Entries by Ryan

Uncanny Groups 3.10: Easier classroom management

February 17, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

There’s one thing in our Uncanny Groups plugin that I felt had been a gap for some time, not just in our plugin but in WordPress in general: Why do users always need a valid email address to set up an account? The answer is straightforward, of course, it’s an identifier and allows users to reset their passwords independently. But in many K-12 classrooms, manufacturing and industrial environments, students simply don’t have email addresses. This makes using LearnDash and our plugins exceedingly difficult. We did offer a workaround for CSV imports; files can include a password column and this password would be set for new users, allowing administrators and Group Leaders to create users that didn’t actually need an email address. With this approach, account info (email and password) could be set up and given to students directly so that setting up a password by email confirmation wasn’t needed. Privacy concerns aside, this at least offered a path for students without an email address to use LearnDash and our plugins. CSV files are hard to work with though and outside the technical abilities of many Group Leaders. Enter Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.10. Password field in Add Users New in […]

Tin Canny 3.6: Microlearning for LearnDash xAPI & SCORM courses

February 16, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

It’s time for a new Tin Canny update! Version 3.6 adds support for microlearning using Single Page LearnDash courses, more flexible user details in reports, new column sorting options, a more visible X icon for modules in a lightbox and more. Single page xAPI & SCORM LearnDash courses Today’s Tin Canny 3.6 release adds support for something LearnDash and Tin Canny users have been wanting for years: the ability to build standalone courses with Articulate Storyline, iSpring, H5P and other module types without having to use LearnDash lessons and topics. What does that mean? Well, with most (non-WordPress) LMS platforms, you can upload self-contained zip files and that uploaded module becomes the entire course. A user sees the course name, launches that uploaded course in a new window or lightbox, and that’s it — no digging into lessons or topics first, it’s just the course. LearnDash, however, normally requires that courses be structured into a hierarchy of WordPress posts that requires at least one “lesson” beneath a course. The SCORM or xAPI file would then be uploaded inside the lesson or topic, so students would have to click through a “course” level first that sometimes served no purpose. Tin Canny […]

Toolkit Pro 3.7: Usermeta in reports, transcript changes and more

February 12, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

We try to avoid Friday releases where we can, but with the upcoming holiday weekend in Canada and some exciting changes from LearnDash, we couldn’t wait to get version 3.7 of the Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin out. It’s a big release with several really compelling new features. Group Drip notification changes We do need to start the list of new features with a change that Group Drip users may need to make on their sites. LearnDash is releasing version 1.5 of their Notifications plugin next week, which is a big overhaul and improvement. That’s great news, but because of how it was rearchitected, it does break compatibility with existing notifications linked to our Group Drip module. Any current notifications on sites set up to alert users when lessons are available to the group will stop working, but there is good news: we have a new trigger available to support Group Drip notifications. If you upgrade to LearnDash Notifications 1.5 and want notifications to be sent to group members when lessons become available via group drip, you must create new notifications with this new trigger: “A scheduled lesson is available to user with Uncanny Drip by Group”. If you don’t use group drip […]

BuddyBoss Group Sync

February 3, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

The Uncanny Groups 3.9 release added the ability to sync changes made to LearnDash groups using this plugin to be synced with BuddyBoss social groups. This means that when users are added or removed from groups using our Group Management page, or LearnDash groups are created by our plugin, these changes can be reflected on the BuddyBoss side too. For this to work, the LearnDash Group Sync and Auto Create Social Group settings must be enabled under BuddyBoss > Integrations > LearnDash on a BuddyBoss site. This is not set up or managed in Uncanny Groups, we detect the settings for BuddyBoss and use those. Please see the screenshot below for reference. When these settings are enabled, the following things will happen on the Uncanny Groups side: When a LearnDash group is created by the Uncanny Groups plugin, an associated BuddyBoss social group is created. When a user is added to a group from the Group Management page in our plugin, the user is added to the associated BuddyBoss group. If the user is a student they are added as a “Member”. If the user is a Group Leader they are added as an “Organizer”. This works for adding single users, adding multiple users and adding […]

Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.9 Update

February 2, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

The version 3.9 update of the Uncanny Groups for LearnDash plugin includes some interesting updates that may really transform how the tool is used by some customers. Given the magnitude of the changes, this is also one that we recommend testing on a Staging site first. Let’s jump right in to what’s new in the release and how it might affect your site. BuddyBoss Social Group sync You asked, we listened. A lot of people use the BuddyBoss theme and platform with our Uncanny Groups plugin. BuddyBoss does include a sync tool for LearnDash groups, but it doesn’t work properly when users are added or removed from groups managed by our plugin. It also doesn’t sync LearnDash groups created with our plugin to new BuddyBoss groups. So, in the Uncanny Groups 3.9 release, here’s what’s new if LearnDash Group Sync and Auto Create Social Group settings are enabled in BuddyBoss > Integrations > LearnDash on a BuddyBoss site: When a LearnDash group is created by the Uncanny Groups plugin, an associated BuddyBoss social group is created. When a user is added to a group from the Group Management page in our plugin, the user is added to the associated BuddyBoss group. If the […]

Generate Historical LearnDash Course Credits

January 13, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

Version 3.2 of the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin adds the ability to generate missing credit records. This means that students who completed LearnDash courses before installing of the plugin and/or before credits were assigned to the course can have a permanent record of the completion stored and a credit value assigned. To generate historical completion records, perform the following: Edit a LearnDash course in/wp-admin/ and make sure it has a credit value assigned. Navigate to Uncanny CEUs > Generate CEUs  as in the screenshot above (this may have different text depending on what you call credits in our plugin). Choose a course from the drop-down list. Click the Add missing records button to generate missing credits and completion records. Please note the following when using this tool: Credits are only awarded for students that have a LearnDash completion record but no credits for that completion. It will not modify CEU values for existing users that already have credits assigned. In other words, if a course had a credit value of 2.0 assigned, a user completed the course and earned 2 credits, then you change the value to 3.0 and run the Generate CEUs function, the student will continue to have 2.0 earned […]

Award historical credits for LearnDash courses

January 13, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

Our Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin has historically been our least popular plugin and not nearly as capable as some continuing education providers would like. Organizations in this space tend to have very specific requirements and outgrow general-purpose solutions quickly. With the 2 most recent updates to the plugin, however, we have completely transformed what’s possible with our CEU product. The 3.1 release added the ability to track credits for anything, even learning activities that were not associated with LearnDash. And with our Uncanny Automator integration, we can simplify awarding credits even further, automating credit activity for live events, forum participation, purchases–if it can be captured online, Automator can almost certainly link it to credits in this plugin. Capture historical completion records There’s always been one big limitation in the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin: it only starts tracking credits for new LearnDash course completions once it’s installed and credits are assigned to the course. For most sites, this meant a disconnect between users that completed courses before plugin installation and users that completed them after setup. In today’s Uncanny Continuing Education Credits 3.2 release, we’re adding a very important new feature: the ability to generate credits for historical course […]

Single Page Courses

January 4, 2021 /9 Comments/in /by

The Single Page Courses module, added in the Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash 3.6 release, makes it possible to create courses that have no lessons or topics. Normally, LearnDash requires that every course have at least one lesson. Lessons and topics are how LearnDash calculates progress in a course and facilitates course completion. For many users, this made microlearning difficult and forced course designers to use a nested structure that didn’t always make sense. This module allows courses to consist entirely of a single page. To create courses that include the course page only, enable the module to add these settings to your course edit pages: Enabling the Single Page Course when saving the course creates a hidden lesson that is invisible to users, it is not shown in the front end and students won’t know it exists. It allows the plugin to make LearnDash think the course has a lesson that users are completing even though they are not. By default, a Single Page Course adds a Mark Complete button to the course page (since it is just the single page). When clicked, it marks the hidden lesson as complete and reloads the page, thereby completing the course. Everything […]

Single Page LearnDash Courses now available

January 4, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

LearnDash course structures have always been very straightforward and rigid, which did limit flexibility but also made building courses more consistent. Courses must have lessons, and lessons can optionally have topics. The 3-level hierarchy evolved a bit when LearnDash added sections to organize things, but progress was always based around the completion of lessons and topics. For many users, this was good enough. For years we heard from people that didn’t want to use lessons. Maybe they used micro-learning or all course content was self-contained in a single video; splitting the content up into lessons just didn’t make sense. We largely pushed back on such requests because they didn’t fit the “LearnDash model”, but after building a solution for a consulting client we started wondering what might be possible with a public plugin. The Single Page Course module In today’s Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash 3.6 release, we’re adding a brand new module that addresses this gap: the Single Page Course module. When enabled, it gives course creators the ability to create LearnDash courses that don’t have any lessons. It adds a Mark Complete button to the course level and enables course structures that are simply just that page. Here’s how […]

Front End Login Changes in Toolkit

January 4, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

We’re excited to announce that today’s Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash release includes some pretty big Front End Login changes (and we wanted to beat the upcoming Toolkit Pro and Automator 2.10 that announcements that will steal the thunder!). The Front End Login module has gotten increasingly capable, to the point that we see people using it on WordPress sites even if they’re not using LearnDash. Today’s release adds even more reasons to use it for login on any WordPress site. Changes to user verification We added the ability to verify users before login was allowed a very long time ago, but the module never had a great way to manage email notifications when users were approved for access. With user verification enabled, site users would have to be approved by an administrator before they could sign in, but how would the admin control the user notification and content? The Uncanny Toolkit 3.4.1 release adds a new customizable email system (see below) as well as an easy way to suppress user verification emails entirely. Emails can also now include tokens (variables) with information that might be useful to approved users, like site name and the user’s name. Login redirect changes Ever […]