WordPress has become one of the leading CMSs for e-learning sites throughout the years. This was possible because of so many factors such as its easiness to merge with other plugins. WordPress led to the development of LearnDash. LearnDash is a corporate training and skill development learning management system. LearnDash development has facilitated and relished e-learning for everybody. The future for e-learning is bright as advancements in fields like artificial intelligence and virtual reality are increasing.
Pre-requisites
To follow this tutorial, it is crucial that you already know how to:
– Set up WordPress on your site.
– Install LearnDash on your WordPress site.
Firstly, the nature of WordPress as a content management system offers a unique benefit in terms of course administration. Secondly, WordPress offers an easy place for employees to train and improve business skills through the website of a firm. Thirdly, for organizational training, WordPress makes it easy to include custom plugins such as LearnDash. Lastly, the combination of WordPress and LearnDash is better than open-source and cloud-based LMSs because of its easiness to bring the e-Learning experience to an organization.
How to set up an Employee Training And Management Platform with LearnDash
The following steps are to be followed carefully to set up your employee training and management platform with LearnDash on WordPress.
- Step #1 Pick an eLearning theme.
- Step #2 Set up Instructors to create and manage courses with WISDM Instructor Role.
- Step #3 Import Demo content for initial courses set up.
- Step #4 Set up student groups with designated group leaders, with WISDM GR.
- Step #5 Set up a learner-instructor networking system with BuddyPress.
- Step #6 Set up forums for group discussions with bbPress.
- Step #7 Set up your payment gateway integration plugin.
- Step #8 Set up any additional Plugins you might need.
- Membership plugin
- Quiz/assignment reporting plugin
- Email marketing integration plugin
#1 Pick an eLearning theme
After installing WordPress and the LearnDash plugin, it’s now time to install an appropriate theme for your site. A theme is a WordPress package that beautifies your site and enables you to do further customization on the looks of your website.
We will be using the eLumine theme which is a LearnDash theme focused and equipped with a Unyson page builder. The eLumine theme is both recommended and advantage to corporate training for the reasons below:
– It comes with a ready-to-use starting site template.
– It is simple to modify to meet the needs of your company.
– It gives several layouts to focus on the details of the LearnDash course page.
– It offers an advanced course and quiz module for LearnDash, as well as a complete gamification experience.
– It has a responsive layout that adapts to all device screen sizes.
– It improves the readability of your courses and provides a fantastic look and feel for your students to appreciate by encouraging student involvement.
– It also offers a variety of color options from which to pick or use a new one by importing easy CSS custom color files.
Theme Installation and Activation
- Go to the Admin Dashboard of your website.
- Navigate to Appearance > Themes.
- Click Add New button.
- Now click on the Upload Theme button.
- Upload the zip file and click Install Now.
Please note that this method requires certain conditions to be met, such as the PHP Memory limit should be 256M and Max upload file size should be 64M. Refer to this link for more details.
Next, you will need to activate the eLumine theme and you do that with the following steps:
- Once the theme is active, you should see a new menu item called WisdmLabs License Options.
- Open this page and enter the license key against eLumine theme.
- Now, click Activate.
- You are now ready to use eLumine and will see notifications on the website whenever an update is released.
- Please remember to take a full backup of your website before updating the theme.
- Having issues activating the theme? Connect with us here.
You’re fine to go if you follow the procedures outlined above. If you are having trouble installing the theme, please see our theme installation guide here.
#2 Set up Instructors to create and manage courses with WISDM Instructor Role
Your e-Learning business will need instructors with different privileges, especially for corporate training. The instructor will manage the entire course modules and reduce workloads for the admin.
WISDM Instructor Role for LearnDash handles instructorship allocation. It lets you set up Course Instructors who can create, manage, and sell courses, without sharing admin privileges. The instructor role reduces, the workload of managing the entire e-Learning platform for the admin. By doing this saves you time and energy that you can use to focus on other vital aspects like marketing, growth, etc. of your LearnDash website.
To set up an instructor who can create and manage all your courses within your LearnDash you have to follow the steps below:
Creating the Registration Form
– To create a new registration form, click on Add New button.
You will find yourself on a page which looks like the picture below. Give a suitable title and choose for your instructor’s registration form the relevant form fields.
Click on the Form Settings tab to set user registration settings once all the fields have been added.
On this page, Set the Default User Role setting to Instructor and click on the Create Form button.
Deploying the Instructor Registration Form
Again when the form has been generated, copy the shortcode by clicking on the clipboard icon next to the Update Form and Preview button.
After this, create a WordPress Page or edit an existing one, depending on where you want to display your Instructor Registration Form.
Now, insert a new shortcode block to the page and paste the copied shortcode in the shortcode block on that page.
Then hit Publish or update the page.
Test your LearnDash Instructor Registration Form
After completing the above steps, visit your page and you will find your Instructor’s registration form with the fields you set up.
Fill all the essential fields and click on Submit.
#3 Import Demo content for initial courses set up
Doing all the initial setups yourself could be tedious, however, the eLumine theme offers a demo data import advantage. This process installs the essential pages that come with the theme on your site.
Once you initialize the process of importing demo data, you are presented with three styles that you can choose from namely, the Classic LMS Demo, the Single Instructor LMS Demo, and the Master Course LMS Demo. This is the more reason you should buy the eLumine theme for your LearnDash setup.
Things to remember before installing eLumine demo content
– Make a thorough backup of your website before installing the sample content so that you can simply restore it to the previous stage if something goes wrong.
– LearnDash is a premium plugin that is not included with the theme. As a result, before installing the demo material, ensure that LearnDash is installed and enabled.
– If the LearnDash plugin is not active when demo material is installed, LearnDash-related data (such as courses) will not be imported.
– Make sure your upload directory has standard WordPress file and folder permissions, i.e. the theme should be allowed to receive and store files like images and videos in the upload directory.
– If you want to install content linked to a BuddyPress plugin, please make sure the plugin is active before you begin demo installation.
Demo Installation
Minimal: The course, goods, etc. are not actually necessary, but simply the most basic items like menus, thematic settings, sample pages, widgets, etc.
Full Without Website Reset: The whole demo contents will be imported to make it precisely like the demo site of eLumine. If you have an existing website, the current information won’t be removed, but new data is created.
Caution: This is not ideal because the sample material was created for websites with no current content. Because you may encounter various difficulties, such as Course-Lesson associations being lost in demo courses imported and other similar concerns, taking a database backup is strongly advised.
Full With Website Reset: Removes all current material and substitutes it with fresh content.
#4 Set up student groups with designated group leaders, with WISDM GR.
You will need to distribute your students in groups when you start your corporate e-learning program. In addition, you must appoint leaders and instructors to such groups.
The Plugin provides the benefit of handling group student registration, assigning Leaders to Groups, managing class registrations, and seeing progress reports with the premium LearnDash Group registration plugin.
That is why the WISDM GR plugin is necessary and is recommended for you.
A standard group option is available for LearnDash, so why pick our plugin? The WISDM GR Plugin allows you to even register students in a bulk and accelerate course registration using LearnDash LMS’s finest Group management feature.
- To implement this, on the dashboard click on groups and then click on add new.
This would give you the interface to create and assign group leaders to a group.
After creating the group, navigate to groups and you will see the just created group.
Use the edit as block option to add a group leader to a group from the list.
Now the group has a group leader, let us proceed to install other relevant plugins to our learning management system.
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