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3 Must-Have LearnDash Add-Ons for the New Age Tutor

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learndash-lmsLearnDash is a heady mixture of features for the quintessential new age tutor; things like drag and drop page builders, points and certificates for achievements, multiple question types for quizzes, and options for micro-managing the courses make life very easy for the course manager. And if that wasn’t enough, there are the extensions for LearnDash!Ranging from payment gateways to gamification options to event planners, the dozens of third-party add-ons equip the creator with all the tools necessary to build a fantastic course.Here are three such add-ons that add dynamic functionalities to LearnDash, addressing some of the major requirements of every course creator.

The Instructor Role Add-On

You are looking to set up an e-learning website with LearnDash but plan to offload the course creation part to external course authors; however, it is neither feasible nor safe to let multiple users have back-end access to your website. Fortunately, for LearnDash, you don’t need to.The Instructor Role add-on lets you create an ‘Instructor’ user role on the website which lets external authors create, edit, and conduct their own courses independently. They can access all course related reports at the back end, such as attendance reports, quiz papers and more, but nothing else.ld-instructor-role-overviewThe add-on lets you add as many authors as you want and charge a percentage commission from each, without having to worry about potential hackers damaging your core website!

Group Registration for LearnDash

Group Registration for LearnDash lets students purchase bulk licenses and enrol as a group for a course. The main purchaser then becomes the Group Leader and is the source of contact for the rest of the members in the group. From a logistical point of view this is very convenient for tutors, as it essentially reduces the number of students you need to keep track of!ld-group-registration-bulk-purchaseAs for the Group Leader, he can track the performance of every group member at the front-end, without necessitating back end access!

Quiz Reporting for LearnDash

The name says it all; the Quiz Reporting add-on for LearnDash lets the tutor export quiz responses as a CSV or Excel file. Reports can be extracted for every student’s every quiz as well as a comparative analysis of every quiz.ld-admin-view-quiz-detailsThis helps the tutor gauge the performance of the student through all quizzes as well as in comparison with his peers!Each of these three add-ons adds a unique functionality to the core LearnDash plugin, thereby enhancing the tutor’s e-learning experience.But here’s a sweet deal to get you even more interested, all these amazing add-ons are available at a discounted price if you purchase the LearnDash Starter Pack! So hurry up, this deal might end soon! 🙂

7 LearnDash Add-Ons That Make Course Creation Easy

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learndash-lmsWhen it comes to creating educational courses on WordPress, there are few LMS platforms that are as adept at the art as LearnDash. The course creation and management software is packed with a multitude of features that make course writing a breeze, even for complete greenhorns.One of the many things that works for LearnDash is the fact that is designed from a user-first point of view. This makes it easy to navigate for people who are unfamiliar with the world of codes and get intimidated hearing things like hooks, and functions, and filters (*cough* like me *cough*). 😉The plugin offers a bundle of features that can be leveraged to create a beautiful course; the features it doesn’t manage to incorporate in its core list, it provides for with some pretty neat add-ons.Here we shall discuss the 7 best add-ons for LearnDash (in no particular order) that add a profusion of features to the core plugin and make course creation super easy!

#1 WPAchievements

Gamification has become an integral part of e-learning today, proving to be one of the most successful methods of encouraging student attendance and increasing productivity. LearnDash incorporates gamification features into its courses with the help of WPAchievements, a comprehensive plugin that adds a plethora of badges, ranks, certificates, leaderboards, and quests to the course.The WPAchievements add-on lets you, as the course creator, add a wealth of points and rewards to students based on how much and how well they interact with the course material. For instance, there can be various tiers for earning points as students attempt a quiz, watch a video, hand in assignments, and of course, complete the course.ld-wpachievementsThe add-on also lets you create where ranks can be assigned to students based on their performance in the course for the week. Not only does this generate satisfaction among students, but witnessing their relative performance to the top-ranked students also spurs the lagging ones to do better work. Nothing like healthy rivalry to improve student productivity, right?!

#2 Content Cloner

As a course administrator, you might have to create similar courses over and over. In such cases, drafting the same course content time and again can quickly become tedious. The Content Cloner add-on lets you duplicate the entire course, including lessons, quizzes, tasks, and more with a single click.
learndash-clone-course-option

Clone Courses in just one click!

The best part is, this functionality can be extended cloning multiple courses at once too, which means you can simply create a skeletal structure of all your course types and keep cloning and modifying them as necessary, over and over!

#3 Visual Customizer

The Visual Customizer add-on is one of the must-haves for LearnDash. Visual Customizer comes equipped with five base design templates, each with its own appeal, that can become the skin for your course. Each of these templates can be further modified, choosing from a color palette of over 20 combinations, that generates a unique feel for every single course!On a more professional note, Visual Customizer can help you more than just to create comfortable courses; it can help you develop your brand in the online education world. Creating a common thread through all your courses can become your education system’s unique identity, whether it is your color scheme, course layout, text structure, or any other feature. Visual Customizer is a Premium add-on, developed by Snap Orbital and available on the LearnDash website.

#4 Front-End Course Creation

One of your biggest concerns as the website administrator is the safety of your core website. While it is true that you implicitly trust the members you are assigning course creation user roles to, extensive user access is nevertheless a potential threat to security. Besides, what if you were approached by a Guest who wants to create a course on your website? You can hardly open your website back-end to a virtual stranger; the risk is too great.LearnDash offsets this hassle by providing the Front-End Course Creation add-on.fcc-learndash-create-course-pageLike the name suggests, once this add-on is in place, you can add course creators who can access the website only at the front-end, with zero back-end access. This elegant solution lets course creators leverage all the creative tools available for managing the course, while limiting back-end access only to designated users.

#5 LearnDash Notes

The LearnDash Notes add-on takes your LearnDash course to a completely digital level. The add-on is a great help to your students as it lets them take notes on your lectures throughout the course. These notes can be exported to the student’s device for later, offline study, if necessary.This effectively does away with the pen-and-paper approach and students can focus completely on the lectures, even as they take notes. One could argue that this could be as easily done by using in-built tools like Microsoft Word or OneNote; however, switching between two different interfaces can be really distracting and ultimately affects student retention capacity. The integrated LearnDash Notes approach helps the student stay in the lecture zone, while at the same time making additional notes for individual reference.

#6 GrassBlade

Addition of tin-can courses, i.e. courses where there can be two-way student-teacher interaction in real-time, have been known to increase student attention manifold. The GrassBlade add-on lets you add your Tin-Can courses to LearnDash, or even embed specific tin-can packages into your course lessons.The add-on is available in two different versions, GrassBlade and GrassBlade PRO. The former is free, the latter premium. Integrating tin-can API into your courses can help you measure student responsiveness to the different aspects of your course, the places visited most, the lectures they spent the maximum and the shortest times on, and so forth. It is like an analytical tool for measuring the cognitive investment of your students in the course and hence can be a powerful resource for generating feedback and improving future courses.

#7 Course Grid

The Course Grid add-on is useful from the point of view of the administrator, as well as the end-user. The add-on does exactly what it says, arranges all the courses from your library into a responsive grid, anywhere on your site. Though not strictly a tool for course creation, it does help the registrant get a bird’s eye view of all the courses on your website and filter them by the category they are interested in.ld-course-gridThat completes the list of our 7 most useful LearnDash add-ons for course creation. The core LearnDash plugin itself has a plethora of features (some 80 if you see the website), and the rest are provided by such add-ons.What other add-ons or ideas do you think could be useful in making course creation easy? Share them in the comments section below!

LMS.org’s Review of Pathshala Theme for LearnDash

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lms-pathshala-review-mainKnown as the theme that lets you design beautiful courses on LearnDash without having to dabble in the coding quagmire, Pathshala has the talk of the LMS town ever since the day it was launched.Pathshala is a simple, user-friendly, highly customizable, and aesthetically appealing theme that was designed specifically for LearnDash.LMS.org’s recent detailed review marks the addition of another feather to the cap of this exclusive theme for LearnDash. The website says that “Pathshala helps polish the [learning] experience with a theme that’s both practical and reliable”Read on for a brief glimpse of the review; or you can read the complete review here too!

Highlights of the Review

According to LMS.org,
“Pathshala takes the LearnDash WordPress plugin and makes it even better. The theme is specifically designed for LearnDash and features a simple drag and drop page builder so users can get right to work without learning code. See the pages as you build them and apply custom colors and more. Student feedback, dynamic sidebars, and a responsive design are a few of the many reasons to give Pathshala a try”
A candid and thorough assessment of the theme highlights several of its best features, such as:
  • The Drag and Drop Page Builder
  • Dynamic Layouts
  • Easy Navigation
  • Custom Colour Palette
  • Plugin Compatibility
  • The Contact Page Template
The review goes on to mention how Pathshala can beautify the Course Catalog; it creates pages and adds content using a real-time visual page builder that reflects the changes you make in the display right away.A simple, responsive, elegant theme, Pathshala successfully takes the LearnDash experience to the next level!And this is just the overview. Check out the complete, detailed review here, at the LMS.org website. You can also, alternatively, test out a demo of the theme here, on our website.Already a user? Don’t forget to add your thoughts, ratings, and feedback!

How to Create a University Website with LearnDash and Instructor Role Plugins

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students-university-featureThe fundamental requirement of a university website is to organize and manage content for its various departments and streams. Now, as each department has its own individual courses and content, it can be very difficult to manage them simultaneously.

Course creation for a university website requires a strong LMS platform which can handle different types of content, manage a large number of students, support all the peripherals like quizzes, assignments, multiple question types, provide various hierarchical course structures, control end-user access, enable drip-feed content, and provide for discussion forums for the students enrolled in the course.

Given this long list, it is no wonder that very few learning management systems can be considered here. Of these, LearnDash offers some of the best features one could ask for, for easily creating and managing courses.

LearnDash as the LMS Platform of Choice

LearnDash offers the needed functionality to setup any e-learning website. Out-of-the-box you’ve got:

  • Course Creation: LearnDash allows you to create create hierarchical course content, wherein you can divide courses into lessons and topics. To segregate courses of various departments, you have course categories and tags. With support for multimedia content, you can create varied courses
  • Content Scheduling: With support for drip-feeding content, a course start date and more, you can schedule course access for students
  • Gamification: LearnDash has an in-built quiz module which allows you to test and grade students based on their work. You also have an assignment upload option, and a certificate option upon course or quiz completion

Course Management

After the LMS has been chosen, we move on to addressing the issue of the actual management of courses. LearnDash lets you, as the site admin, create all kinds of courses and conduct them. However, none of the other, in-built user roles have a similar capability, which effectively implies that you yourself must be the one creating and marketing these courses.

This may not always be practically possible, especially considering the sheer number of courses you would have to work on, given that this is a university website, for the various departments, streams, and subjects offered.

Hence, as the admin for the website, there are two ways in which you can handle this situation without letting it get way out of hand,

  1. You offload some of your work by creating other admins who can create and conduct courses on their own.
  2. You create and assign multiple Instructor roles to professors who are to create and conduct their own courses, using the Instructor Role plugin for LearnDash.

Let us discuss both the methods in detail.

In the first method, you are essentially giving equal power to all the other people, to whom you have assigned the ‘Admin’ user role, to make changes to your website. While this can be beneficial from the point of view of dividing the work, there are some serious disadvantages. Have you spotted them yet?

Firstly, you are opening up your core website to dozens of people. Anybody of these can change the layout, add or remove plugins, edit pages, posts, even the other authors’ courses; in other words, they are free to wreak havoc as they see fit. It can result into a classic case of too many cooks, as each will have their own idea as to how the website should ideally look and be structured.

Secondly, giving access to the heart of your website to a large number of people cannot be healthy from a security point of view. Even taking into consideration the fact that you implicitly trust all of your fellow admins, there remains a strong possibility of your site being hacked or attacked by malicious users. Besides, this limits the creation of your courses, as it necessitates the development of trust between you and your author, before you can grant him access to your site.

Thirdly, the addition of multiple admins opens up all your commercial transactions on the website for everyone’s perusal. Needless to say, this can be disastrous at the very least.

Creating Multiple Instructors

To avoid this minefield, it is a better idea to opt for the latter option, i.e., the one where you simply create and assign ‘Instructor’ capabilities to all your course authors, instead of making them administrators, by using the Instructor Role plugin for LearnDash.

The plugin adds an additional user role, i.e the ‘Instructor’ user role to your roster, which can be assigned like the other roles to your professors and teachers who are to be conducting their own courses.

The biggest advantage here is that assigning the Instructor user role significantly limits the author’s capabilities towards interfering with your website. As an instructor, the author can create and manage their courses completely, including quiz creation, assignment management, gamification integration, etc., but they cannot meddle with any other part of the website, without being granted the requisite permission.

This makes redundant all the latter concerns of content and commercial security, as you are not relinquishing the core functionalities of your website to anybody else. More, it gives you the freedom of adding any number of Instructors, as well as guest authors, without having to run them through a screening test!

Another advantage is that the overall control still remains in your hands, as the website administrator, and all your Instructors are answerable for their content, unless you decide otherwise.

The Instructor Role plugin for LearnDash allows the course author to retain his/her creative freedom, without reducing your control over the university website. In addition, you can set up a percentage commission to be drawn from guest Instructors, who wish to conduct their courses on your website.

Endnote

Instructor Role and LearnDash work hand-in-hand with each other to help you create beautiful courses for your university website. As LearnDash is compatible with WordPress multisite too, this functionality can be successfully extended to create courses on multiple websites for all your departments!

Growth Hacking Your LearnDash Site

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Running a LearnDash site single-handedly is not easy!

Along with creating and publishing quality content, you also wear the hats of a course designer, the site admin, a digital marketer and/or occasionally, a salesman. (Hint: That’s several hats too many!)

multitasking

If you’re a descendant of Da Vinci who does all of the above and still has time to catch your favourite show on primetime, hats off to you (all of them). But for most mortals, creating content and managing the traffic along with strategizing growth via marketing is.. well, too much.

Best case scenario when you do it all yourself? You manage to grow your user-base until it hits an upper limit of sorts. The competition catches up to you. From there on, it can be a rough road downhill, and will most likely result in your content quality and web traffic taking a massive hit. Naturally, the same would apply to your revenue. So how do you solve this problem?!

Divide And Conquer

Redistribute the proverbial hats. Assign content creating/publishing responsibilities to your instructors while you focus on marketing strategies and growing your website. And this time around, the growth will be exponential!

Instructor role is an extension that adds the user role of an ‘Instructor’ to your LearnDash site, perfect for when you want to redistribute or outsource content creation and publishing. With an additional user role that’s custom made for Instructors, managing content on your LearnDash site will not just be easy, but also optimized for your target demographic.

ld-instructor-role-overview

How Can You Benefit From Instructor Roles?

The applications are umpteen! Here are some of the ways in which Instructor Role for LearnDash can benefit your website:

  1. Have multiple Instructors create courses for your site simultaneously. More Quality Content + More Traffic = More Revenue
  2. Use it to protect your private settings and sensitive data by limiting Instructor access.
  3. Connect with online instructors to create a Course Marketplace by letting individuals teach on your website and earn commissions.
  4. Large organizations can assign Instructors to a group of learners and create sets of self sustaining ‘batches’, with one Admin overseeing the whole process.
  5. Corporates can let department heads create their own training modules.
  6. Universities can let professors create their own subject matter.

Instructor Role has been highly acclaimed by our users, and LearnDash loves it too. We want to keep the momentum going, and have so much more to offer you in terms of features and functionality!!

Getting down to the technical bits:

  • The Instructor Role plugin works with the latest version of LearnDash and integrates well with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads to pay instructors commissions on course purchases made
  • The instructor can view detailed reports for courses they’ve created. The reports contain shows total number of students enrolled for courses created and course completion status.

Let’s stop here! Explore the product in detail, checkout the features, ask us questions- make course management simple! 🙂

Instructor Role & Group Registrations for LearnDash: Now Compatible with EDD

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It’s raining updates!

Two of our most popular plugins and leading LearnDash extensions – Instructor Role and Group Registration – have undergone major updates.

With their latest versions, the plugins provide support for course sells using Easy Digital Downloads.

LearnDash owners using Easy Digital Downloads can now seamlessly integrate the multiple instructor role or group registration functionality into their LMS.

Good Just Got Better

Out-of-the-box, LearnDash was suitably built for single course administrators.

However, several users were missing out on the multiple instructor functionality – wherein users could sign up as teachers or faculty members and add their own courses.

We built the Instructor role plugin to cater to this very audience. The plugin – although not dependant on WooCommerce – was made compatible with WooCommerce:

  • allowing instructors to set up paid courses in WooCommerce
  • and LMS admins to set instructor commissions on courses purchased through WooCommerce.

With Group Registration, we introduced the option for users to bulk purchase courses and enrol students. This plugin was built as an extension to LearnDash and WooCommerce.

While both these plugins, made life simple for LearnDash LMS owners using WooCommerce, there were several others who were missing out!

Why Easy Digital Downloads?

With over 50,000+ active users, Easy Digital Downloads is a leading e-commerce solution for businesses looking to sell digital products.

For us here at WisdmLabs, an integration with EDD for our LearnDash plugins, was always in the development pipeline. But with several pre-sale inquiries, this functionality got bumped up the list. 🙂

Instructor Role for LearnDash ver. 3.0.0

With version 3.0.0 of the Instructor Role plugin, instructors/teachers can now sell courses through EDD. Instructors commissions will be auto-calculated for courses sold through EDD as well.

Make sure you checkout the plugin’s documentation for details.

ld-instructor-role-edd

But that’s not all. We have a minor improvement for existing Instructor Roles users!

Now, all instructor communication emails to students will contain the instructor’s personal id, instead of the admin id.

Group Registration for LearnDash ver. 2.0.0

The Group Registration extension for LearnDash has been integrated with Easy Digital Downloads in version 2.0.0.

ld-group-registration-edd

Now, LearnDash admins can set up courses in EDD, which can be purchased in bulk using the Group Registration plugin. More on this is available on the plugin’s detailed documentation page.

Next Steps

Well, if you were waiting for this awesome functionality, all you’ve got to do is update the plugins to their latest versions, or purchase them right away! 😀

Spread the word!

How to Set up Live Classes in LearnDash using WizIQ Virtual Classroom

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With the advent of e-learning, there has been a massive surge in the creation and development of learning management systems (LMSs). Supporting a wide spectrum of educational courses that can be conducted online, several robust LMSs offer varied features catering to institutes big and small.

LearnDash is one such powerful, WordPress based learning management system.

An intuitive and straightforward setup with all the necessary functionality and add-ons for more, it helps you design, create and sell beautiful courses online.

Here is a quick overview of the main features of LearnDash.

LearnDash Features

learndash-lms

Course Design

LearnDash allows for the creation of multi-tiered, dynamic courses with different options for content management. Course content can be either released altogether or drip-fed to the students, i.e. the subsequent lesson is displayed only after the first is completed.

Course Management

Course management can be done from your WordPress interface. Advanced quizzing options with 8 different question and answer types can be flexibly added to any given test or assignment which gives you lots of permutations and combinations to work with.

LearnDash also lets you create flexible prerequisites for any given course depending on the kind of course you opt for.

Gamification

Gamification is addition of bonus points, rewards and other perks that make the course engaging. LearnDash lets you add badges and custom certificates for a fun learning experience.

Communication

Users can track their progress record after logging into their accounts. Moreover, LearnDash has inbuilt email features that let you send autoresponders to students to inform them about course updates, after a long absence or recommend other courses they might like.

Course Analysis

LearnDash generates comprehensive reports for student performance, quiz results and student progress. This can be enabled across multisites too.

Marketing Options

LearnDash integrates with WooCommerce to sell courses efficiently. Payment methods include one time deposits or monthly subscriptions. Multiple courses can be purchased simultaneously and LearnDash is shopping cart enabled.

The one feature that LearnDash lacks however is real-time syncing of course lessons. It supports all kinds of video tutorials, external video links and offline linking of videos but does not allow for live audio-video communication.

Recent polls show that online learners keep looking for newer and better features in learning technologies. In the light of students’ desire for more collaborative tools and social interaction on e-learning platforms, lack of live-lessons is a shortcoming in the otherwise excellent LMS.

This is where the WizIQ Virtual Classroom extension comes in.

Bringing the traditional classroom experience online, the WizIQ Virtual Classroom plugin lets you connect to your student audience in real-time with high- quality audio-video lessons, interactive chats, grouped discussions and synergistic whiteboards.

Thus introducing an element of blended learning.

Here is a look at how Virtual Classroom enriches the student learning experience.

WizIQ Virtual Classroom Features

virtual-classroom-feature

Real time audio-video communication

Virtual Classroom lets you add online sessions to your course in a variety of display sizes.

Additionally, it provides for online chats during the lecture so that there is free flow of communication between the tutor and the students. An interactive whiteboard can be used to solve problems, draw diagrams and graphs, just like in an actual classroom.

Group Discussions

Virtual Classroom lets you add students to breakout rooms where separate sub-topics or such can be discussed. You as the moderator have sole control over all conversations and can transfer students as required.

You can jump from conversation to conversation in these breakout rooms, thereby providing a more personalized e-experience.

Varied Courseware

Various types of courseware can be supported by Virtual Classroom. You can upload PDF’s, project videos, broadcast audio recordings and more. Virtual Classroom offers multilingual support in over 19 languages. This helps you get your course localization ready and hence make it more accessible to a wider audience.

Secure Recording

The live lectures conducted can also be recorded and stored for later use. These are protected by periodically expiring URL’s to ensure data safety.

Interactive Polls

Much like a real classroom, students can ask queries during the lesson and vice-versa. This can be further extended to conducting pop quizzes or surveys to gauge student understanding and involvement. Integrations

Besides these, the plugin also lets you communicate with the students via e-mail, for sending course updates, material and reminders.

The catch?

WizIQ cannot be directly integrated with the LearnDash LMS. So how do you incorporate the Virtual Classroom feature into LearnDash and sell the course?

With the LearnDash – WizIQ Virtual Classroom Integration plugin of course! 😀

The LearnDash – WizIQ Virtual Classroom Extension integration allows you to manage Virtual Classroom via your LearnDash site and schedule classes for the same. As a synchronization plugin, it lets merge the best features of both these platforms to create a complete course online.

LearnDash – WizIQ Virtual Classroom Extension Features

The plugin lets you control all your WizIQ classes via your LearnDash site.

learndash-virtual-classroom-feature

Class Scheduling

Courses created with LearnDash can be scheduled using the WizIQ account and marketed on WordPress. Class scheduling includes deciding the class date, duration and type.

Attendance Tracking

Apart from the regular attendance control options in LearnDash, WizIQ lets you track student attendance according to the entry time, exit time and total duration in the live lesson. It also lets you set a minimum duration to be attended in the lecture for it to be marked as successfully completed.

And so the system comes full circle.

When using the integration plugin, creating a separate WizIQ account is not necessary. It automatically generates a new user account when you first log-in to schedule a class on WizIQ. Also, if you have an existing WizIQ account, the plugin simply integrates the two, without necessitating the creation of a new account.

LearnDash and WizIQ are both paid plugins. The integration plugin is free of cost and can be downloaded here.

Endnote

Integrating two online learning platforms, the LearnDash – WizIQ Extension lets you create your courses on LearnDash, schedule it on WizIQ and display it on your course page, keeping students continuously in the loop.

There is a positive correlation between a well-organized course and student engagement.

LearnDash inherently provides gamification options to make the course engaging. Add to that the interactive real-time lesson functionality provided by WizIQ and the interest level increases exponentially.

Know any other options to come up with an effective learning plan? Let us know in the comments section below!

LearnDash & Virtual Classrooms: It’s Finally Happening!

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WizIQ-LD icon

One reason why LearnDash holds it’s own as a leading LMS extension on WordPress is because of the sheer number of awesome integrations in its kitty.

It could be anything; restricting content via a popular membership plugin like PaidMembershipsPro or scheduling and managing live events for your Course using Event Espresso, LearnDash covers a wide range of subsystems that can be used in sync with the LMS.

And now a Virtual Classroom service!

WisdmLabs is  thrilled to announce yet another kick-ass extension for LearnDash; LearnDash-WizIQ Virtual Classroom Extension is now available for purchase download and lets you schedule live classes for your LearnDash Courses and set up a virtual classroom like environment for your learners.

Virtual Classroom for LearnDash Courses

WizIQ is an online education delivery platform, specializing in providing real time collaboration tools for learners in the form of audio-video communications, chat options and a whiteboarding feature, essentially setting up a virtual classroom where all members can interact with each other simultaneously.

With LearnDash-WizIQ Virtual Classroom Extension, an instructor can schedule such live sessions for his/her Courses on LearnDash. The plugin also let’s you display all the Classes scheduled and updates their statuses in real time.

LD-WizIQ view-all

Schedule Classes Your Way

LearnDash-WizIQ Extension requires your WizIQ credentials to function; which can be easily generated right from your WordPress backend in case you don’t have them.

Scheduling a class comes with a large number of versatile options, letting you choose a schedule and a format that best suits your needs. Choose an appropriate Start Date, End Date, Class Duration, max no. of attendees and also a recurrence pattern, for classes that are periodic in nature.

LD-WizIQ Add-class

Classes once scheduled aren’t necessarily rigid, cancelling or editing classes can be carried out with relative ease.

And that’s not the end of it..

LearnDash-WizIQ Virtual Classroom Extension is coded to send out automated emails to all the learners enrolled in a Course whenever you Add, Edit or Cancel a scheduled class so that they always stay on top of the game.

You can also track attendance of all your virtual classroom sessions with respect to parameters like entry time and exit time of the learner.

All Of This For FREE !!

You read that right! LearnDash-WizIQ Virtual Classroom Extension is available for direct download FREE of charge, take it for a spin and let us know how you like it in the comment section below.

For downloads, user guide and FAQs, click this link right here and say hello to virtual classrooms.

NEW LMS THEME: Pathshala (Designed for LearnDash)

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pathshala-screen

See that image there? That is the first ever WordPress theme designed by WisdmLabs. And I can’t wait to tell you all about it!

But there’s a story to this exciting development.

e-Learning on WordPress has always been one of WisdmLabs’ strongest fortes.

We handle a large number of customer queries (on a daily basis) that have us helping people with everything from setting up an LMS on their website to integrating it with various sub-systems and even developing additional plugins that extend functionality.

Many of these queries, and I mean many, have a solution that involves tweaking the existing theme so as to fit in the LMS perfectly within the website’s ecosystem. A great instance would be when, say, you need to change the template of your courses or lessons. This happens to be the case often; most online learning portals have their own personalized instructional designs for delivering courses.

But what if the theme on your website is such that it’s built ground up to maximizes the usability of an LMS on WordPress? A theme that’s built solely for the purpose of e-learning?

Pathshala is our answer to two of the most common problems of LMS management on WordPress:

  1. Not every functionality that you need to add would have you shelling out thousands of dollars just because your existing theme isn’t compatible.
  2. It makes more room for you to add even more functionality to your LMS, tens and maybe hundreds of them without your website acting like YouTube streaming on a 256Kbps connection.

Pathshala is currently optimized for LearnDash, but hey if you’d like a similar theme for your website you can just tell us!

In case you’re curious, Pathshala aptly translates to ‘school’ in Hindi.

Paathshala works with LearnDash like fire and crackers. Setting up courses, lessons, quizzes and other content for your website will be easy and can be completed within a matter of minutes. It’s all waiting in their for you.

image01 (1)

And of course, all of the extensions for LearnDash gel in just as well.

Introduced in Pathshala is Course Categories, a new feature for LearnDash users, which conveniently sorts all your courses into categories to improve on the accessibility.  

pathshala-categories

Pathshala is designed around the two best frameworks in the industry: Unyson and Bootstrap, two very good signs of excellent UI/UX. The list of all supported features is extensive, but here’s a quick sneak peek:

  • Built-in SEO Settings
  • One Click Backup/Restore
  • Dynamic Sidebars  
  • User Feedback
  • Responsive
  • M-learning Ready
  • Font Awesome Icons

It integrates flawlessly with BuddyPress and bbPress, so there’s that solution to all your elearner social media and gamification needs. Should you choose monetize things, WooCommerce is exceptionally compatible too!

Oh and for those who take up the layout as an art, Pathshala also provides for Visual Page Builder to tweak and fine-tune the look and the feel as you see fit.

Head to the theme page for more details, queries and the pricing. Better yet, take Pathshala for a test drive! Time to go to school folks!

Introducing: Group Registration for LearnDash

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New-LaunchNew Awesome Extension Alert!

First up, a big and hearty thank you to all you wonderful customers for all the love and support (and patience) that made it possible for us to reach where we are today.

In a short span of 3 eventful years, we already are proud developers of 19 solid products and numerous services in the realms of eLearning, eCommerce, event management as well as other miscellaneous domains.

2016 will present itself to be big year for us in terms of upgrading our product line-up, we have as many 10 new products and updates all set to release this year.

The first of which is already here and how!

LearnDash, possibly one of the best ways to set up a full fledged LMS on WordPress, just had a brand new extension added to its already impressive arsenal of elearning tools.

An extension that takes it leaps and bounds ahead in terms of functionalities and plausible use-cases!

The Group Registration Plugin for LearnDash is now LIVE and can be found RIGHT HERE.

Here’s The Big Deal

Just as the name suggests, Group Registration for LearnDash gives Group Leaders the power to purchase multiple licenses for a Course on behalf of a number of users, with all of them automatically enrolled for the Courses linked with the Group.

ld-group-enroll-students-1

Compare this with the default settings for LearnDash, wherein just an Admin had the rights to add Users to a LearnDash Group and link it with various Courses.

So now, if you’re company looking for a way to enroll all your employees for a Corporate Training Course, all you you have to do is designate a Group Leader who can purchase a Course and simply register all the relevant employees to it.

Or maybe you’re a part of a team that authors online courses for an eLearning portal, and need a way to register all of your student base at once to a Course authored by you.

The possibilities are endless!

How It Works

Group Registration for LearnDash is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress and LearnDash, i.e 4.4 and 2.1.5 respectively, and requires active installations of WooCommerce and WooCommerce – LearnDash Integration plugins.

It’s a straightforward process flow:

1. You download LD Group Registration Plugin, and activate it using the license key you obtain after a successful purchase.

2. While you’re setting up a Course as a WooCommerce Product to be available for purchase, you will see a checkbox which let’s you enable Group Registration, towards the end of the Product page.

screenshot-ldgroups

3. Any Course which has Group Registration enabled in the back-end, will display a similar check box on the front end during the purchase. Checking this box will allow multiple users to be enrolled for the Course by the Group Leader.

ld-group-registration-bulk-purchase

4. After a successful purchase, all a Group Leader would need to do is head over to the Group Registration page on the front end and enter the names of all the users that he wishes to enroll for the Course.

ld-group-enroll-students-1

A Group will automatically be created with all the listed members as group members, enrolled for the Course(s) associated with the group.

What You Need To Do

Check out the page for Group Registration for LearnDash to browse through the specifics, the complete list of features and the pricing plans.

You can also find screenshots of the plugin in action, so you can take a look at those and see for yourself how the plugin works!

This is only the first release, and we look forward to getting feedback from you guys so we can improve upon our work and come out with updates and exciting new features as soon as possible.

Stay Tuned!

Front End Course Creation for LearnDash: Tutoring Made Easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s real, and it’s happening.

Front End Course Creation Plugin

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

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

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

fcc-learndash-create-course-page

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

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

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

fcc-learndash-buddypress-settings

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

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

fcc-learndash-course-creation-settings

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

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

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

Happy Publishing!

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The Instructor Role Extension for LearnDash Just Got BIGGER and BETTER

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WooCommerce-scheduler-updateYes, we have updated the Instructor Role Extension for LearnDash. With this update, I promise that the plugin has definitely taken a huge leap in terms of features!!

What’s new?

Well, the extension now comes equipped with the Instructor Commission feature.

But before I get into the details of the update here’s a little bit of backstory.

Why the Instructor Commission Feature?

The main intent of the Instructor Role Extension for LearnDash was to provide users with an additional user role for their LearnDash system. A role that would have more capabilities than the ‘Group Leader’ but fewer capabilities than the ‘Administrator’.

The basic version of the plugin fulfilled this intent.

Now comes the Instructor Commission Feature.

When we introduced the basic version of the plugin to Justin from LearnDash his immediate response to us was this.

instructor-commission-justin-email-1

However, by then we were well into the development phase, and we stuck with our initial plan, that of providing the instructor role. Soon after the release, though, (just as Justin had predicted) we were inundated by quite a few of these queries.

An example of these queries is this..

instructor-commission-customer-email

And this…

instructor-commission-customer-email-2

Without a doubt, we were prompted to put the Instructor Commission feature on our priority list and here we are today  with the update.

Understanding the Instructor Commission Feature

So what does the Instructor Commission Feature exactly entail? Let’s take a look!

Once you have updated the Instructor Role extension a new sub-menu labeled ‘Instructor Commission’ will be made available under the ‘LearnDash LMS’ menu in the admin panel.  Once you navigate to ‘LearnDash LMS’ -> ‘Instructor Commission’ three tabs will be displayed on the screen.  Here’s what you will be able to do with using the three tabs.

Assigning a Commission for Instructors

In order to set instructor commission, you will have to navigate to ‘LearnDash LMS’ -> ‘Instructor Commission’ -> ‘Instructor’ tab.

Once here you a list of instructors on your website will be displayed in a table as below.

instructor-commission

Here you can set the commission percentage against each instructor and save the newly added data using the update button.

Viewing Instructor Commission Reports

A detailed report of an instructor’s earnings can be viewed by navigating to the ‘LearnDash LMS’ -> ‘Instructor Commission’ -> ‘Commission Report’ tab.

Here you will be able to view instructor specific reports by selecting a particular instructor from the ‘Select Instructor’ drop down list. Once you select an instructor and click on the submit button you can view a list of the commission amount earned by the instructor for each course sold.

instructor-commission-report-view

The ‘Paid Earnings’ is the commission amount, you have paid an instructor. And the ‘Unpaid Earnings’ provides the pending amount which has to be paid.

You can update the ‘Paid Earnings’ by clicking on the ‘Pay’ button and entering the paid amount in the text box against the ‘Enter amount’ field. An important thing to note here is that the ‘Pay’ button does not ensure the payment is made. It is just a means to update the data once you have made the payment.

instructor-commission-pay

Exporting Instructor Commission Data

Finally moving on to the last tab, as the name suggests it helps you ‘Export’ some sort of document. What document? The instructor commission report document.

Here again, the reports exported are instructor specific. Along with that, date based filtration criteria has also been provided.

instructor-commission-feature-export-csv

What are you waiting for then? Update your copy of the Instructor Role Extension for LearnDash now and enjoy the all new instructor commission feature.

Not convinced? What if I told you it will help you increase sales? Will that motivate you to click on the update button? Go! Stop reading this!

Images by freepik

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