On today’s episode, we talk about five different learning management plugins that can turn your website into an online course right here on your website engineer podcast episode #310.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today, we’ll be talking about, like I said, those five E-learning management softwares or plugins to add to your WordPress website. But I’ve got a few announcements and plugin to share with you before we get to that. The first thing is I want to let you know that WordPress 4.7 beta 2 is now out and available. This software is still in development, obviously, as it has the beta tag. It’s the second release, and some things have been changed since beta 1 which happened last week. Some of the small things are the 2017 theme wasn’t being installed on upgrades. Now, it is. So if you were upgrading from 4.6 to 4.7, they’ve fixed that. Now, 2017 is included. They edited some shortcuts; they changed some rest API endpoints. They’ve done a bunch more developer type things. There were 150 changes made since last week.

So I highly recommend just going and playing with it and getting ready to use it. I’m really so in love with the new CSS feature that’s built into the customizer, just really slick. It works really, really well. I’m excited especially because we’ll call support. A lot of times we have to tell them how to make customizations via CSS. A lot of times it’s like, okay, install jet pack. Install simple CSS or one of these other plugins that are out there that can do CSS. So it’s a step to get another plugin. They can copy and paste the code. Now, it’s just like go to customize, go to CSS settings, and paste and write in. You’ll see that live and take place right away. So I really, really like that. The other thing that I want to remind you about is that 2016 survey. It is only going to be open for a few more weeks.

Then, all of the data and results are compiled and will be shared at Word Camp U.S. in December at the State of the Word Address by Matt. It’s basically just some questions. It won’t take more than five to eight minutes or so. It’s about 16 questions or so. It basically let’s Matt and the WordPress community know how you’re using WordPress. Do you make an income off of WordPress? How much are you making? All that kind of stuff. Just some facts and figures that he can share at the State of the Word Address. I’m always really excited to see how much had grown like how many people now are making a full-time living off using WordPress or building websites for people and what not. So if you are, I guess, anyone who is listening to this podcast should go and fill out the survey.

You can find a link to it in the show notes or just go to wordpress.org. There’s a reddish orange banner at the top. It says have you taken the WordPress 2016 survey yet. Then, just click on that, and it will take you right to the form. The last thing in way of announcements is Buddy Press 2.8 development kicks off. I have to be honest; I haven’t spent a lot of time with Buddy Press or even been even aware of what’s going on in that process. It’s just another piece of software that I just don’t have time for. Buddy Press is a way to turn your WordPress website kind of into like a Facebook like a social community and what not. It is a fairly large plugin. It works a lot with a lot of other plugins and what not. So they’re starting the release. The target release date is January 21015. They’re working with a bunch of different things and what not.

If you are interested or using Buddy Press, I highly recommend just kind of getting involved there. There’ll be a link in the show notes for more information about that. And with that, let’s go on over to the plug in of the week. Today, I found one that’s called Above the Fold optimization. This plugin is a toolkit for Above the Fold Optimization that enables a Google page speed to get the 100 out of 100 score. So it is compatible with most optimizations, minifications, full page cache. It can be made compatible with any plugin by creating module extensions. Some of the supported plugins that are out there are W3Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Better WordPress Minify, and WordPress Super Minify. It just helps you get to that 100 out of 100 page score when it comes to Google and their developer kit or whatever they’re calling it now.

If this is something that’s interesting to you, it’s got more than 10,000 downloads. It allows you to minify data; it allows you to serve data from the right places and all that good stuff. So if you are interested in getting that 100 out of 100 optimization score from Google, I highly recommend checking out this plugin. All right, today, I want to talk a little bit about learning management systems. I honestly haven’t spent a lot of time with these either because I don’t have an online course anymore. When I did, I used to use Sensa. I used the very first version of Sensa when that came out a few years ago. Now, Sensa is a part of WooCommerce. So that’s the one I always thing about because it’s just the one that I’m used to that works really well with the systems and stuff that I get to work with on a day to day basis.

A lot of WordPress or a lot of WooCommerce questions that come in through our support channels have to do with Sensa because they’re all kind of related. The pieces of the puzzle all kind of relate together. But today, I’m going to talk about five of them. We’ll talk about them in just a lot of random notes. I don’t have anything like, okay, here’s all the advantages. Here’s all the disadvantages in that way. I’m just going to highlight the benefits and disadvantages. You’re going to find out that over all five of them could do pretty much the same thing. Some of the features will overlap, but there will be some features that are only in certain plugins. Today, we’re going to talk about WP Courseware. We’re going to talk about Sensa. We’re going to talk about Learn Press and Learn Dash.

The last one is Lifter LMS. Lifter LMS and Learn Press, those two are free. The other ones are premium. Even though they’re free versions, they do have some premium upgrades to just kind of extend and enhance the plugin. So we’re going to go ahead and dive in. We’ll tackle them in that order. But basically, an LMS is a learning management system. It is kind of the new technology of I want to not say of the future, but there’s a lot of courses that are going online these days. Even college courses and curriculum are being served and developed and been able to be taught online. I love taking online classes. It doesn’t matter if it’s Joe down the street created this online class about something I want to learn or from a professional institution. There’s a bunch of websites that are out there that just focus on delivering courses.

There are – I can’t even think off the top of my head, but I’m in Code School right now. Code School is one. There’s a bunch of ones that are specifically for code. There’s a lot that are just specific. You to Me is another big one that comes to mind. That’s just a platform for people to upload their courses. It’s kind of like a learning management system, but it’s not based on WordPress. But these five plugins that we’re going to talk about today are ones that you can utilize with your current website which is really nice. One of the big pain points of creating a course over on You to Me is you put your course up on You to Me, and now all your subscribers are over at You to Me. Everything is controlled by You to Me, but you’ve got your website over here on WordPress. Then, you’ve got to manage two different systems.

With these plugins, we just add them to our current version of WordPress and our blog, website, or store if we’re selling anything, all that stuff just kind of works really well together and nicely together. So the first one is called WP Courseware. Out of the box, it is a $99.00 plugin. This plugin allows you to split your course into units. So you can have content pages act like individual lessons and modules. It gives, of course, a familiar structure for students to work through at their own pace. Units are created in the same way that WordPress posts are. Within each post, you can write texts, share links, and embed media. Once you create all of your units, then WP Courseware has an intuitive drag and drop functionality that allows you to organize them in a nice logical order. You can drag and drop.

It makes it easy to rearrange those later if you find that your course is better suited to be in another order or what not. The ultimate aim of any E-course that we’re talking about is to help students learn. So WP Courseware comes with a range of built in quiz functionalities. You can add multiple choice, open ended questions, file upload if you want people to draw something and they have to upload an image or whatever. Then, you can create assessments to make sure that you’re testing your students’ knowledge to make sure they really understand a particular thing. I see this as really valuable for somebody who is teaching like a college course to make sure that you can take the online assessments after learning. It’s a little bit different like I’m thinking back to college. In college, you had to show up and listen to what the professors say.

Then, if they didn’t really make sure that you listened per se, they just made sure that you were there. This is doing a great job to making sure that you at least grasp the main concepts of what you were taught over the last module or entire lesson or what not. That’s what I like about E-learning platforms. WP Courseware also allows you to add widgets to help students track their progress. There’s a course outline widget where students can jump to specific modules and specific units. There’s a dynamic progress widget which allows a student to show how much material is remaining in the rest of the course of the current module. You can also set up WP Courseware to have drip content. So you can restrict certain modules until a later stage. You can configure their access to new modules after a fixed date or specific intervals of enrollment.

If you wanted them to only get module two after they’ve been enrolled for a week, you can do that. This is a great way to make sure that people don’t like buy your course, login, download everything, and then say I want a refund after they have all of the information. So you can kind of spread that out over several, several weeks. You can reward your students. By completing the course, you can award them with personalized certificates. They can be customized and is just kind of a nice way to say congratulations, you finished this module. Let’s see, what else? WP Courseware is developed to make money by selling your course. It has full integrations with Blue Commerce, easy digital downloads, and I theme exchange. There’s 10 integration extensions available offering compatibility with other plugins like Optimized Press, Member Press, etc.

That WP Courseware starts at $99.00 and includes one year of support and updates. It’s compatible with any WordPress theme as well. So there will be a link in the show notes to head on over to WP Courseware and find their website and all of the information. Up next is Sensa. This is a plugin that costs $129.00. It’s a plugin that’s compatible with most of WordPress themes and Woo themes and a range of – there’s some Sensa compatible themes that are out there. It splits courses a little bit differently than WP Courseware. It just breaks them into lessons. Then, the lessons are configured just like a WordPress poster page with specific lessons configured via a meta box directly below the WordPress Visual Editor. In this meta box, you can specify the length of the video.

You can give it a complexity rating; you can embed video. You can also configure a quiz that a student has to pass to mark the lesson as complete. You can control every aspect of this from the number of questions to pass marks. You can also create a question bank for each lesson. So maybe you say that you want three of the six questions to appear. So it’s kind of a random quiz for every person that’s coming through the course. The multiple-choice quizzes are graded automatically. The students receive their grades immediately. You can preconfigure marks required for each grade. So you can say they need an 80 percent pass rate to move on to the next module. For open ended questions that require a teacher’s review, the students can pick up their marks from a student dashboard area which enter remarks or grades or whatever from the dashboard area.

You can see the progress throughout the course. One of the things that sets Sensa apart from some of the other LMSs that are out there is it allows you to set pre-requisites which will allow you to sync your course with Blue Commerce products. You can charge for your courses with a payment handled by WooCommerce checkout. So you could do this with a – you could offer a free guitar lesson course after you buy a guitar from your WooCommerce E-commerce store which is pretty nice. You could do that. So you can kind of think outside of the box. They have to buy this to do this. Or they have to go through this course or whatever, then they get this course for free or whatever. There’s also analytics built in that offer insights to students’ progress. The teacher can track key metrics against all the people that are enrolled in the class. Sensa is a very capable plugin.

It can do a lot of things. There’s also a few other extensions that are out there for Sensa. There’s two paid ones that’s content drip. So you can access the content via Drip. That’s a $39.00 plugin. There’s a Badge OS is a rewards system that you can earn digital badges for the course progress. That is $19.00. Other things that you can build in with Sensa are Sensa certificates, media attachments, course progress, course participants, and share your grade. The share your grade allows students to share their lessons grades via social media. Those five are completely free. All right. The next one is called Learn Press. Learn Press is a newer plugin that is a free plugin. It’s free from the WordPress Repository. This is different. Let’s look at how this one compares to the paid versions that are out there.

Learn Press is easy to use. It comes with plenty of features as well as many free plugins. It’s fully extendable. Courses are created by just going to Learn Press in course. It looks like a WordPress Visual Editor, but the important course details are configured using meta boxes very much like Sensa is. You can start outlining the course by adding course sections and then splitting them up into individual lessons and quizzes. Each lesson or quiz is then added with a single mouse click. So you kind of build your outline first. Then, once you’ve built the outline, you can click on each individual item in the outline. It will take you to a page where you can start creating that which is kind of nice. Instead of trying to outline things and then go create a new page, it kind of allows you to do this all in one spot.

When published, the lessons are displayed in a light box which feels like a more comfortable way to learn. It basically brings the text and content out and darkens the rest of the screen. It kind of grays it out a little bit. You can really just focus on the content. In the visual editor, you can also configure important things for your course including the final assessment details including what the past score is, maximum enrollment, course duration, number of retakes permitted. You can also use this section for setting up an enrollment price. The free course supports PayPal right out of the gate. There’s extensions available for Stripe and WooCommerce as well. Other things that it also has built in is it integrates with Buddy Press or BB Press. So you can build this online forum or just a place for students to socialize and talk about their course or if they’re having any problems or struggling.

So that’s built in as well. You can just add those plugins. Learn Press has 17 add ons. Six of them are free; there’s 11 premiums. Some of the free plugins are very impressive out of the gate, but the premium ones add extra functionality. So I guess the first free one that I want to share about is pre-requisites. It allows Sensa the ability to add pre-requisites to a course. You can add co-instructors so you can have multiple teachers to a course. That’s a $30.00 extension. There’s assignments which is a $30.00 extension which allows you to set assignments for your course that students can upload to your website. There’s collections which allow you to bundle courses and sell them for one price tag. That’s a $20.00 extension. There is one called my cred, a $30.00 extension that integrates Learn Press with my cred which enables students to earn badges and points for their progress.

Learn Press is compatible with all WordPress themes. The developer has launched two Learn Press themes on Theme Course, Education WP, and E-learning WP. They each cost $59.00 each. They both look really stunning. You can check those out as well with links in the show notes. So that one is called Learn Press. Just a couple more here. The next one is called Learn Dash. This is a, I think, the most expensive one coming in at $159.00. It is an exceptional all in one learning management system for WordPress. It comes with a lot of features making it easy and possible for you to create online courses. The Learn Dash supports multi-tier courses. You can structure them by splitting them into lessons, topics, quizzes, and categories. The course content can be drip fed to students keeping them all working the same schedule.

You can restrict certain access to certain lessons by configuring pre-requisites. That’s built in just like Sensa and Learn Press with its pre-requisite course extension. Quizzes are viable for tracking progress. Learn Dash comes with built in for seven question types including multiple choice, single word, essay, drag and drop. Questions may be asked in text, audio, and video format. For more thorough assessment, you can set assignments for students to submit an uploaded document to your website. The quizzes come with cool features as well. Visitors can earn certificates and level up based on their performance. As an incentive, the top scores are displayed on public leader boards. On the back end of things, the teachers get a break down of quiz performances. They can review individual answers. They can check on overall group progress by looking at statistics by question.

Learn Dash also creates a dedicated forum for your courses. That’s just built in instead of using Buddy Press or BB Press. That will just be built in with Learn Dash. In order for your students to do this, they have to create a front-end user profile. Some of the other big features about Learn Dash – some of the selling points are the developers are actively listening for suggestions for extra features and release them as extensions. There are 21 extensions to date. 18 are free; 8 are premium. Some of them are payment gateways built in so you can pay. It integrates with Blue Commerce, Stripe, Easy Digital Downloads, I theme Exchange, Checkout, and Jigsaw. There is event expresso integration which makes it possible to offer E-courses with your live events. There’s course grid which will display your available courses in a product grids.

The visual customizer is $29.00 extension which allows you to brand your course with fully customized course content widgets and progress bars. Then, front end course creation is a $35.00 extension that lets you create courses on the front end of your website. This is more friendly than WordPress back in author. It allows you to register as a course author turning it into a full E-course marketplace. So this almost turns your Learn Dash world – yeah, Learn Dash will allow you to turn your website into like a You to Me. You can have students create courses on your own website. You can become a marketplace and sell all of them. You can take a commission or whatever. Learn Dash feels like the one that overarching has the most capabilities and is the most extensive plugin of the ones that we’ve talked about.

Lastly, Lifter LMS. This is a free plugin. It is highly regarded in the WordPress community. WordPress 101, WP 101, recently migrated all of its courses over to Lifter LMS. That’s quite the endorsement for Lifter LMS. It works like a membership website. Students register or purchase a course. They can upgrade their membership level and then access relevant content. All the course materials are assembled via the WordPress back end. The interface is straightforward letting you build your course from a series of modules to lessons. Lessons can be text, video, or audio based. You can target different learning styles. While videos are usually considered more premiums, they can justify a higher price tag. Speaking of price tags, Lifter LMS comes with a built-in shopping cart functionality which you can use to sell your courses.

It has three payment gateways that are supported: PayPal, Blue Commerce, and Stripe. Stripe is a $99.00 extension. To entice your students and boost your sales, Lifter LMS allows you to configure coupons as well. Other features that are built in are drip, quizzes, analytics, gamification. Gamification awards badges based on the students’ performances. For a free plugin, it has a lot of unique features. For starters, there are custom sidebars that allow you to add dedicated sidebar widgets to enhance your courses. Most impressively though, Lifter LMS is supported by automated email system that’s designed to boost student engagement. So student triggered automated or students trigger automated emails in a number of ways such as not logging in for a number of minutes, days, or weeks.

If you fail a module, they’ll get an email. If they leave a quiz incomplete, they’ll get an email reminder as well. If you want to upgrade to Lifter LMS Pro, it’s available for $99 per year. The Pro version primarily adds priority supports with developer promising more timely responses at a greater level of detail. Pro also supports a few extra graphics for your gamification system. So those are the five LMS systems. I have to be honest, as I’m like just talking about them, I really want to install all of them. I really want to just like start building a course I know that this is not the time. I have zero time barely to keep up with what I’m doing with work and keeping these podcasts going and spending time with my family and what not. But it’s just so exciting that online courses and teaching people online is just one of my favorite things.

That’s why I continue doing this podcast week after week. It’s just teaching and encouraging and sharing great content that’s out there. I honestly want to try these and play with them. Some time I’m going to try to fit some of this into my schedule and build a little course or do something that just allows me to play and explore and just have fun with WordPress. That’s what I wanted to share with you this week. I also want to let you know – this is just a last little announcement I forgot to say at the top of the show – Word Camp Louisville is this weekend. I will be heading there. If you are going to be in the area, please let me know. Say hi. I’ll be probably wearing a Woo Commerce shirt, or I’ll be kind of hanging out. I’ve got a session. I’m doing my Word Camp session that I’ve done for – this will be my third Word Camp this year.

It’s just about how to customize your theme the right way. I just love sharing that knowledge and spreading the word of not customizing and modifying your theme and putting everything into plugins and what not. So I’ll do that session one more time. I’ll think of a new topic to do next year. That’s what I wanted to share with you this week. We’ve got Lifter LMs. We’ve got Learn Dash; we’ve got Learn Press, Sensa, and WP Courseware are the five learning platforms we look at today. If you have any inkling to create an online course, I highly recommend checking out these plugins. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Until next week, take care. We’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.

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