A Tin Can LRS and LearnDash Reporting for WordPress!

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Uncanny Owl is very pleased to introduce the easiest way to incorporate Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and H5P modules into LearnDash courses! We don’t just embed modules; we created the very first Tin Can (xAPI) Learning Record Store that’s completely native to WordPress. There are no other applications to install. No endpoints to configure, no complex upload tools, no segregated reporting or any of the other complications that have been historically required to track Storyline, Captivate and H5p modules in WordPress. Easy Tin Can/xAPI and LearnDash reporting is now available with the Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin.

The Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin is more than just a Learning Record Store. Capturing Tin Can statements is of no value unless there’s a great way to present the data—so we built a very powerful reporting tool that combines Tin Can data with all the rest of your LearnDash course data. In fact, even without the Tin Can piece, this is the most comprehensive reporting platform available for LearnDash sites. And that’s still not all—we wanted LearnDash and Tin Can integration to be as seamless as possible, so we modified LearnDash Mark Complete button behaviours so that they only appear after a user has completed all Tin Can modules on the page. (It’s all automatic; if are Tin Can modules on a page, we monitor Tin Can verbs to unlock the Mark Complete button at the right time.)tin_can_report

Everything that’s needed for effective Tin Can use is included in the plugin, from a Storyline and Captivate upload tool (that detects Tin Can vs. non-Tin Can automatically and parses XML files for slide names) and a Learning Record Store to dashboard, course, user and Tin Can reports. Simply install the plugin and everything is ready to go. In fact, the only setting is to toggle whether or not to use Tin Can (as this plugin is also a fantastic LearnDash reporting tool without Tin Can).

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The reporting capabilities really can’t be understated. Here are just a few new metrics that are available for LearnDash courses in the drill-down reporting tool:

LearnDash course completion trendsAverage quiz scores
Topic completion recordsAverage course completion times*
Time spent in courses*Enrolment records

* Requires the Simple Course Timer module from the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro modules.

And on the Tin Can side, all of the following are available as report filters:

LearnDash GroupUser
CourseTin Can Module
Verb/ActivityDate Range

Head over to our Knowledge Base articles to read more about how the upload tool, LRS and reporting tools work.

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At the time of writing, this is the first release of a very large plugin. We wanted to get the plugin out to users as soon as possible, so there a few features that we’ll be adding in the near future to round out the plugin. They include the following:

  • Group Leader reports (right now they’re for administrators only)
  • Additional export functions
  • A report builder that lets you choose your own columns and filters
  • Controls for disabling the Mark Complete integration (it’s currently forced if Tin Can is on a page)

These are all coming in the near future! We will also be making performance improvements to query millions of records in under 5 seconds. Development testing included data for 10,000 learners, but we know we can make report generation even faster.

Please also note that the Learning Record Store is ONLY for on-site use (there is no endpoint for external Tin Can data) and has been built specifically to support Storyline, Captivate and H5P modules only. 

Get the Tin Canny Reporting for Learndash plugin now!

Add Sample Lesson Labels in LearnDash

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Version 1.2 of the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro has been released, and with it a new module: customizable labels for sample lessons.  If you’ve offered sample lessons for your closed courses, you’ll know that LearnDash’s differentiation between sample and non-sample lessons is quite subtle.  This module adds a visual “Sample” label, and the module settings let you customize the text, colors and size of the label.

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Visit the knowledge base for full details.

We’ve also included a number of updates and fixes in this release, including better print styles for the learner transcript module and better support for long course names in the course dashboard.

Head over to the downloads page to see the full changelog for version 1.2.

Tin Can for WordPress is Coming!

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Update: Our Tin Can/XAPI LRS plugin with LearnDash reporting is now available. Read the announcement.

We’ve seen a lot of excitement for Tin Can use in WordPress in the past but very little use of it in the real world. After all, every Tin Can solution relied on a reporting application outside of WordPress. It meant segregating reporting and figuring out how to send Tin Can statements externally, plus reports tended to be too granular and not practical. Many LRS solutions obfuscated code and prevented customizations, so making improvements was impossible. We discouraged Tin Can use for our  clients because capturing data—and, more importantly, making the data meaningful—was just too cumbersome. Of course, the lack of a viable Tin Can solution also meant that WordPress wasn’t a useful platform for larger organizations that tended to create elearning modules with tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and others.

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We decided it was time to add Tin Can to WordPress. We just finished building a complete Learning Record Store (LRS) that’s entirely native to WordPress. It captures Tin Can statements with no configuration. Just upload Storyline or Captivate zip files, or add H5P modules, and statements are automatically captured right inside an existing WordPress site. And it integrates seamlessly with LearnDash, the leading WordPress LMS plugin.

Please note that all images in this post may change before the final release but were all generated with our plugin from live data. Additional charts will be added before release.

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Of course, Tin Can data isn’t of much use unless it’s feeding a robust reporting platform. We built that too! We’re still wrapping up the reporting work, but it’s going to add a lot of insight to administrators of elearning programs powered by LearnDash. It fact, it reimagines reporting for LearnDash data in a big way. Here are just a few of the metrics you’ll be able to see with our reporting:

  • course_chartAverage completion time of every course
  • Tin Can statements by verb, LearnDash Group, module, user, or almost any other combination you can think of
  • Course completion trends
  • Tin Can statement trends

There’s a lot more available, of course, but the metrics above are examples of data that was never before available for LearnDash courses. There are also drill down capabilities, so you can start from a view of overall course activity and click down to seeing which topics have been completed by a particular user. It’s all inside WordPress too—there are no CSV files or external applications to worry about. We support instant sorting, filtering and searching inside javascript data tables too.

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The plugin will be available before the end of August, 2016. We’re very excited about it, but it’s also new territory for us and we want to make it as useful as possible to people using Tin Can modules in WordPress. Do you use Tin Can on your LearnDash sites, or are you considering it? Tell us what we can do to improve Tin Can in WordPress in the comments below!

Branding for LearnDash Groups

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Do you sell courses to organizations? If you do, you probably wish there was an easier way to tailor your course and site branding to your clients without having to use multisite or cloned courses. With today’s release of a new Pro branding module for LearnDash Groups, you can easily deliver organizational branding right inside your existing courses!

group_logoOur new branding module adds 2 important features to LearnDash sites: group logos and front-end group lists. After adding a logo to LearnDash groups, just add a shortcode anywhere you want users to see the logo associated with their group. It might be a learner dashboard, a contact page—it could even be in the header of your site. How much would your clients like their users to see branding associated with their organization? It’s completely dynamic, so users will only see the logo for the group they’re a member of. If you use our Group Registration module, you can even display the logo for the associated group on the user registration page. It helps users validate that they’re on the right page, and it helps your client organizations deliver the right branding for their users—all without multisite.

Our shortcode for group listings seems simple at a glance, but it’s actually an extremely powerful way to give courses the feeling that they were created just for an organization’s users. What the shortcode does is list the user’s LearnDash Group on the front end. Let’s suppose that a site has 2 users, Ryan in a group called “Uncanny Owl” and Ken in a group called “LearnDash”. Inside one of the course lessons we include the phrase, “At [uo_group_list], we embrace diversity.” When Ryan views the lesson, he would see “At Uncanny Owl, we embrace diversity.” Ken, on the other hand, would see “At LearnDash, we embrace diversity.” We’re very excited about using this new shortcode on client sites to deliver the experience of branded courses without the hard work and complexity that usually goes along with it.