Laura Vaquero – Introduction to LearnDash

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

Have you ever been curious about how to set up an online course? Here is your opportunity to explore the world of online learning with this introduction to one of the most popular learning platforms, LearnDash LMS.

Discover its power to create engaging courses effortlessly. Learn about its key features and how they can help you create, manage, and deliver online courses tailored to your audience’s needs.

You’ll also gain insight into LearnDash’s robust reporting capabilities, allowing you to monitor student progress and course success effortlessly.

Through compelling case studies, Laura showcases real-world examples of LearnDash in action, illustrating how individuals and organizations leverage its power to transform their online learning initiatives.

In this enlightening session, Laura Vaquero will equip you with the knowledge and inspiration to harness the full potential of online learning and elevate your initiatives to new heights.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Laura Vaquero is a Senior Developer at Kanuka Digital—a Platinum Certified WooExpert partner agency—and a LearnDash Certified Expert. With a professional career spanning over 15 years, she has specialized in WordPress since 2010. Working across a diverse range of clients and industries, Laura has a wealth of experience delivering enterprise-level WordPress solutions.

Originally hailing from Spain, she has made her home in the UK for the past 17 years. Beyond her professional endeavors, she is a devoted mother to two children and enjoys spending her free time outdoors.

SUMMARY

Introduction to LearnDash

E-learning has become increasingly popular as a way to deliver educational content. LearnDash, a highly acclaimed learning management system (LMS) plugin for WordPress, has emerged as a top choice for individuals and organizations looking to create and manage online courses. This comprehensive overview will delve into the key features, benefits, and case studies that highlight the power and flexibility of LearnDash.

LearnDash provides users with a wide range of features to create dynamic and engaging online courses. These features include assessments, quizzes, certificates, and the ability to integrate e-commerce plugins for selling courses. Furthermore, LearnDash is highly customizable, allowing users to seamlessly integrate it with other WordPress plugins and themes. Whether you are a freelance educator, a small business, or a large corporation, LearnDash offers the tools and capabilities needed to develop a successful online learning platform.

Why Choose LearnDash for a Learning Site?

One of the primary reasons why LearnDash has gained immense popularity is its user-friendly interface. With its intuitive, drag-and-drop course builder, even those with limited technical knowledge can effortlessly create and manage courses. This ease of use ensures that educators can focus on the content and delivery of their courses, rather than grappling with complex technical processes.

Beyond its user-friendly interface, LearnDash also has a wide range of powerful features that are crucial for effective online learning. These features include progress-tracking tools, complex quiz creation options, and the ability to customize the learning experience. Whether you are an individual instructor or an organization, LearnDash offers flexibility in adding content and tailoring the learning experience to suit the unique needs of your target audience.

Another advantage of LearnDash is its versatility in monetizing online courses. Educators can choose to sell courses individually, offer subscriptions, or create membership sites. This flexibility allows for a variety of revenue models, ensuring that educators can monetize their expertise in a way that aligns with their goals and target audience.

Furthermore, LearnDash features a strong support system and an active community of users and developers. Should any issues arise, users can rely on the LearnDash support team for prompt assistance. Additionally, the community of users and developers provides a platform for sharing ideas, best practices, and troubleshooting tips. This collaborative environment ensures that educators using LearnDash are well-supported throughout their online teaching journey.

Key Features of LearnDash

To truly understand the power and capabilities of LearnDash, it is essential to delve into its key features. These features enable educators to structure content, manage students, track progress, and create engaging assessments. Let’s explore some of the crucial features that make LearnDash a leading LMS plugin.

Structured Content Organization

One of the defining features of LearnDash is its ability to structure content into courses, modules, and topics. This hierarchical organization allows educators to present their content in a logical and coherent manner, ensuring that learners can navigate through the material easily. By breaking down courses into modules and topics, educators can provide a clear learning path, enhancing the overall learning experience.

Customized Course Settings

LearnDash offers a range of customizable course settings to suit the unique needs of educators and learners. Administrators can set start and end dates for courses, release schedules for modules and topics, and even establish course prerequisites. These settings enable educators to control the pace at which learners progress through the material, ensuring that they acquire knowledge in a structured and meaningful way.

Diverse Assessment Options

Assessments play a vital role in measuring learner progress and evaluating comprehension. LearnDash offers a diverse range of assessment options, including quizzes and certificates. Educators can create interactive quizzes with various question types, scoring options, and feedback mechanisms. Additionally, LearnDash allows for the issuance of certificates upon successful completion of courses, providing learners with a tangible reward for their efforts.

Student Management Features

Efficiently managing students is crucial for any online learning platform, and LearnDash offers robust student management features. Administrators can group students together, assign group leaders, and effortlessly track student progress. This feature is particularly useful for organizations that need to manage learners in teams or departments. By grouping students, educators can tailor the learning experience to specific groups, ensuring that content and assessments are relevant and targeted.

Robust Reporting and Tracking Tools

To gauge the success of courses and monitor learner progress, LearnDash provides administrators with robust reporting and tracking tools. These tools enable educators to analyze student data, track completion rates, and identify areas for improvement. By gaining insights into learner performance, educators can refine their courses, enhance engagement, and deliver a more effective learning experience.

Extensibility through Integrations and Add-ons

LearnDash’s extensibility is a key feature that sets it apart from other LMS plugins. With a vast array of integrations and add-ons available, educators can enhance the functionality and capabilities of their online learning platform. Whether it’s integrating with popular e-commerce plugins to sell courses or incorporating interactive learning tools, LearnDash offers endless possibilities for customization and enhancement.

Case Study 1: WineSure

To illustrate the real-world application and effectiveness of LearnDash, let’s explore a case study involving WineSure, a wine distributor. WineSure needed to transition its face-to-face training program to an online format, and LearnDash provided the perfect solution.

WineSure’s online training program features a single course with multiple modules and topics, accessible only to logged-in users. The content is presented in various formats, including videos and interactive elements, creating an engaging and immersive learning experience. Although the course has a fixed learning path, students have the flexibility to revisit past lessons, reinforcing their understanding of the material.

Student management for WineSure is streamlined through the grouping of users by company. This approach allows administrators to efficiently manage access and progress tracking for their employees. In the case of employees leaving the company, access can easily be revoked, ensuring that sensitive training materials remain secure.

Case Study 2: GS Yuasa Academy

Another case study that highlights the versatility of LearnDash features GS Yuasa Academy, a battery manufacturing company with a global workforce. GS Yuasa Academy offers 22 courses in multiple languages to cater to its diverse employee base.

Courses at GS Yuasa Academy primarily consist of video-based content, divided into modules and topics. Some courses have prerequisites, allowing learners to progress through the material in a structured manner based on their job roles. Student management at GS Yuasa Academy is done by grouping users by company and providing a custom dashboard to manage companies, teams, and student progress. Additionally, custom reports and extended LearnDash functionality were developed to meet the specific requirements of GS Yuasa Academy.

Demonstration of LearnDash Features

To provide a hands-on understanding of the capabilities of LearnDash, the presentation included a demonstration of key features and functionalities. Attendees were guided through the LearnDash admin interface, showcasing the process of creating and managing courses, modules, and topics.

Furthermore, the presentation highlighted the configuration of course settings, such as access, prerequisites, and certificates. Attendees learned how to build engaging quizzes and tests, exploring various options for question types, scoring, and feedback.

The student management features of LearnDash were also showcased during the demonstration. Participants discovered how to track student progress, issue certificates, and assign user roles.

Finally, the presentation showcased the custom dashboards and reporting capabilities developed for the case study clients. Attendees witnessed how these features allow administrators to gain valuable insights into learner performance, track completion rates, and improve the overall effectiveness of their online courses.

Conclusion

In conclusion, LearnDash is an exceptional learning management system plugin for WordPress, offering a comprehensive set of features and capabilities. Its user-friendly interface, powerful out-of-the-box features, and flexibility in customization make it an excellent choice for educators and organizations alike.

The case studies discussed in this presentation demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of LearnDash in creating engaging and effective online courses. Whether it’s transitioning a face-to-face training program to an online format, managing a global workforce’s training needs, or delivering courses in multiple languages, LearnDash provides the tools and functionality to meet unique requirements.

By leveraging LearnDash’s structured content organization, customizable course settings, diverse assessment options, robust student management features, and extensive reporting and tracking tools, educators can create and deliver exceptional online learning experiences.

In an era where online education is rapidly growing, LearnDash stands out as a powerful and reliable solution for anyone looking to provide high-quality, engaging, and effective online courses. With its continuous development, strong support system, and active community, LearnDash remains at the forefront of the e-learning revolution.

RESOURCES

• Websites: www.kanukadigital.com
• Email: laura@kanukadigital.com
• Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lQx9TKW2eeT4Iahgfpf3yvfa7_cPDRO4wuwEqDE6nko/
• Follow: https://www.instagram.com/KanukaDigital

TRANSCRIPTION

Rob Watson:

Welcome everyone to the third Thursday Meetup of the West Orlando WordPress meetup group I’m Rob Watson a co-organizer and host West Orlando WordPress is an official WordPress Meetup Group affiliated with the WordPress Orlando and word Camp us meetup groups have you ever been curious about how to set up an online course here’s your opportunity to explore the world of online learning with this introduction to one of the most popular learning platforms learn dlms discover its power to create engaging courses effort effortlessly learn about its key features and how they can help you create manage and deliver online courses tailored to your audience’s needs you’ll also gain insight into learn Dash’s robust reporting capabilities allowing you to monitor student progress and course Success effortlessly Through compelling case studies we’ll showcase real world examples of learned Dash in action illustrating how individuals and organizations leverage its power to transform their online learning initiatives in this enlightening session Laura V vakero will equip you with the knowledge and inspiration to harness the full potential of online learning and elevate your initiatives to new heights Laura bakero is a senior developer at Kuka digital a platinum certified woo expert partner agency and a learn Dash certified expert with a professional career spanning over 15 years she has specialized in WordPress since 2010 working across a diverse range of clients and industries Laura has a wealth wealth of experience and delivering Enterprise level WordPress Solutions originally hailing from Spain she has made her home in the UK for the past 17 years Beyond her professional Endeavors she is a devoted mother to two children and enjoys spending her free time Outdoors at this point I’d like to invite everyone to mute their microphones for the presentation Laura thank you for being our presenter this evening the time is now yours

Laura Vaquero:

thank you welcome to introduction to leas LMS one secondes move yes I’m laa vakero yeah I’m from Spain I live in England I have been working with WordPress since 2010 and with Landa since 2016 I’m currently a senior developer at kanuka digital Kuka digital is a web agency specializing WordPress we design develop e-commerce stores learning sites and portolio websites we are certified by W commer and lers as Brian said in this talks I’m going to I’m going to give you a short explanation of what is lendas why is a good choice for learning the for a learning site and it’s key features and benefits then I’m going to explain to you to you two real life cases St this and to finish I’m going to show you learn dance and how to use it to manage a Lear a learning s to do this I will use the websites from the two cases to this then I you will be able to ask me any questions that you might have at the end so what is landar us it is a a popular learning management system plugin for WordPress it is used to create and manage online courses it provides a wide range um of um feates like assessments quiz and certificates also if integrated with an e-commerce plugin it give you the ability to sell those courses it is highly customizable and integrates with other plugins and themes well this allows you to easy tailor The Learning Experience to your specific business needs so why to choose learn dance for a learning site it is easy to use with his intuitive interface especially it’s drag and drop course Builder it comes with a powerful features out of the books like the ability to build complex quizzes with progress tracking tools it allows you flexibility when it comes to adding content to your courses and it use WordPress blog editor so you might be familiar with it already it is easy to customize in see it integrates simly with many themes and plugins it is possible to sell courses individually offer subscriptions or create membership sites just by installing e-commerce plugins like wmer it offers good customer support support and there is a large and active community of users and developers that can help you so what are is a key features it is easy to structure the content into different courses modules and topics it is possible to set a starting and ending dates for courses or releasing schedules for the content is a possible to set course prerequisites meaning for example that a student can take a course until it has passed another it offers a different ways to test the knowledge of the students and this can be different for each piece of information it it gives you the ability to award and create certificates it is possible to manage the students by grouping them and assigning a group leader it helps a lot it has tool and sorry it has tools and report to be able to track a students progress and course success it is easy to add the ability to sell your content in different formats for example you might want to sell your courses with an a one time purchase or you might want to offer subscriptions on membersip as developer I love it is possible to stend it functionality and sorry and there are multiple Integrations and them already a available to work with lenda sites sorry IP one so let’s see cases do this so I’m going to present you two real life case studies to demonstrate learn us the first case stud is wi Shure wi Shure is a a win distributor pbook training program initially deliver as traditional face Toof face training for the clients they came to um they came to us to look looking for an online alternative the course is is same other client service staff with the knowledge needed to guide customers inting wine and serving them with confidence the site has only one course splitting many modules and topics they wanted the training contain only Contin only available for Lo log it in uses as this is a perk that they give to their clients sorry they they want the man I’m sorry they wanted to present the content in different formats in some cases needing best PLS to add it and look more Dynamic it has a fixed learning path meaning that all students access the content in the same order going forward however it is possible to Revis it past lessons they wanted to add a bit of sporic content by giving the students random facts relating to the content in between topics we build this by customizing learn dance C navigation and therefore extending it functionality excuse me one second have something in myo anyway so they also needed to group and manage the student by company as were only having access to their clients and they also wanted to remove um uses um after the client leaves to achieve this we sending WordPress user roles and we will them a Spoke dashboard to manage the students contracted progress show you all of this in a minute on the demo so my second case student is jasa and GS academ yasa is a battery Manufacturing Company their Online Academy is the first battery training program to partner with the Institute of motor industry and it provides Technical Training and accreditation official accreditation the end there are 22 courses available in F language the courses are a to garage and techicians so as you can see it’s completely different to the previous case study the content is mostly video format and it’s splitting modules and the site enroll students in different courses depending on of the their their job role however some courses are mandatory in order to access others so it’s different ways to to learn inside the website they also need H to group and manage their students and by company as the clients will manage their own students again to achieve this we need to to add new work user roles and we build them at B spoke dashboard to manage companies teams and students to track a student progress they requested has B book reports and that we be lending learn functionality okay so this is go press and as you can see and just away these panels here are from lendas to give you I was talking about the reporting functionalities it gives you a an overview of what is going on how many students you have what they have been doing lately how many courses this by the way is um wio um website this is wio how it looks like it has um eight modules inside the the course and you can go to any of them and then this is the topics as as you can see it structures the content of the website until you get to the actual content of the course and with navigation in this case it’s highly customiz it by by us because the way it navigate is what I was talking about when I said they had a fixed learning path but coming back again to the back end we can see apart from the reports here what is going on we have a new item on the menu L us LMS the first one is the setup a general one and in St way you can just go to courses and here you can create your courses Ed your courses manage them same way that you can do with a page so if we edit for example the course this is the the course page it will will be the introduction to the course when you see it on the on the front end in this case it doesn’t have it so we can I cannot show you but if you go dashboard is general for other plugins to add metab boxes here and information well here is General about the page already had some something interesting like Associated content is the content that is ass associated with this course but if we go to the Builder is when the fan starts here we have all the modules for this course and if we click here and span we will see all the topics of them we can add new ones we can edit them we can move them change the order I believe we lost the audio and the video there we go we lost you just for a second there if you want to go back to kind of just starting where you were at this page that’d be great okay sorry about that it’s yeah my internet sometimes dips down don’t know anyway I was talking about the Builder um tab for for courses and once you are here on this page let me let me close it again the first thing that you can see with the mark with a M on the green circle is the is the modules of the course all the modules that compon the course you can move them change the order it’s it’s an easy way to to change the the learning path of this course in this case so if we open if we click one of them to open we’ll see in red the top topics CU remember in this case it’s a structure like course modu topics it’s like having a book and then you have the chapters and and then you have sub chapters inside something like that to make it easy for for a students to to go through the information and I was saying that and you have the topics and at the end of this modu you have a quiz actually I a little exam that the students have to pass in order to progress to the next one and you can add this quiz at the end of a module at the end of a topic at the end of the course in this case um for one sure it is at the end of each module and at the end of the course so if um if I see you show you as well the settings for the for the course there different ways to access the course because it can be open for free for everyone and you you might need to buy it a recurrent might be close and be a private course so there’s different options here that you can select you can also select the pre requisites if we had more courses you can um change that and say you cannot do this course until you have done the other one also you can set points for the courses um and as I was saying before as well you can set starting dates and end dates limit of students it’s loads of uh options here to to tailor the what you want to do with with the en learning website and also one one that is also quite useful is you can assign a certificate once the user have completely the completely the course they can get a certificate and and something that prove that they have gone through that so that’s more or less yeah also I was saying about different H learning paths and flexibility in this case is linear so you have to go from the model one to model two model three from topic one to topic two topic three but it could be free form and you can jump all over the place with a n say navigation and go for a first module and then the third one and then back to the first one and jump around so it’s it’s up to you how you want to configure this as I said if you go back to the website in this cases and eight modules with an exam at the end and you go through the topics and it’s just a little bit of information these are just blocks St away as I’m loging if I want to edit this is a topic in this case is model one topic introduction to um sorry model one introduction to Wi topic alcohol fermentation so all of this website is all about wine but we can straight away click here edit topic and we are editing the topic that we want and this is just um WordPress blocks so here we have a container in this case and we have a paragraph an image all standard blocks in this topic but can be more different ones and if you go back you have the whole list of topics that is just here on the menu and it tell you what is the course they belong to and what module and who who create it you can draft it like normal Pages same as we have done it before in any page Post in WordPress May so I say you have courses you have modules you have topic it’s just a different way to call bits of a content and yeah the way usually to set up a course is you set up a the the course first the name of the course basic settings and the easy way to set this is you just leave it like that and then create the the module and the topics and go you know where work your way up from topics to the course because it’s much easier to assign for example you can do everything from your track and drop on the course like we saw before but it’s easier to assign the settings here this is a topic we go for settings same video things but then it’s associ course and you just need to select the course and the module and release immediately if if you want it and that’s it that joins it and adds this topic to the course editor Builder that we saw here add is in the right place and everything so that’s the basic about the content then we have this other part that is a about test questions certification and groups again this is the way they call the quiz and you can have as many as you want it with as many questions as you want it again easy to create a question separated and then adding them to the to the test if we go to the questions for example it tells you the the type of question where is assigned create one the title is just for the administrator h same here and that’s actually the question and we scroll down and it’s different options that you can have here let’s add a new one I think this question and then answers you can have different options here that’s what I was trying to show you you you put um the answer and is sorry some settings yeah you selected the final test for example you go back and the answers if it’s correct it can allow you to have HTML if you want it so you can add media as well any extra information that you want and then you can give it points uh different options in terms of how evaluates if we go back to the course to the test let’s leave that one we are editing now a quiz and we have again the Builder with all the questions we can order them but on the settings there this this fun settings like the passing score so to pass this this quiz the student has to get at least 50% right otherwise it fails and you can also add a certificate for this quiz at the end and limit the time so more things but there also quite interesting ones about um let me find you yeah the controls of how it looks like the quiz you can have it that start straight away way or you can have a button that say start quiz start complet out of the if it shows you the all the questions straight away it can give you one question at a time or it can give you all of them it can give you the questions in a specific order or in a random order it can give you you can select here okay like here I have 12 questions but only display six randomly pick from from the pool of 12 questions and it’s these kind of things that makes the the quiz much more interesting and complex so it gives a quite a nice feeling for that for testing the the knowledge of the of the users again H at the end of the quiz you can show the results to the student say you got this many questions wrong but you can see the questions that are wrong so you fail this question so you can also show show the student the right question and the way the right answer for that question so all of these things it helps you depends on what you want to give your students depends of for what is the course for example if you’re going to give a certificate or something or it’s just it’s just for them to learn so there’s loads of settings and configurations here that makes landas quite powerful for the for the quiz so after that H I’m going to show you as well certificates for example you can create them and it’s reasonably easy you upload an image and then overlays HL on top of that so you can add the name of the student who is a word days and and what date the name of the course cannot all that information for the for the certificate and then see it I’m going to show you the certificate actually from the the spoke dashboard that we build for them so I was talking before about them they have different uses here and it shows you how many modules have completed it shows you the progress for example if you click there you can see the progress this student has passed everything if I click here I can see the certificate and they can save it with the name of the student with the cost what date it pass it and it keeps Frozen there for them once they have passed the the course you can see on the progress how many questions they have failed how many test they have passed how many times they have to try to get it right I I’ll be back to to this dashboard but coming back to to the back end we have the certificates there and we just assign it and again you have the groups if you want to group in the the students you have also challenge exams assignments that you can create notifications and reports this something quite interesting so you can export the uses C data export the uses and all of this is information in terms of the reports actually from the dashboard you can export them as well you can filter them by courses by modules by starting dates and once once you have filtered them and you can see them it’s a way to download them I think because yeah you click here it downloads the information for you as a CSV file and basically this is landas on the back end so in this example for example I was showing you in terms of the dashboard that we build for them extending the functionality of lendas all these functions CU when you click here you can edit the account change passwords in you you have action different things in this case for example the red ones are the inactive users because this customer was very keen of after a a client left or a St a member of the staff left they don’t have access to the to the course anymore so it’s a way to to time them and and find them and eventually delete them well and I was talking about we are grouping students here by companies we will the ability to this is a cust taxonomy for for for the courses so you can have different companies and this is for venues and restaurants so they have the restaurants and the restaurants link to the company and the people and the staff the students link to the venues so you actually can know here how many people for example work on the boting and if they leave and if it’s no longer the cine you can remove them and stop giving them access so that that concludes a little bit showing the demo for wi sh but before leaving I wanted to show you as well youa because one sure it was only one course if if I saw you then one course different modules straight forward with a final test well for example J Academy was 22 uh courses so much more information here they just dividing them modules but they added the the extra difficulty of five languages so they are all translated the quizzes are translated the questions are translated everything on this on this website is translated and we need with the multilingual plin so we can see one of the CES and this is more kind of the one sh is highly customized on the theme but for example yasa has their own custom theme but the look of where in yasa is more the standard look from lendas so this is for example this is a course it’s all video content sorry it’s because it’s my local it doesn’t display the video otherwise you will see someone explaining about batteries and how electricity works so um once you go down the the intro that we saw before about the the course then you have the different modules and the test and this is the standard H way to display this from for granders with the green t the green ticks on the side and everything and also with the navigation we were talking about a free free going up and down in the modules in this case you can do it but you can still navigate to the next module or to the previous one and see how how it works if I try I told you there was some prerequisite is and this are the mandatory courses if I don’t have them they it shouldn’t let me do some of these other courses they said course State not started so haven’t even started this and it has support materials this and sometimes I’m an administrator I don’t have to there a a button that said enroll into the course because users need to enroll into the courses again let me see if I can show you using WordPress users to Ed profile this is on the back end and it shows you how many courses is enrolled the user is automatically enrolled to all the courses in this case and it go it can go through all of them but I could remove that enrollment if I so you one sh this is the kind of screen that you will get use rolling courses and this are the courses that he can enroll and he’s not enrolled yet you just select them and move them for example if I go the other way around now he’s not enrolling anything I say well I want him to en roll on wi sh so I move it there and still gives me all the information about the progress of this user can also delete the data but the wars knew that is permanent so once you delete it is is deleted it’s quite useful to fix things sometimes because you can just remove one one qu that is blocking something okay going back to to this one so if you see with this different way to navigate but if we see now the dashboard it looks quite similar but you will see the the information in another way it has all the progress details it has all the courses that that person is enroll to how is he doing if he’s moving across or just not doing anything last time loads and again you can uh do some actions with it like SE and roll courses Al in this case they have I’m not going to click because I delete the data so it’s not going to have any data but it had the ability to download a report similar to this table and it’s a combination with all the information that learn has had and it’s specifically the information they want in how many courses when they finish when they start taking it how long they were working with a with a course before they they move to the next one or they finish so quite quite a lot of useful information here and this one for example again has different companies that they manage you could create a different one filter them and had teams and you could invite members because part of this was to have a Facebook registration so when someone someone register themselves for data protection and give you the the right to use the data so students have to register to in this website and they enter the details and they use a code in this case code for identifying the the team that work as um a password in this case all of this I’m explain now is a best functionality built on top of of a Lear D but that help to build this kind of learning sites and and expand the what they could do as I explained at the beginning lend us just alone without anything of this is quite powerful and it gives you quite a lot of options and I think more or less this finish my demonstration at the moment so I’m going to stop sharing

Rob Watson:

thank you so much this has been a fascinating look into how this all works I’ve actually done this myself so I’ve I’ve got a lot of curiosity on this thank you for your time yeah I hope you have load of questions after yes