builder
Icon font and Google font support
Unlimited color schemes
Powerful theme options panel

Pricing:

Priced at $59 for a single site, this theme is available for purchase on ThemeForest.

9. Lincoln

Lincoln is an LMS theme in itself with support for LearnDash. Apart from supporting all LearnDash and e-learning related features, it comes with completely customizable PSD templates and support for events management. The highlight of this theme is the boxed version that sets itself apart from other themes.

Highlighted Features:

Dedicated boxed version Boxed Demo
Fully compatible with BuddyPress and bbPress
7 Homepage variations

Pricing:

Lincoln is priced at $59 for a single site license and is available for purchase on ThemeForest.

10. Education

Education is a theme built specifically for LearnDash. Along with supporting WooCommerce, it provides support for teacher profiles, events and service management. The theme provides an advanced course search functionality unlike any other. Highlighted Features:

Powerful course searching
Course review option
Max Mega menu and SiteOrigin page builder included
Testimonial slider included

Pricing: Education is priced at $59 for a single site license.

Confused?

Picking the right theme out of the many listed above can still be a challenge. But take it one step at a time. List down all your primary set of requirements and compare them against the list of features provided by the theme. For example, if contemporary, exclusive layouts are of prime importance – go for eLumine; if social learning is central to your system – go for Social Learner; if a lightweight theme is what you need – go for Invent… you get the idea. And what if none of the themes fit your requirements? You always have the option to contact us to build you a custom theme or modify one to suit your needs! 🙂 Did this list help you figure out which new theme you will be adopting in 2019? Do leave us a comment in the section below!

7 Must-Have Qualities of an LMS to Consider for Your Company

January 8, 2018 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Erika Taylor. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

Thomas J. Watson, who served as IBM’s chairman and CEO and oversaw the company’s growth as an international behemoth from 1914 to 1954, was the source for this gem on employee development: “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied. I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?” Fortunately, companies don’t need to lose more than half a million dollars just so a hired hand will learn a literally valuable lesson. With proper training, employees should be able to become more efficient than ever and further develop their skills, knowledge, and, ultimately their careers. Of course, training people will still need budget allocation, but done right, it is money well spent. After all, a company is only as good as its employees. Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corporation, put this fact succinctly when he said, “No matter how good or successful you are or how clever or crafty, your business and its future are in the hands of the people you hire.” While there may be several ways to help employees improve on their craft, one of the most popular and effective is via eLearning courses that employees can choose themselves and take at their own time and pace, which avoids disruption of their productivity during office hours. Online learning, for its part, depends entirely on an effective learning management system, the essential tool that helps eLearning professionals create, deploy, and maintain online courses. And with so many LMSs available on the eLearning market nowadays, it becomes a task just choosing the best one to use to train employees. Do you go for the most popular, the least expensive, or the one that fits your company’s needs like a glove? The first step to effectively answer the question is to set learning objectives and goals. What is it that you want to achieve through eLearning? Once you have a clear view of the direction you want to take, compare the top learning management software, and then see to it that you get the following vital information from your shortlisted vendors (at least three to four). This will ensure that you will be buying the LMS best suited for your employees’ training needs, and the one that can grow alongside your company.

Vendor’s Longevity

Successful vendors tend to be those who have been in operation for some time. It is also a great gauge of the quality of their products and services. They wouldn’t be able to stay long in the business if they can’t offer a reliable product.

A List of Their Customers

If this is not possible since vendors might be compelled to keep their customer information to themselves because of legal or privacy reasons, what you need to be sure of is that the vendor has dealt with similar needs that you have in the past. If no customer information can be given, you can ask instead for some successful use cases and for what industry the vendor’s LMS is to be used.

Ability to Adapt

Does the vendor update its product as frequently as possible? If the answer is yes, that means they value feedback from the customers and are open to market changes. This is a good insurance that the LMS you will use is not apt to become obsolete and useless in just a few years.

Payment Method

Generally, LMS vendors cater to any of these four price structures: pay per learner, pay per user, pay per course, and pay per licensing. You also need to know if there are separate costs for setup, training, support, and services, as well as for additional software. There might also be long-term fees or even discounts.

Implementation Process

Knowing beforehand how the LMS will be implemented is important for it to succeed for your company. This is why it’s important to make sure you ask for detailed information for you to review thoroughly. This way, you can see if there are gaps that need to be addressed before the system goes live. This will also allow you to set a timetable for its setup and learn what things are needed to get it going, as well as determine if the existing applications you already have will be compatible or not so you can make the necessary adjustments.

Included Training

As is usually the case, the vendor will provide training for your learning and development team so they can get a good understanding of the LMS and effectively answer questions once the online training starts for employees. It is important then to confirm what learning materials will be provided, and for how long you can have access to them. Additionally, you should also have an idea of how many people are allowed to participate in the training sessions.

Support Services

Finally, you must have a clear understanding of what the vendor’s responsibility is when it comes to issues that may crop up during use of the LMS. Will there also be additional costs if you would need customer and tech support? This will also be the best time to ask the vendor if the data collected and stored in the LMS can be retrieved in a format that can be read and digested by other systems. This will ensure that the information will be still usable even if in the future you decide to use another LMS. Getting the right and complete information on prospective LMSs will help you decide on the best system to use that will create the ideal eLearning experience for your employees and help them become even more effective as key contributors to your organization’s success.

About the Author

Erika is a marketing specialist for Betterbuys.com. Better Buys has become a trusted authority for delivering unbiased, expert insights on the software and technology that businesses rely on. You can follow the company at @Better_Buys

Setting up a Timer in WooCommerce Sensei

December 15, 2017 by Akshaya Rane 2 Comments

WooCommerce Sensei has been climbing up the LMS ladder for quite a while now. A lot of users are now switching to Sensei due to its intuitive features. However, once in a while we encounter some smart customization request which takes our development experience to a whole new level. One such request was to add a timer during a student quiz in WooCommerce Sensei.

Client Requirement

Our client wanted to set up an optional Timer for Quizzes of his choice. If a Quiz timer was set, it had to be displayed whenever a student started the Quiz. This was a crucial requirement as a timer would be very helpful to students to keep a track of their performance as well as Time-Management in a subject. Before starting with the solution, let us get familiar with some terms that we would be using in our customization. Admin: Client and the owner of the LMS. User: Student taking the course. Module / Project: Our customization project. Let us take a look at our approach towards the customization.

Our Solution

We provided a setting on the “Edit Lesson” page. Here, Administrator can activate the timer for a Quiz and set the timer accordingly. We used PHP, JavaScript for the customization and worked on WooCommerce and WooCommerce Sensei.

This would allow an optional timer for a quiz to be enabled and the admin could set the time in hours, minutes and seconds. We also provided a setting to make the quiz accessible only after certain day(s) of user registration. This is how the quiz page looked like:

As shown above, the time remaining would be shown & regularly updated. The admin could also enable it to be a floating timer for the user’s convenience. If the admin wanted to set some minimum days to restrict the quiz access, it would be checked against the user’s registration date and an appropriate message like ‘Quiz will be accessible only after <N days> after registration. You can access the Quiz on <date>’, would be displayed.

Features for the Admin

Enable a quiz timer and set its duration.
Enable a quiz reset button.
Enable a floating timer.
Set minimum number of days to restrict quiz access.
Set a minimum number of days after registration to take the quiz.

Features for the User

The user could pause the timer and Save the Quiz. He/She could then resume back from the remaining time later.
If a user accidentally closed the window, then the time spent would be saved and the user would get only the remaining amount of time when he/she took the quiz again.
After the timer ran out, the Quiz would be submitted automatically.
We also added a validation in which a message would be displayed if the user tried to open the quiz in a new window.

And the End Result is?

We were able to complete the customization swiftly. This timer can be used in all Sensei instances, such as training courses, universities, e-learning platforms and other places where a timer for an examination is required. Want help with a similar customization or functionality? Drop a comment below!

Setting up an Offline Learning Management System

December 14, 2017 by Prachi Vidhate 3 Comments

A cyber Learning Management System is a great way to reach out to students across the globe. But what if we want to set up an offline LMS, say, for a University? We encountered one such request from one of our clients and it got us all spruced up!

Client requirement

Our client wanted students to attend classes scheduled via an offline LMS. Students who would enroll from a list of courses would get a course schedule and weekly timings of classes. Upon completion of a particular course, they would be assessed and an Instructor would enter a key on their system. The key would generate a certificate with a unique code which can be verified anytime by future scrutineers.

Our Solution

We decided to use WordPress and Gravity forms as the prerequisites for this customization. A student would enroll in a particular course using gravity forms, on the basis of a schedule for upcoming courses. He would then make payment using the forms. Once he was successfully enrolled, he could proceed to course. The Student would also get notifications for the course, such as the time and date of the next lesson, quiz etc. Once a student completes a course, his trainer would come and generate his certificate after evaluation, as mentioned above. One offline LMS served with a smile. 🙂

The Customization in Brief

We used PHP to create the modules including WordPress and Gravity Forms. For Courses and Schedules, we created a custom post type called Courses. There were Schedules associated with each course. One such schedule had the following details:

Dates (start date – end date)
Location
Price
Method: Virtual/Classroom
Total seats
Remaining seats

One could edit, delete or create a schedule for any course. For every training, there would be an associated trainer and a salesperson. While creating a training schedule, the admin had to select the trainer from a drop-down menu, where only available trainers were shown. After selecting the dates, available trainers would be fetched dynamically. Details of the Course: For every course, we had the following options:

Description
Objectives
Attendee
Prerequisites
Course Outline
Career Path
About the Trainer
Other Details
Testimonials
Enroll Now

Features for the User

Enrollment in the Course: We included gravity forms for enrolling the user in the course.The form had the following fields:

First name and Last name.
Email Id.
Schedule of the course (Available schedules were shown dynamically for the course, according to availability. Availability was decided on two criteria: 1. Previous dates. 2. Vacancies in the Batch.)

Certificate: The certificate was a custom post type. When a user completed the course, he would get the certificate associated with the course. The Certificate would always be shareable via a link, or downloadable as a PDF. Get a Friend Along: This was a feature which allowed a registered user to get a friend with him, like a referral system. The Admin could keep a track of these students. Calendar: A calendar was added to a submenu page. A filter was also provided to show the schedules assigned to the selected trainer.

Features for the Admin

Specialization: Specializations are basically a group of courses. We created a custom post type for them. On the “edit specialization” page, we provided a multi-selection box using which the admin could group courses under the name of specialization. Recommended Courses: The Admin could recommend courses to the user. The user would get a notification when a recommended course was sent to him. Roster: The Admin could select a course and schedule of the course from a drop-down menu which had a list of users who were registered for the course as well as their friends.

And the Conclusion is..?

This module can be applied to Universities, Schools, Training Centers, and all other centers where offline learning is essential. Currently, we have many E-learning plugins and websites, but there is no system which handles the case offline courses. We hope that with our customization, we can bridge the gap between these systems. How did you like our glitzy customization? We would love to hear your comments!

Gear Up: Your Learning Experience Amplifier is in the Works

November 21, 2017 by Harsh Shah 15 Comments

Knock, knock! Who’s there? A new product! ‘A new product’ who? The ultimate learning experience amplifier that’s perfect for you! We’ve got something BIG that’s coming up. We’re working on an e-learning product that’s built to improve the learning experience for students and teachers alike. This breakthrough product will be packaged to you as a quintessential e-learning theme – eLumine!

eLumine- A Sneak Peek

As a learning administrator or an instructor, we know your biggest challenge is creating top-notch course content. And that should be your focus. Our focus is to make sure it’s presented at its best to your students, for optimal interaction and understanding. With eLumine, we’ve tried to get your e-learning classroom in order by organizing the chairs and tables- that is to say- by creating unique templates and advanced functionality to facilitate the consumption of learning content.

Here’s a quick look at highlighted features the theme offers:-

LearnDash Compatibility

With LearnDash being the top plugin in WordPress LMS, the eLumine theme has been built to completely support LearnDash, with experiences tailored purely for the plugin. Our team of LearnDash experts, who’ve been working consistently with the plugin- building extensions and working with e-learning clients- have shared their insights to help the design team build an ideal theme for LearnDash. Here’s an example. We’ve introduced infinite scroll to help students sift through courses offered without any speed-breakers. So, if you’re using LearnDash, this is the theme you need to take your website to the next-level.

Optimized Page Layouts

Owing to the extensive work we’ve done in user experience development, the layouts have been designed primarily to improve readability, keeping in mind the needs of the learner and the tutor. For example, we’ve completely reinvented the LearnDash Course page and WooCommerce Shop page to make content comprehensible and improve interaction. We’ve used the latest Bootstrap 4 framework to create a contemporary and clean look. And do we need to mention that all layouts are responsive?! Perfect for learning on-the-go! What’s even better, is that the theme includes a drag & drop page builder to help you design your own pages.

Advanced Quiz Module

If you were to ask us the USP of this theme, it would have to be the advanced quiz module that comes packaged with the theme. This quiz module transforms LearnDash quizzes entirely to bring about a befitting interface, laced with Gamification.

Support for Wholesome Learning

An e-learning website is no longer limited to an LMS. The need of the hour is to have supporting functionality integrated such as e-commerce, social networking, forums, gamification, to create an active learning environment and monetize training services offered. eLumine addresses this need by supporting major WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress and BadgeOS.

Are You Ready?

If you’re as excited as we are about this theme, we want you to know that the theme’s undergoing the last phase of development- rigorous testing and quality check- before it can be made available to you. A tentative launch date has been set for a couple of weeks from now! Stay ahead of the Game! Get an exclusive notification once the theme is ready!

So watch this space for more updates for us, and get set. When we hit go, you’d want to be on board!

A Simple Guide to Choosing an Online Teaching Technology

November 6, 2017 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Shivani. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

The investment in education technology ticks up in 2017 despite an all-time low in 2016, making it evident that eLearning is the way forward. The opportunities that are available for educators and students in the online environment continue to expand. Today’s educators (and students) are now faced with a decision – what is the best online teaching technology to use? Here we will go over some of the most important criteria that you should consider before fully committing to a platform.

#1 Compatibility

No matter how inspiring a new technology may be on its own, it will always rely on the technology that is around it. Put it another way, a technology puts its pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us, and those pants need to match the rest of the outfit. The best ed-tech platforms are always compatible with the systems that are currently the industry standard. It must be all-inclusive and should allow you to fully integrate the best visual, audio and data streaming services into an education platform. Students and teachers will be able to connect using platforms that they are already used to. The video is especially important to consider in this environment, as many educational programs are contingent upon high-quality video streams. Students need to be able to read the blackboard! Additionally, a high degree of compatibility keeps you from having to install new plugins alongside the installation of your ed-tech platform.

#2 Accessibility

WebRTC wins here, as the core tech here works across devices and browsers and leverages the built-in capacities of a browser, ensuring a native video experience. WebRTC operates through the commercial online environment, so there is no new background technology for an educator or an administrator to learn. Many software development kits that are built on the WebRTC infrastructure have been praised for allowing teachers, administrators, and students to communicate more clearly. The servers used to communicate are physically dedicated and strategically placed all over the world, so there are very few problems associated with lag or a lost data stream. Servers that are fully dedicated also allow students and teachers to utilize wi-fi, 3G and 4G networks in a seamless way, ensuring the best possible audio and visual experience for every student regardless of the bandwidth they have. Bandwidths do not have to match, and a student with a slower bandwidth will not weigh on the rest of the network. The ability to blend technologies means that the overall platform is more accessible to everyone. For people who are looking to learn a particular skill instead of spending all day tweaking hardware options, this is an aspect of technology that must be considered.

#3 Scale

The best teachers around the world will obviously be the most popular. Does an educational platform allow students to access the teachers who already have a huge student base? If not, there is no difference between a physical classroom and a virtual one. Ideally, the constraints that limit a physical classroom to 20 or 30 students per teacher is completely lifted in the virtual world. The scale is exponentially larger. Virtual learning solutions allow for the scale mentioned above regardless of how popular a teacher may be. Also, students have a choice of the best teachers and tutors from anywhere in the world. These teachers come to students through applications they are already familiar with. Virtual classrooms can easily accommodate hundreds of students, all with the same opportunity to access the knowledge of the best minds on Earth. The result is a much lower cost, higher quality education.

#4 Classroom Format

Online teaching technology allows for completely new classroom formats, the most interesting of which is known as the “flipped classroom.” Instead of going over a lesson in class and doing homework at home, the flipped class allows students to watch a lecture before class begins and complete “homework,” or practice exercises, during the time with the professor. However, the format can only be properly implemented when there is a good video system integrated into the education technology. With a platform that can replicate traditional classroom in a virtual world, students can easily watch the lecture beforehand in high quality. They will come into the classroom/homework session best prepared for the exercises that will truly drive home the concepts.

#5 Specific needs

Not only does a good technology allow for better teachers overall, but it also allows for more specialization. Home-schooled students, for example, were limited to the tutors who were within the physical proximity of the student’s home. Within the virtual environment, a student can now access specialists for different subjects. Administrators can bring in specialists when there is a subject that is especially difficult or simply to highlight a point during a lecture. Virtual classrooms can increase the viability of homeschooling. With more parents and students looking into the homeschooling option, choosing the right educational platform can make all of the difference in the decision making process. Although you have many choices when it comes to your educational technology, the above tips should help you find the technology that is perfect for you. Consider the schedule of your program, the current benefits of the platform and the compatibility of the structure to ensure best results.

Author Bio:

Shivani is Content Manager at WizIQ – an EdTech company that offers online learning delivery platform to businesses and educators. She writes about eLearning, education technology and the role of cloud in education. Follow WizIQ on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Advantages of Picking WPLMS over an e-Learning WordPress Plugin

April 17, 2017 by Anoop Sudhakaran 1 Comment

Choosing a platform for your e-Learning portal can be overwhelming, more so thanks to the abundance of options available.

Platforms range from WordPress extensions to full fledged e-learning solutions. But being the user-friendly platform it is, WordPress definitely seems the best option right?

Now, again with WordPress there are two main routes to take.

Choosing an e-Learning plugin.
Choosing an e-Learning theme.

While each has its own pros and cons, here, I will try to explain the situations where you should go with an e-Learning theme, specifically – WPLMS.

Picking WPLMS over any e-Learning WordPress plugin has some advantages, as you will learn in this article.

Compatible with Plenty of Plugins

WPLMS offers support for plenty of popular extensions. These integrations add tons of useful features to your e-Learning portal.

It offers support for many popular WordPress plugins like : LearnDash, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce.

Low Maintenance

Being compatible with all these plugins means there is no need to install any other mediatory plugins (such as BuddyPress integration).

This in-turn reduces your need for constant updates and maintenance.

Plugins are just another chunk of code ready to be executed on call. This means every line of code that gets executed is putting a toll on your server and its performance.

Another important factor is from security point of view. Integration plugins may have several vulnerabilities which when not addressed properly can leave your entire WordPress installation vulnerable to attacks

Less plugins = less load on your website + lower security risk + less maintenance = Happy e-Learning.

It’s a Win-Win situation!

Comes Bundled with Premium Plugins

As you’ve seen, WPLMS is compatible with a variety of plugins.

Want more? The theme comes bundled with variety of premium plugins like:

Visual Composer – A page builder plugin with drag and drop interface.
LayerSlider – A responsive slider plugin for WordPress.
Revolution Slider – Another responsive slider plugin for WordPress.
EventOn – An Event Calendar plugin for WordPress.

All of these plugins are together worth over $129.

Choose from Ample Styles

Choosing a theme for your website is always a daunting task, hours of searching, comparing and testing only to find that the theme you like is not within your budget.

But with WPLMS, there is no need to look for another child theme. This theme comes with a myriad of design layouts to choose from.

To test out these layouts, you can even import the sample data that comes with it.

Uniform Styling

Since WPLMS has integrations for all major plugins, all these plugins will have a uniform styling. This means the entire theme wouldn’t need customization to suit different plugins.

When to Choose an e-Learning WordPress Plugin?

Although there are several advantages of using an e-learning theme, many people still prefer using an e-Learning plugin over the theme.

Here are a few reasons to opt for an e-Learning plugin:

When you don’t need the advanced functionalities of an e-Learning theme.
When you don’t want to be tied down to the style that a theme offers.
When you want a light-weight solution for your e-Learning needs.
When you want a low cost solution.

Wrapping Up

Now that you are clear about the differences between an e-Learning theme and a plugin, go ahead and choose the right option for your website.

Let us know what you chose and how it’s working out for you.

5 Best Membership Plugins for e-Learning Websites

April 5, 2017 by Anoop Sudhakaran 1 Comment

So you run an e-Learning website!

Most of your content must be accessible to anyone who register, right?

But what if you decide to offer premium content? The type you would want people to pay for before they can access it. I bet you don’t want that to be publicly available.

Hence you need to create some type of “gate”. Something that would restrict access to content based on different parameters.

This can be easily done through Membership plugins on WordPress. Yes, the same type of plugin that we are going to discuss today!! Coincidence? Woah!

So What Does a Membership Plugin do?

Simply put, it provides you full control over what part of content is accessible to your users. But that is just the gist of it, A membership plugin is a suite with plethora of options.

How Does it Help My e-Learning Portal?

As an e-Learning portal, your website has the ability to provide courses for your audience.

Now, you may already be selling courses on your website with the help of WooCommerce. You can even sell subscription courses.

But that doesn’t offer you the level of granularity into content management and user role assignment as much as a Membership plugin would do. You can create different membership levels, groups for users. Registered members can be updated about new courses that are published & more.

So in this article, we will discuss a few membership plugins that will help you setup your e-learning membership portal in no time.

Let’s being with the mammoths in Membership arena.

MemberPress

MemberPress is one of the most popular plugins in the membership category on WordPress. It’s fame is mostly attributed to its robust features and ease of use.

It offers unlimited membership levels and unlimited members. The Access Rules can be set such that only certain member roles can access the content. Armed with these rules, you can restrict access to almost every aspect of your site such as Posts, Pages, Tags, Categories etc.

Content dipping is a fairly regular feature in most membership sites, it allows you to slowly publish new content on the site and provide access to members.

The plugin gels well with several email marketing providers such as Aweber, Mailchimp etc.

Coming to the most important aspect of Membership sites – Payments. MemberPress offers support for most commonly used payment gateways like Paypal and Stripe. These two make up for most of the transactions on web, but unfortunately the only other payment gateway supported is Authorize.net.

MemberPress’ pricing options are a bit heavy on the wallet. Their Business edition rounds out to about $119 per year which is a single site license.

The multi-site license a.k.a Developer Edition comes down to around $239 per year. That being said, the price is worth what the plugin delivers.

Find out more : MemberPress

Members

Members is a WordPress membership plugin developed by Justin Tadlock.

This is a basic plugin that was developed with the core principle of membership sites in mind. The plugin provides the two basic concepts i.e Content Locking & User Role Definition.

The Role Manager part of this plugin lets you create, edit, delete roles and capabilities of various users on your site. What is interesting is a user can be assigned several roles, These roles will allow or deny them access to certain parts of the site. User roles can be cloned easily too in order to build new roles.

Content permissions give you control over which content can be access by which role. Which means if a content is specific to only users in the role “New Subscribers” then only users with that role can access the content.

As usual, shortcodes and widgets are shipped along with it to make your user experience easier.

Even though the plugin offer all these features, it doesn’t come pre-built with Payment integration. But this can be easily fixed by installing payment gateway plugins (Members is compatible with these).

Coming to the price of this plugin. The plugin costs nothing. Yes! NOTHING! It is available for FREE on WordPress repository, no wonder it is being used by over 100,000+ users worldwide.

Check it out: Members by Justin Tadlock

WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce Memberships plugin is developed by the renowned WooCommerce team, so you can trust the quality and compatibility it offers.

Rather than being just a plugin to restrict your site’s content, WooCommerce Memberships plugin is a site-wide solution for memberships. Being WooCommerce compatible means not just content, but products can also be part of your membership sites.

Here are a few striking features of Memberships plugin:

Memberships can be sold as a product on your store.
Memberships can be tied to products being sold, such that these memberships open up when a product is purchased.
Send invites to people in order for them to purchase a plan.
Drip feed content to members.
Provide discounts on memberships and products.
Import/Export members.
Add notes to memberships.

The pricing structure of this plugin is a bit different as in, it doesn’t offer unlimited site licenses. The single site license costs $149. 5 site license costs $199 and 25 site license costs $249.

Find out more : WooCommerce Memberships

Paid Membership Pro

Paid Membership Pro is another plugin which offers the Free, Pro and ProPlus Model.

The free version more or less gives you an idea of how the plugin works. Not being a WooCommerce Addon, it lacks in features such as Variable Pricing etc. But fret not, since PMP comes with support for Addons.

These addons can extend the functionality of PMP to add advanced features such as Link Tracking, Affiliate program. Apart from addons, it supports various integrations with third party tools like email marketing (Aweber, Mailchimp) and CRM softwares.

Compared to other plugins, this offers a bit more freedom by supporting many payment gateways like Paypal, Stripe, Braintree, 2Checkout, Cyber Source, Authorize.net etc.

Discount codes can be generated for users. This can be set to start on a particular date & configured to expire on a day. The coupon codes can even be limited to number of times it is used. The amount of granularity it offers is immense.

As I said before, the plugin has a basic free option. But the Pro Core plan costs $97 & Pro Plus plan for $197 (Unlimited sites licenses).

Checkout the plugin over at Paid Membership Pro

Digital Access Pass

DAP is one of the oldest membership plugins around.

This is the only plugin that I saw, which offers a hefty amount of Payment Gateway support. It offers support for around 20+ Payment Gateways.

It is a feature heavy plugin, but with hefty features comes steep learning curve. It might actually take some time to setup the plugin and get it working on your portal. To understand the level of customizability, let me just put this out there – there are over 70 settings to tinker with.

With DAP, you can easily link more membership levels and courses to a single user. Want more? You don’t have to manually remove each and every linked product when someone cancels their subscription.

It comes with a One-Time payment plan (but has a monthly plan too). Single site costs $167, Unlimited site around $297.

Find out more: Digital Access Pass

Over To You

That was all about Membership plugins and how they can benefit your e-Learning website. The plugins we discussed here are all popular ones being used by thousands of websites.

Which of these caught your eye? Let us know what more you are looking for in a membership plugin.

8 Reasons LifterLMS Might Be Perfect for Your e-Learning Needs

February 20, 2017 by Pranoti Panchwagh Leave a Comment

With the flexibility and ease of use provided by WordPress and the wide range of functional e-learning plugins available, several tutors, trainers and instructors are turning towards the WordPress + LMS plugin approach to setup their e-learning website. But choosing the right e-learning plugin, might be a tad-bit difficult- given all the WordPress e-learning plugins out there. Well, understanding the features each plugin has to offer can help you decide. Today we’re going to take a detailed look at LifterLMS – a fairly new LMS plugin on the block, that’s rapidly gaining popularity. In a nutshell, LifterLMS is a complete e-learning system built on WordPress and equipped with all the core functionalities you require to create and sell a course online. Let’s explore the primary features in detail, and understand what makes this LMS plugin suitable for your needs:

#1 Super-fast Course Creation

LifterLMS is designed with a clear, easy-to-understand interface, which you can get used to really quickly, and build a course in a very short time. The logical flow and step-by-step setup is useful to start the course in a jiffy, so long as your content is ready.

#2 Integrated Shopping Cart and Payment Options

The LifterLMS plugin has an in-built shopping cart option and a native payment gateway extension that lets you start selling courses without the need for an e-commerce plugin (though it is always good to have one!)

#3 Easy Course Customization for User Engagement

LifterLMS has plenty of gamification options which can be utilised to add achievement certificates, bonus points and badges to your course. Not only do these make the course more colourful and interactive, they have been proven to increase student engagement exponentially.

#4 Discounts and Coupons Support

Apart from user engagement, the plugin also supports course marketing and promotion by offering the discounts and coupons functionality. You can add these to product bundles for your recurring students, thereby creating a sense of belonging and increasing customer loyalty!

#5 Multiple Content Type Support

LifterLMS supports all types of content, to be added to your courses. Text, PDF’s, audios, videos, you name it. You can add various permutations and combinations of these while designing the lesson.

#6 Drip Content Enabled

Dripping content to your students implies adding the lessons one after the other, as opposed to adding them all in one go. This feature ensures that your students keep visiting your course regularly instead of petering out in the first couple of weeks.

#7 Native WooCommerce Integration

LifterLMS has a native integration with WooCommerce, which enables you to avail of all of its functionalities by simply installing the WooCommerce add-on. This opens up a host of new possibilities for course marketing, what with WooCommerce being one of the most popular ecommerce platforms.

#8 Social Network Integration

Similar to the WooCommerce integration, LifterLMS also has add-ons for integrating social networking functionalities through BuddyPress and bbPress. BuddyPress is used to create Student profiles (like the profiles on Facebook) which can be imported into the e-learning system, while bbPress is used to build student-teacher groups and communities for discussions and forums.

With these and more, LifterLMS makes for a formidable e-learning plugin, that’s one to watch out for. And the best part?! Well, it’s completely FREE! Are you looking to use the plugin? Or are a current user? Let us know your thoughts about it! Let the discussions begin!