LearnDash

LearnDash is, perhaps, the most popular and known learning management system for WordPress. It has been around for quite some time now. It is very well-supported and used by many educational institutions, smaller course creators and more.

Key Features of LearnDash

Let’s run through some of the key features of LearnDash 3.0 that make it quite a powerful platform.

#1 – Drag-And-Drop Course Builder

LearnDash creates 3 new core post types: Courses, Lessons and Topics. Courses are, of course, pretty obvious. Then, within each course, you have one or more lessons. And, optionally, you can even break a lesson up into multiple topics.

The Course Builder allows you to quickly assemble the overall structure of your course using drag-and-drop. You can add lessons, section headers, topics, and quizzes very quickly. You can reorder them around to make sure you have the overall outline in place of your course.

What I like to do is outline my course in Dynalist. Then, I will use the course builder in LearnDash to quickly put together the skeleton of the course. Right from the builder, I can quickly click into individual lessons to put together the content.

#2 – Advanced Quiz Builder

LearnDash has a pretty powerful quiz builder, too. It isn’t something I am currently using inside the LAB, but it is nice to know it is there if I decide to use it in the future.

The quiz functionality is also quite developed as well. LearnDash is used in a lot of pretty official learning sites where quiz functionality is literally part of their grade or even professional certifications. So, quizzes need to be secure and flexible.

You have a lot of different question types available…

You can set up your quiz questions, correct answers, and all settings right from a quiz builder which operates a lot like the Course Builder (pictured above).

You can issue certificates when they get a passing score. You can use a quiz as a gateway to unlocking further content. You can put time limits on quizzes, allow retakes (or not). You can put custom fields on a quiz to collect custom data from your students before they take the quiz. You can even show leaderboards of student grades.

It is VERY robust.

#3 – Strong Access Control

LearnDash has built-in course access control… OR you can use it alongside any membership site plug-in and let the membership handle things.

Built right into LearnDash, you can:

• Allow open access, so anybody can take it.
• Free, so they need to be registered, but can access the course without paying anything.
• Buy now, which means they can instantly purchase the course via LearnDash’s built-in Stripe and Paypal integration
• Recurring, which means they pay with LearnDash, but they are billed on a recurring basis for continued access.
• Closed, which means either only manual enrollment by an admin, OR you are deferring to a third-party integration (like a membership plug-in) for access control.

So yes, this technically means you can run a membership site or sell online courses with LearnDash alone… without the need for any other systems. I can’t say I would recommend that, however.

The LearnDash integration with Stripe and Paypal is quite simplistic. It works. But, it lacks many of the options and controls of a full-featured shopping cart or membership plug-in. Personally, make all sales using ThriveCart (read my ThriveCart review). I do access control on the site using WP Fusion (read my WP Fusion review) so that I can control everything with tags. So, for me, I set all courses to “Closed” in the LearnDash settings and WP Fusion handles it all.

LearnDash also has a “Groups” feature where you can group courses together and add or remove access rights in bulk. You can specify certain settings that apply to a group of courses all at once.

Since I integrate with WP Fusion, I use that to auto-enroll people into the LAB PRO group whenever anybody buys a PRO membership.

Whenever I apply that tag to their profile, WP Fusion auto-enrolls them into the LAB PRO group in LearnDash… which in turn enrolls them in every single course in the system so they have access.

Using LearnDash with WP Fusion is a very powerful combination. Click here to learn what WP Fusion does in my review and why I love it so much.

#4 – Pre-requisites And Progression Control

LearnDash also has the ability to force (or not force) the way students can consume your courses.

You can assign pre-requisites if you want, therefore requiring they complete other courses before being allowed to take another.

You can also control whether you want students to be able to skip around and do lessons in whatever order they want…. or if you want them make  them go in order. In my case, most courses in the LAB are free-form. However, the Roadmap phases are set to Linear so that they do it all in the order I specify.

#5 – Built-in Progress Tracking

In my previous course system before I switched to LearnDash, I had no way to see what my students were doing. They could mark lessons completed, but I had no way to see it. So, a major selling point for me on LearnDash was the ability to see what my students were doing.

First, when you visit any member’s profile, you have a breakdown of all of their progress on every course they are enrolled in. Here’s what mine looks like in my own profile admin:

You can also view details of exactly what content they’ve completed… and you can even edit their progress if you have some reason to do so.

LearnDash also has a ProPanel add-on (a separate plug-in) that allows you to run collective reports across your entire site to see who is consuming your courses. The plug-in puts some widgets on your Wordpress dashboard so you can view reports. Here’s an example on the full-screen display of the ProPanel…

You can see how many people are enrolled in each course, if they’re making progress, etc. You can also look up individual users without having to go to their full profile. It is very handy.

Even cooler, but with WP Fusion running in the mix, I can even add tags when they mark lessons as complete or complete the entire course. All kinds of automated followups can be built with that.

What I Like About LearnDash

I like how well-supported the plugin is. They’ve got great documentation and a lot of integrations. 

I like the focus mode on online courses. I like that I can track student progress. I like that I can keep things simple with courses… or make it as involved as I want. Whether you just want to sell a few of your own courses or build an entire online school, you can do it with LearnDash.

What I Don’t Like About LearnDash

LearnDash can feel a little overwhelming at first. The flexibility of the course builder means that courses and lessons are completely separate content types, which means they are not automatically grouped together in one, singular interface. It can be a little confusing. Once you get the hang of it, though, it all comes together.

LearnDash also doesn’t come with very much native design flexibility. It relies a lot on your theme. If your theme doesn’t have specific and unique styling for LearnDash baked into it, you will be mostly dependent on just using LearnDash shortcodes and letting it default to your theme’s default style and colors. LearnDash simply cannot hold a candle when it comes to visual control with Thrive Apprentice.

LearnDash does have built-in ability to sell your courses, but it is quite simplistic. For this reason, I don’t really recommend you do it that way and instead I recommend selling your courses via another platform (like WooCommerce) and just granting course access upon purchase. The good news is that LearnDash will work with almost all outside shopping carts and membership site plugins.