LET’S FIRST UNDERSTAND HOW TO BUILD A LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN WORDPRESS?
A Learning Management System (LMS) is a website/webapp which hosts eLearning programs providing students a way to participate in online trainings. Implementing an LMS with WordPress may look simple & straight forward, but one has to calculate and analyze alot of things before actually going with it. When you consider building a Learning Management System for your organization, your first step is to list out all the requirements you need. Next, begin your search for all the available options. Let’s narrow down your requirements based on some of the most common features available in today’s LMS systems.
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Course Creation: The most important feature of any LMS application is the ability to create courses from front-end/backend meeting the goals of your organization. Search for the ability to create categories of various types of courses, create lessons, quizzes, topics, and assignments for your learning individuals.
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Reporting: Your LMS Dashboard should provide you detailed data, such as the number of learners in your program(s) & the number of courses and assignments (both completed and not completed). Also, it should allow you to filter to drill down a snapshot of more specific data, like the number of learners and their progress per course. With detailed reports, you can gain insights into your LMS platform and how your learners are utilizing the program(s).
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Administration: You should look for features like user profiles, a robust email notification service/process for learners’ engagement, group management, clearing data, test expiration, assigning grades, certifications and rewards.
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Content Management: Content is the most important asset for any website, whether it is using an LMS, or not. However, when building an Online Learning Management System with WordPress, you should know that its Content Management System (CMS) offers the ability & utility to create content that coordinates with your LMS offerings. WordPress CMS is pretty straightforward in that sense. Various wordpress lms themes & plugins give you the ability to create content in the desired and intuitive way.
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System Integration: A good LMS system is integrated into existing platforms like a HR Information System or billing systems etc. WordPress already has a pretty robust APIs for third party integrations. You can search for an LMS system, like LearnDash, twhich provides integrations for systems like Slack, Articulate Storyline, Stripe, Zapier, MailChimp, Adobe Captivate, to name a few.
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Automated Communication: Notifications can be set up to run automatically, reminding learners about courses they need to take or steps they are yet to complete, as well as automating emails to operation managers and instructors for things like courses’ progress or regularly scheduled reports for all the courses that they manage. The idea is to deploy a huge time saver for the administrators of the site.
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Social Community Implementation: Activity Feeds, Leaderboards, Forums, Reviews, Badges etc.
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Multiple Language Support: Depending on your audience, you may want or need to provide several language options for your lms platform.
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Monetization: You can put individual courses up for a one-time purchase or create a recurring subscription model that allows users to gain ongoing access to your library on a monthly or annual basis. You can also utilize eCommerce tools to create memberships to your training site. Other options may include creating course bundles, course licensing etc.There are LMS plugins for WordPress websites having integrations with popular payment gateways, like PayPal, Stripe and 2Checkout; as well as full integrations with popular eCommerce plugins including WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
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Responsive: Your LMS platform should be responsive, i.e, it should be accessible on all devices: desktop/laptop, tablet, and smartphone.
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Security: A very important feature for not letting hackers to do piracy on your videos.
WORDPRESS LMS PLUGINS
There are various LMS plugins available for integration into the WordPress platform. Here are two that are getting used widely to implement and deploy an effective and flexible online learning platform:
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LearnDash
LearnDash is a commercial LMS plugin for WordPress which is easy to use for course creation & management. You can create various kinds of courses with lesson plans, quizzes etc.
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Sensei
Sensei is another LMS plugin from the creators of WooCommerce. Sensei brings various built-in functionalities allowing you to integrate badge rewards & achievements to provide gamification feature to your online course offerings.
WORDPRESS LMS PREMIUM THEMES
You can get alot of premium wordpress themes for your LMS platform for some small dollars $. All these themes are bundled with all necessary plugins and ready to use. All you need is just to purchase the license and start using it with your brand name. A little customization work will be done to make it product ready for your organization. No need to spend big money on hiring & managing a team of developers to re-invent the wheel.
And many more such themes to serve your purpose.
So WordPress looks the best platform to run an effective, exciting, and dynamic learning management system as it is designed to make life easy for you and your organization. It costs less, it’s faster to market. Everything is great. Isn’t It So? Let’s come to our main question now “Should You Build Your Online Learning Management System (LMS) In WordPress?”
The answer is both the Yes and No. There are in general 2 Techniques to Build E-learning Websites: With & Without Coding.
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Code From Raw: Programming using languages like PHP, ASP, JAVA, PYTHON, NODE JS as options from scratch.
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Open Source Options: Moodle, Open edX, WordPress, Joomla which may require little coding/customization.
Let’s start with the first option, Code From Raw. This is primarily done by individuals or businesses who have developers in their team or outsourcing it with major objective to serve a large number of students with lot of custom features in place. Here, each part of site: user management, course pages etc. is to be coded from scratch. PHP, ASP, NODE JS, PYTHON, JAVA all are good technologies to work in. It is recommended to go with the language in which the development team is most comfortable and experienced with. Server: AWS or Dedicated Server in your country and Database has also to be setup along with these sites. For large cases a dedicated server in your own country or something global like AWS will be good. For small cases, shared hosting by godaddy etc. is also good enough. Regarding feature and customization since entire site is coded by your team or some outsourced company, time and cost has to go into development of all features. But at the same time, it means that you can have everything you want. It is difficult to do full customizations with other open source options which we are going to discuss after this. In terms of costs, if you are outsourcing, the cost is considerably higher than other options since it requires full development. It is great if you have a developer in your own team. The cost of regular maintenance and support is generally not much. Regarding time it will generally take around 2-3 months of time to get ready with a full fledged elearning website. To discuss scale effects, for less than 1000 expected users anually, this option is not recommended as the costs and time involved do not comply with the risk od starting up for such a small scale. All the sites with number of annual customers in range of 10,000-Millions are recommended to use this option to build a site. Reason for this is that, as you grow in your user base, you start to face feature demands specific to your student demographics and courses you are selling. Then it is easier to customize if the site backend is in your control. In case of urgencies, your own team will be better able to cope up with requirements & issues.
Now coming to second choice that is open source options like Moodle, WordPress, Joomla etc. We ll pick wordpress here to discuss, but same scenarios apply on other options as well. Working in this model doesn’t actually require any coding skills. Using premium lms plugins and themes, most of common requirements are fulfilled. Detailed level customizations might not be possible in this model. You only pay for themes and plugins which you use, that also only one time. It is quite affordable. If you are not sure how your business will shape up or how much students will signup, it is better to use this option instead of coding from raw. Time to launch can be within 5 days. To discuss scale effects, if the number of subscribed students you expect on your site are not going to shoot past 10,000, it is good to be on such platforms. You might face scaling and customization problem if the number shoots past this range. Certainly you can upgrage your server and its cost to handle the traffic, but this server maintenance cost may grow exponentially as we increase with users due to multiple plugins making site heavier than the custom(code from raw) one.
We hope this post helped you make some sense of various offerings that are provided when building a Learning Management System. This post does not come close to touching all the possible details and points, but it certainly hits the high notes to give you a place to start when you’re developing your new list of requirements.
Thanks for reading this post. For any queries, please write to us at consulting@qewings.com. Stay Tuned!