Entries by Ken Young

Uncanny Codes 4.2 includes our most requested feature!

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Uncanny Codes gives you the ability to generate codes that users can redeem for almost anything on your WordPress site.  Originally built to provide a way for site admins to distribute codes for LearnDash course and group access, code redemption can now be redeemed for anything supported by Uncanny Automator, including memberships, achievements, store credit, coupon codes and much more.

With the ability to generate hundreds or thousands of codes for use by businesses and organizations, one of our most requested features was the ability to cancel individual codes within a batch, without deleting the batch and associated records of redemption.

New Mark Complete Button Options in Tin Canny!

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Our Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin offers the easiest way to add modules from tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Rise, and iSpring to your LearnDash courses. It’s our second most popular LearnDash plugin and gives thousands of LearnDash sites xAPI and SCORM capabilities that rival bigger LMS vendors. Since it was introduced, we gave LearnDash users a way to control progress in courses based on how learners interacted with uploaded modules. It was pretty simple: users could only click the LearnDash Mark Complete button to move forward if they completed, passed, or achieved some other condition inside the module. For Tin Canny some users, that wasn’t enough. We got a lot of questions about Tin Canny like these: Can we hide the Mark Complete button completely until the learner completes a module? Can we change the text on the Mark Complete button if there’s Tin Canny content on the page? Can we automatically mark the lesson/topic complete when the learner completes the module? Can we automatically move the learner to the next lesson when they complete the module? We wrestled with changes for a long time and couldn’t settle on the right way to handle autocompletion and autoadvancing for […]

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. 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.

WordPress the LMS: Working with LearnDash

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LearnDash is a low-cost Learning Management System (LMS) plugin for WordPress.  Installing it adds LMS features to your WordPress instance, including courses, quizzes, certificates and progress reports.  In this post, I’ll review some of the ins and outs of working with LearnDash and how we used it to create Grade Hacks, our study skills program. Installation Installation of LearnDash is as straightforward as installing any plugin in WordPress.  You purchase the plugin at learndash.com, download the .zip file, and upload it to WordPress through the Plugins page.  Doing so adds new menu items to your WordPress admin panel including Lessons, Courses, Quizzes and Certificates and Advanced Quiz. Setting up courses Setting up your first course in LearnDash involves creating a course, then creating a lesson and associating it with the course.  If you wish to further divide your content you may create a topic and link it with a lesson*, or create a quiz and link it to a lesson. Because the admin interface is organized by content type (course, lesson, topic, quiz) rather than by course, setting up a course is a bit of a disjointed process. You are constantly jumping between the the course, lesson, topic and quiz screens, […]

Migrating Manuals to iPads & Tablets – Part 1

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The request sounds simple enough: take paper-based training manuals and turn them into something that’s iPad-friendly. There are lots of iPad apps that support formats like Word, PDF and EPUB, so how difficult could it be? The problem is that very few apps provide all of the key benefits of going paperless, such as centralized syncing with offline viewing, version control, embedded audio and video, easy navigation and linked documents. Here were the client’s requirements: a simple development workflow that avoided complicated and expensive authoring tools the ability to push out updated guides automatically offline viewing when no internet connection was available embedded videos links between guides First Attempt, First Failure We started with a Word to Adobe Acrobat workflow. This lets authors create everything they need, publish to PDF and then add multimedia and hyperlinks in Acrobat with minimal training. To take care of automatic updates and offline syncing, we decided to use Dropbox. It pushes files out automatically when an internet connection is available and “favourite” files are available offline. Dropbox also supported embedded video (one of few PDF readers that did). Unfortunately, it didn’t support links between files, but that was identified as a non-critical requirement that […]