Entries by Ryan

Tin Canny Meets Gutenberg

December 6, 2018 /0 Comments/in , /by

Happy WordPress 5.0 Release Day! Are you ready for Gutenberg? Or, more importantly, are your plugins? If you use Uncanny Owl plugins on your LearnDash site, you might be ready. Users of the Pro modules of the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit, Groups, Continuing Education Credits and Codes plugins are all set with the latest versions available from our site without needing to update. But if you use Tin Canny, make sure to update to version 2.9.9 or higher to use the Tin Canny uploader! Without it, you will not be able to upload your SCORM and xAPI modules to your LearnDash courses. Tin Canny 2.9.9 isn’t just about Gutenberg though. It’s a big release and the last update before the 3.0 release later this month, so we wanted to talk through some of the changes and what they mean for your site. Most important is, of course, the Gutenberg uploader for Tin Canny. It’s completely different than what you’re used to seeing for Tin Canny. Uploading modules is now done in Gutenberg using the “Tin Canny Content” block. By clicking that, you can choose to Upload a new module or Select from Library any existing content. All of the controls you’re used to for your modules […]

Easier LearnDash Group Management

October 11, 2018 /2 Comments/in /by

Uncanny LearnDash Groups 2.6 includes easier user management, group communication and group creation tools. And that’s just the beginning! Find out more about the new features in the latest version of our Groups plugin.

What’s New in LearnDash Toolkit Pro 2.5?

October 2, 2018 /0 Comments/in , /by

Yesterday’s release of the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro 2.5 update included a few very highly requested features, so we wanted to highlight exactly what’s now available in a blog post. First up, there’s a brand new module: LearnDash Reset Button. We kept this one simple, but it’s powerful. When triggered, it allows users (or the system) to completely reset a user’s progress in a course. An example of this might be when a user has already completed a course but must retake it. In those situations the user may want to reset their progress first so they can start again, and this button is a great way to do that. Want to make sure users only see the button after they’ve completed a course? Wrap it in the shortcode! This module also includes a PHP function to reset course progress, handy for developers that perhaps want to reset progress when users repurchase a product. Learn more about this new module over in our Knowledge Base. We also have big changes for our Enhanced Course Grid module, one of our most popular modules in Pro.  Users have long requested that there be a way to resume courses. The most recent release of our free LearnDash […]

LearnDash Reset Button

October 1, 2018 /0 Comments/in /by

The LearnDash Reset Button module enables 2 things: a course progress reset button and a course progress reset function (for developers). The button will certainly be the more popular of the two and can be used with this shortcode: [uo_reset_course_progress course_id=”x”] In that example, “x” is the ID for the course, which you can look up by editing your course as an admin and looking at the “post=x” value in the URL. The “x” there is the course ID. This shortcode can be added to any post type, including course post types. We expect it will be used most often on courses, though please note that you do still need to pass in the course ID even if place on a course page. When added (and the module turned on), the button will be shown on a page only if the user viewing the button has some progress recorded for the course. The button will not be displayed if the user hasn’t started the course. If you want to show the button on a course page and only want to show it when users have completed the course, consider wrapping it in the course_complete shortcode included in LearnDash. See https://support.learndash.com/articles/course_complete/ for more information. For even […]

New Front End Quiz Reports

July 16, 2018 /6 Comments/in , /by

One of our Tin Canny customers came to us with a great question: How can my instructors and students easily track performance across both LearnDash AND xAPI/SCORM modules? Tin Canny does a pretty good job with LearnDash results, but xAPI results are harder to analyze and none of our existing reports combine all scores together (LearnDash and xAPI). So, to help that client out, we created some new reports—and those new reports are now available in version 2.9.5 and higher of Tin Canny. The first new report is a front end Group Leader quiz report. Administrators and Group Leaders can use the report to view LearnDash quiz and all scores tracked by Tin Canny (so H5P, iSpring, Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline and Rise) by group and by course. That means no digging into the Tin Can report in the back end and reconciling it with LearnDash quiz scores to get consolidated results. It’s all in a single report. Better yet, if quiz statistics were turned on for LearnDash quizzes, the new report also links to detailed quiz results, including a user’s answers and quiz times. (No such reports are available for Tin Canny scores, unfortunately, as those are LearnDash-only reports.) […]

We’re Going to Change How You Use WordPress

July 5, 2018 /8 Comments/in /by

About 8 months ago, we had an idea that got us very excited. We wanted to personalize learning and give users the right direction and feedback they needed at the right time, and to do that, we started looking into an Trigger > Condition > Action model. We could watch for things to happen on an elearning site (a trigger), check a condition, then automatically do something else (an action) if the requirements were met. It’s a simple model, but with it, we would be able to completely personalize learning. That led us to start thinking bigger. If we’re going to build this architecture for one plugin (LearnDash), why not just build it out and make it work with lots of WordPress plugins ? The possibilities seemed endless. We could make one plugin, or several plugins, trigger actions in other plugins. Not only would it would a system like that make it easy to connect plugins and automate workflows, but we could eliminate the need for one-off plugins that just connected 2 plugins together in very simple ways. So, one thousand development hours and 6 months of development time later, we built the framework for a plugin that does all […]

How Are We Doing? Part 2

May 24, 2018 /0 Comments/in , /by

One year ago today we posted a reflective article about feedback from our customers about our performance. At that time we had been using a Help Desk system for over a year, and that allowed us to start collecting metrics and feedback from some of our plugin customers and development clients. A year later, we wanted to look back and reflect on how things have changed for us. For one thing, we’re definitely a lot busier! And, as we come up on our 5 year anniversary (next week!), it’s even more important to take a look at what growth has meant to our level of service. Here are some key stats for Uncanny Owl over the last 12 months: (The number of sites using our plugins may actually be a fair bit higher than 10,000, as we can only accurately say that it’s somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000; we suspect it’s around 11,000 at the time of writing.) It’s a lot of growth! Installs and support requests have more than doubled over the last year. And even with that growth, we’ve been able to improve the level of satisfaction across our support channels. Keep in mind too that those are only […]