In this tech world of growing eLearning, LearnDash stands as a beacon for flexibility and versatility.
But for those who are new to LearnDash, it is a huge space of eLearning opportunities with no limit.
In this blog, we will unravel LearnDash and understand what it truly offers.
Let’s begin with understanding what LearnDash is.
1. So What is Learndash?
LearnDash is a well-renowned WordPress LMS tool. It lets you create and sell online courses on your WordPress website. It acts as a digital classroom, letting you teach any subject.
You can make various quizzes, manage students, and earn from your courses. The setup is flexible. You can customize it to your preferences. And you can use plugins to add extra functionalities to your site. Plus, if you are planning to create your site with custom-made plugins, opting for learndash custom development services would be a good idea.
As for the target audience, LearnDash is great for anyone who wants to teach online. This includes individual teachers, schools, companies, and organizations. They use LearnDash to train people and teach new skills. You can even run a full online school.
2. Setting Up Your Development Environment
The requirements for setting up your development environment are like the ingredients you need for a recipe. You’ll need a website that runs on WordPress. You will also need a hosting service and the LearnDash plugin. Make sure you have these ready before you start.
First, you install WordPress on your hosting service. Next, add the LearnDash plugin by uploading it to your site and activating it.
Configuration and setup are about making everything work the way you want. In LearnDash, you’ll go through settings to choose how your courses look, how users sign up and other details. Take your time to go through all the options and set them up as you like.
In the next step, I’ll explain how you can easily create courses using LearnDash.
3. LearnDash Basics
You will see LearnDash LMS on your WordPress dashboard when you activate the LearnDash plugin. Click on the Courses menu.
Then click on the Add New button. After this, you’ll see a course header below which there will be a text box.
Once you are done with this step, fill in the details of your courses like its description and the content you’ll be providing in them.
This is just the course creation. To create your Lessons for the course, go to LearnDash LMS -> Lessons.
Now you can enter your Lesson content and click on Save as draft. This is because we don’t want to directly publish an empty course.
Similarly, you can create a topic for the lessons you created. Again, once done click save as draft. Then you can create quizzes for those topics, and set certificates if you want to.
These are just the basic steps to course creation. To know more in detail on how you can create your Learndash site, I recommend you to read this blog- ‘6 Easy Steps to Install LearnDash on WordPress’
4. Customizing LearnDash
You see, LearnDash doesn’t just run using plugins. You also have to choose a Theme that will suit your website. Themes and templates in LearnDash change how your course looks. You can pick different themes to change the style or use templates to change the layout of your lessons and quizzes.
Additionally, you can make use of CSS styling to make your LearnDash site look great. You can change colors, fonts, and even the size of buttons with CSS. Well, if you do not have coding experience you can always seek assistance from LearnDash development services to do it for you.
Talking about custom shortcodes, they are like secret codes that make things happen on your site. You can use shortcodes to add new features or content quickly.
Also, Filters and actions are used to change how LearnDash works. You can use filters to adjust details, and actions to add new functions. It’s a way to make your course do exactly what you need it to do.
5. Extending LearnDash Functionality
Plugins and extra add-ons for LearnDash give you more options and tools to do cool things in your course. For example, LearnDash itself is a plugin, and you can use Course Grid Add-On to show your courses in grid format.
If you start exploring LearnDash based plugins, you will find lots of plugins for your quizzes, reporting and any other feature you want.
How can we forget Gamification? Gamification and engagement features are about making learning fun by adding game-like elements. It lets you You can give badges or medals when students do well in a course. This keeps students excited and wanting to learn more.
6. Best Practices in LearnDash Development
Performance Optimization is all about making your LearnDash course run smoothly and quickly. You can do things like optimizing images and using caching to speed up your course.
You should also keep your website safe. Keep your software updated and use good security practices to protect student data.
Check that your site’s user interface is well-planned. This is because if the user experiences any problems your site will have a bad reputation. You want to make sure that your course is not only educational but also enjoyable to use.
7. LearnDash Development Workflow
Figuring out what you need is crucial because it decides what your course should have and do. You think about what your students need and what you want to teach.
The Development Phase will take all the ideas you gathered and start building your course. Like I discussed in Step 3, you can create lessons and quizzes, and everything else in LearnDash. It’s important to follow your plan and make sure everything works together.
Make sure to check your LearnDash course to find any problems or mistakes. You want to make sure that everything you build works well and that your students will have a good learning experience.
Conclusion
We understood what LearnDash is and what it allows you to do. As an educator, you can easily create courses for yourself or for an organization. And offer a great learning experience for your students.
We talked about how you can customize LearnDash and how you can extend its functionalities. You also need to follow the best practices to avoid any mishaps. Remember to keep your site safe using good safety plugins.
