Creating a course in LearnDash is a breeze, even if you’re not familiar with coding. Thanks to LearnDash’s intuitive interface, you can craft a comprehensive course in just about an hour. The process puts you in the driver’s seat, allowing you to customize every aspect. In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps of creating a course using LearnDash Course Builder.
The eLearning sector has seen a surge in growth since the onset of the pandemic. With frequent lockdowns forcing people to stay indoors, many opted to use this time to learn new skills online. Some even pursued certifications, enhancing their employability. Schools, colleges, and universities also embraced online education during this period.
If you have expertise in a particular field, now is the perfect time to create and sell your online courses. Using WordPress and an LMS plugin like LearnDash, you can easily set up your online course. In today’s article, we’ll explain how to create a course in LearnDash with the of Reign theme and Reign Learndash Addon .
Planning Your Course Development
Before you begin building your course, it’s important to ensure a few key elements are in place. Firstly, verify that you have a suitable domain and hosting plan for your eLearning website. If you’ve chosen LearnDash Cloud, your WordPress site will be set up and ready to go, allowing you to focus on creating and selling your courses while LearnDash handles the technical aspects.
If you opt for a different hosting plan, that’s perfectly fine. However, this article will not delve into domain and hosting details. For more information, please refer to our post on How to Create an eLearning Website with LearnDash.
How Do You Create a Course in LearnDash?
It seems you’ve already installed WordPress and purchased LearnDash, which is now installed on your WordPress website.
Create a course with the Course Builder
After configuring your LearnDash and finalizing your theme setup, it’s time to start creating your courses.
To make this process smoother, begin by creating a course plan. Outline your course structure, including lessons and topics. This way, when you start building your course, you can easily add these components.
In your WordPress dashboard, locate and click on ‘Courses’. If this is a new LMS website, there won’t be any courses yet. However, if you’ve imported a demo, there might be some dummy courses. You can delete these to make way for your own content. For now, these dummy courses will help you visualize the design of your site.
Click on ‘Add New’ to open the LearnDash Course Builder. This tool consists of three pages for creating a course. The first page is where you’ll enter the course details.
Course- LearnDash Course Builder
On the course details page, you have the opportunity to provide a course description, set a featured image, and more. This page serves as the initial introduction to your course and is the first thing users will see when they select it.
Here’s what you can do on this page:
- Give your course a name.
- Provide a course description.
- Set a featured image for the course.
- Select course categories, tags, and other relevant details.
- After you’ve completed these steps, click on the ‘Builder’ tab to open the course builder and start adding lessons and topics to your course.
Builder
The course builder is a tool that assists in creating lessons and topics for your course. You can also add quizzes to your lessons if you have any. We will cover quiz creation later. For now, let’s focus on adding lessons and topics to our course.
You can easily arrange your lessons and topics by dragging and dropping them within the course builder. However, even though we’ve created lessons and topics, they’re currently empty. To add content:
To edit a lesson, hover over it and click ‘Edit’ on the left side beside the arrow.
To edit a topic, first, click the arrow on the left side of each lesson to expand it. Then, hover over a topic and click ‘Edit’ to modify it.
When editing a lesson, you can describe its contents and upload videos to explain the lesson further. The Gutenberg editor allows you to customize the lesson content to suit your needs.
To add content to your topics, you can include text and videos in a similar manner as you did for the lessons. We’ll cover how to add quizzes later on. If you have content prepared for your topics, you can simply upload videos or text to complete your course.
By following the same process, continue editing your topics to finalize your entire course. Depending on the scope of your online course, this step may require some time. However, if you’ve already planned your lessons and topics, this process should be relatively quick.
Course settings- LearnDash Course Builder
After completing the content for your topics, navigate to the ‘Settings’ tab in the Course Builder. Here, you’ll need to adjust several settings for your course.
Begin by selecting the access mode for your course. Options include Free, Buy Now, Open, and others. Depending on your selection, the interface may change. For instance, if you choose the Buy Now option, a section will appear where you can set a course price and enrollment URL.
The Course Prerequisites, Course Points, and Course Access Expiration options are all optional and not needed for our current setup.
Next, you can customize the course display options. This includes adding course materials that will be provided in the course, such as documents or additional resources. You can also set up a course certificate, a challenge exam, and more from this section. However, we will revisit these options later.
The next important decision is choosing the course navigation system. There are two choices: Linear and Free form. The Linear option allows users to progress through the course sequentially, completing one topic after another. The Free form option, on the other hand, allows users to move through the course freely without having to complete topics in a specific order.
In general, the Linear option is the recommended course navigation system for most courses. However, you can choose the Free form option if you prefer.
Course Create Wizard
This action will redirect you to a new page containing an input box. From there, navigate to your YouTube, Vimeo, or Wista course playlist and copy its URL. Paste the URL into the input box and click on the ‘Load the playlist data’ button.
You’ve completed the course creation process using your video playlist. Ensure you paste the playlist URL, not individual video URLs, for this to work correctly.
The course creation wizard generates lessons based on your playlist automatically. Afterward, you’ll configure the course access settings. If you have a course on YouTube, Vimeo, or Wista, this feature helps you quickly convert it into an online course.
This concludes the course creation in LearnDash. We still need to add quizzes and certificates to our course. Let’s proceed with that next!
Also Read: Thrive Quiz – Best WordPress quiz plugin
Creating quizzes for your course
Now that we’ve set up our course lessons and topics, let’s add some quizzes to our course. From the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Quizzes and select ‘Add New’ to create a new quiz. This will open the Quiz Builder, which is similar to the Course Builder. It consists of the quiz introduction, the builder, and the settings options.
Start by giving your quiz a name (e.g., WordPress Quiz 1) and adding a description if desired. Then, click on the builder to create your quiz.
Creating a quiz is similar to building lessons and topics. Begin by selecting your quiz category, such as single choice, multiple choice, open-ended essay, etc. Then, give your quiz a heading (e.g., Question 1) and write the quiz content. The interface will adjust based on the category you choose.
For example, let’s create a single-choice quiz. Refer to the screenshot below for a visual guide.
You can continue creating multiple quizzes for this quiz series using the same method. You also have the option to create quizzes for different categories or courses. Once you have created your quizzes, go to the ‘Settings’ tab for additional options.
From there, you can add your quiz to a course or lesson. Adding it to a course will require users to complete the quiz at the end of the course, while adding it to a lesson will require them to do so at the end of that specific lesson.
You have the option to customize various settings for your quiz, such as Quiz Release Schedule, Quiz Prerequisite, Allowed Users, Passing Score, Time Limit, and Restrict Quiz Retakes. Explore the quiz settings to choose the options that best suit your quiz.
Another method of adding your quiz to your topics and lessons is by returning to your course builder and selecting the ‘Builder’ tab. From there, you can drag and drop your quizzes from the left side panel to your desired topics.
This is the process for adding quizzes to your topics and lessons using the Course Builder.
Conclusion on LearnDash Course Builder
Creating a course in LearnDash can be challenging, especially if you’re new to it. In this step-by-step guide, we aim to simplify the process of setting up your eLearning website.
LearnDash is a robust LMS plugin with numerous features and options. In this guide, we’ve covered only a portion of these to keep things straightforward. There are many other features and add-ons available for you to explore. Features such as Assignments, Challenge Exams, Email Notifications, and Login and Registration are just a few examples of what you can discover.
This concludes our guide. If you encounter any difficulties, remember that LearnDash offers documentation and support to assist you. You can also leave a comment below, and we’ll do our best to help. Good luck with your online course website!
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