Build A Learning Management System With LearnDash

Before the digital era, classes were limited to lectures whose accessibility to the common public ranged from alright to abysmal. Happily, the times have altered and it’s now simpler than ever to reach top-quality educational content from the most esteemed universities in the world and self-reliant educators having a passion for exchanging knowledge. In reality, the e-learning market globally is predicted to cross $243 billion by 2022, and the learning management system (LMS) comprises the main driver of this growth. LMSs constitute software applications that offer a range of tools for the distribution and administration of training programs and educational courses – mixed, traditional, and wholly online. Teachers frequently employ LMSs to dispatch material to their students, monitor student advancement, and handle record-keeping.

A few LMSs can be employed to supply completely online courses resembling those you might already be acquainted with from sites such as Udemy or Coursera.

Irrespective of whether you’re an educational institution or an autonomous educator, this selection of the finest self-hosted learning management system is present to aid you to distribute knowledge to people over the world.

LearnDash – A Powerful E-learning Plugin

In the e-learning space of WordPress, some plugins lead. LearnDash is among the best 3 with the other two being LifterLMS and LearnPress.

LearnDash has sufficient functionality loaded into the core, and various extensions to include more features.

Anyone who wishes to set up an LMS with WordPress, wouldn’t falter with LearnDash.

LearnDash is not a standalone LMS, unlike Moodle. LearnDash is an extension of WordPress. Certainly, it contains all learning management system capacities, though the plugin itself can’t offer students and teachers an e-learning website.

You would require WordPress to install your e-learning website.

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LearnDash – A Premier WordPress LMS

LearnDash is the leading WordPress LMS built to carry a learning management system and eLearning delivery within the WordPress open-source platform. The top choice of Fortune 500 companies, training organizations, major universities, and entrepreneurs globally for designing and selling learning systems.

You can utilize any kind of media for course content like images, audio files, SWF files, videos, HTML 5 besides more. LearnDash works ideally with any modern WordPress theme with no custom coding. It integrates conveniently with WordPress Ecommerce, bbPress, and membership plugins.

LearnDash carries its years of experience to display what industry professionals can design. Similar to LifterLMS, LearnDash also employs a drag-and-drop interface for its content builder; though the functionality is fabricated into the plugin itself.

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However, some core features are only present in LearnDash.

Create Limitless Online Courses

As the primary purpose of LearnDash is building online courses for WordPress websites, it’s wonderful to see you can publish unlimited courses. There are no restrictions on the number of lessons and quizzes you can include in your courses also.

You can employ the drag-and-drop interface to arrange your course content.

By the latest update, the LearnDash course builder has been upgraded, and the current drag-and-drop interface performs a great job of easing the process of building courses and structuring them.

Getting a clear overview of the parts of a course, with the capacity to rapidly shift lessons and quizzes to fresh locations, renders the user experience far more intuitive than a few of the other LMS plugins and solutions available. You can view for yourself the way courses and other contents appear when published by approaching the LearnDash online demo.

LearnDash permits teachers to diversify their tests and quizzes with 8 separate types of questions. Besides that, you can discover features also possessed by Lifter Learning Management System. You can create question banks to automate quizzes, drip-feed course contents, place a timer on lessons, besides more.

Courses can possess preconditions, like finishing another course on your site, and your lessons can contain quizzes, each with their personal individual passing scores. The types of quizzes include fill in the blank, sorting, free text, multiple-choice, among others. The quizzes can be timed and students who make progress are automatically bestowed downloadable certificates.

Monetary System

LearnDash presents different ways of monetizing your online course site. Your subscribers can purchase lessons individually or in a package, pay monthly, or receive all in one purchase. LearnDash allows you to license your classes for further advertising purposes. A good instance is when someone sells his or her course for company instruction.

Student Engagement

One exciting feature from LearnDash is the capacity to expire user’s entry to your lessons. This helps motivate your students to match everyone’s progress. Other features associated with student engagement comprise discussion forums, student and instructor profiles, a report book, and email notifications.

Integrations

Since your LMS platform will hardly stand-alone, your preferred plugin must support a variety of integrations with different tools and systems.

LearnDash integrates with some recognized and helpful tools:

• BadgeOS: reward custom badges for accomplishments
• Easy Digital Downloads: sell courses independently or as a package
• PaidMembershipsPro: utilize memberships features to administer access to courses
• Gravity Forms: design unique registration forms for courses containing auto-enrolment
• KB Gradebook: report grades safely
• 2CheckOut: obtain payment for courses employing 2CheckOut and also PayPal
• Experience API (Tin Can API): interact with other learning systems

LearnDash also integrates with WooCommerce.

As seen by you LearnDash has been developed to work with multiple third-party services to aid you to construct the platform needed by you.

LearnDash is being utilized by some famous names to dispatch their online courses, like USA Rugby, WP Elevation, and multiple universities and education institutions.

Powerful Administration And Reporting Tools

Building learning content is simply one part of operating an effective online course. You must also be able to handle your users and know how they’re interacting with your site.

LearnDash contains some helpful features in this sphere that both assist to empower your users and ease your role as course administrator.

For beginners, signed-in users can see their profiles on the front end of your website. They can see the number of courses present to them, how many they’ve acquired, and other information concerning their progress, all by a single easily accessible portal.

The reporting tools even permit administrators to speedily see the actions of individual users, including the period they’ve spent on a course, how they’ve done on quizzes, and their general progress through the content that’s present to them.

It’s worth noticing that many of the reporting features are offered through the ProPanel module that exists on the top 2 license options, though not the entry-level plan.

LearnDash also possesses the capacity to dispatch email notifications related to specific triggers, aiding to automate a few of the tasks concerned with running online courses. Some instances of these triggers comprise: When new content is present to users; whether access to a course is on the verge of expiring; and whether a user hasn’t logged in for a specific period.

Useful User Documentation

This whole helpful functionality includes a cost, and that’s the time needed to really know this plugin and get the maximum from it.

Happily, LearnDash is equipped with plenty of online documentation to aid you to begin, and then build an improved knowledge of how the plugin functions and what you can achieve with it.

LearnDash Facebook Group

LearnDash users can exchange tips and advice within the Facebook group.

Apart from the instructional content present on the LearnDash website, the plugin embeds a few helpful tutorial videos into your WordPress Dashboard to aid you to begin. A Facebook is also present for LearnDash users for members to discuss the finest practices and exchange tips.

Pricing

LearnDash is a paid LMS plugin. It includes 3 plans, though all of them contain the same features. The distinction is that each can uphold a separate number of websites. For one site, you have to pay $159. The second alternative is $229 for 10 sites. The final plan needs you to pay $369 and in return, you receive 25 sites. Regarding that, LearnDash is ideal for schools or colleges that wish to transfer their services to the web.

Wrapping Up

LearnDash contains all the features you would hope for from a plugin of this kind. The huge number of supported integrations will truly benefit those who wish to enlarge the functionality of their WordPress-powered LMS system and possess the capacity to sell and handle entry to their courses with plenty of flexibility. If you are a developer attempting to decide which LMS to employ for your e-learning site – or your client – you truly can’t achieve better than LearnDash.