LearnDash Archives - Uncanny Owl

New Mark Complete Button Options in Tin Canny!

August 8, 2019/6 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ken Young

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 people that wanted those things. That led to some Tin Canny users adopting third party solutions, like Uncanny Automator.

Instead of coming up with a single solution, Tin Canny 3.2.2 offers—all of them!

Introducing the new Mark Complete Options

We heard your feedback and added every option we could think of to Tin Canny. They include:

Always Enabled: Mark Complete button is always enabled.
Disabled until complete: Mark Complete button is disabled until the completion condition has been satisfied. This is the current default behaviour when the Mark Complete control is turned on in Tin Canny.
Hidden until complete: Mark Complete button is hidden until the completion condition has been met. When the condition is met, Mark Complete appears.
Hidden and autocomplete: Mark Complete button is hidden and the lesson/topic is automatically marked complete when the completion condition has been met. (Make sure you have an intuitive way for users to know they finished the module and can move forward!)
Hidden and autoadvance: Mark Complete button is hidden, the lesson/topic is automatically marked complete and the learner is automatically advanced to the next lesson or topic when the completion condition has been met. (You may want to add an empty final slide or something similar so users aren’t automatically advanced when a results slide appears.)

For a full description of the options, visit our Knowledge Base. The options can be set globally from the settings screen, or individually at the lesson/topic level. We think these new options open some exciting new possibilities for an even more seamless learner experience.

These new options should address all requests that we’ve had for new behaviours in the Mark Complete controls, but as always, send us your feedback about how we can make things even better. Our goal is always to make Tin Canny the easiest and most feature-rich SCORM and xAPI solution for LearnDash platform!

Use LearnDash Groups? Get this Toolkit Pro Update

July 25, 2019/5 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

Version 3.2.6 of the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro might sound like a small point release, but for users of LearnDash Groups, it’s going to make things a lot better. We worked really hard on this one to accommodate a number of user requests (including from the LearnDash team), so we know it’s going to add a lot of value.

Send Group Drip Notifications

The Group Drip module is now compatible with the LearnDash Notifications plugin!

What does that mean for you? Well, if you control how lessons are dripped by LearnDash Group, it means you can send users an email when the lesson is available. Workarounds, like using a CRM to drip notices based on group tag, are no longer needed.

This makes is much, much easier to let students know when content is available in their courses.

Please note that while we did our best to make things as simple as possible, because of how the Notifications plugin works, having emails triggered by group drip date does unfortunately require that everything be set up in a particular order. Here’s what’s needed to make the notifications work:

Create the Lesson Notification in the LearnDash Notifications plugin.
Create or edit the lesson you’re going to drip.
1. If Shared Course Steps are off, choose a group for the drip behaviour and then select a date.
2. If Shared Course Steps are on, select a course in the Course Switcher dropdown, choose a group for the drip behaviour and select a date.
Save the lesson changes.

The lesson update after setting up the notification is unfortunately needed for emails to be triggered properly. It’s worth it though for this powerful new feature!

Integration with the Uncanny Groups Plugin

The 3.2.6 release of Pro also adds some really compelling new ways to use Pro with our Groups plugin. The Import LearnDash Users and Group Registration modules now recognize and work with seat limits set in Groups. What does that mean for your site?

For the Import Users module, it means that user uploads into LearnDash Groups that have seat limits will now count against available seats. In other words, if a group has 100 seats assigned, 40 in the group already and you add another 40 by import, the group will now have 20 seats remaining. The imported users will count against the seat count for the group. And, if you were import 100 instead of 40, then the seat limit for the group would be increased to 140 (since there were 40 and 100 were imported) and the available seat count would change to 0.

It’s pretty great, but the Group Registration changes are even better. Now all users that register from the group URLs count against the available seat limit. These means you can now limit how many people can use these registration URLs, but even better, you can let group members self-register directly into groups without using enrollment keys. Instead, the unique URL they register from effectively acts as the pre-populated enrollment key. This approach is far easier for learners to use when signing up for group-based access.

And that’s it for Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro 3.2.6! If you use LearnDash Groups, you’re definitely going to enjoy these new features.

Manage LearnDash Course Progress for Learners

July 19, 2019/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Websites using LearnDash Groups, rejoice! The 3.2 release of the Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin just added an amazing new feature: a way for Group Leaders and administrators to view and edit learner progress in the front end. It’s got a great UI, it’s really simple to use, and our Manage Learner Progress tool is very powerful.

Here’s a video that explains it:

Just drill down into courses, click, and progress is updated automatically. It works for courses, lessons, topics and quizzes. If courses and lessons have associated lessons, topics and quizzes beneath them, those get automatically completed too.

Set up Front End Progress Management

To use the new tool you must, of course, have the Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin installed and activated. Once that’s done, the Manage Learner Progress page must be created manually by adding the [uo_groups_manage_progress] shortcode to a page. Once that’s added, Group Leaders and admins can start managing progress!

Why manually create the page when other pages in the plugin are created automatically? We made that decision because a lot of LearnDash admins might not want their Group Leaders having this level of control. This way, it can’t be accidentally turned on.

Once the shortcode is in place, you can map the page in your Uncanny Groups Settings page and decide whether you want the view to be read-only for Group Leaders or whether you want them to be able to edit learner progress. Once the page is mapped in the Settings page, a new Progress button will be added to the Group Management page automatically! Group Leaders can now track course progress, report on quizzes, manage assignments, manage essay questions, and now edit LearnDash progress—all in the front end.

Point & Click: It’s That Easy

Once the Manage Learner Progress page is up, Group Leaders and admins can find users easily by searching by first name, last name or email address. The records autocomplete, so it’s really easy to find the right user. (And don’t worry, Group Leaders can only see users and courses associated with the groups they manage.)

Once records have populated for a user, the Group Leader or admin can check or uncheck records to mark them as complete or incomplete. Changes are instant; there’s no risk of forgetting to save changes before leaving the page.

For courses and lessons, you may wonder why we force the user to confirm the change before the system loops through and marks associated posts as complete (or incomplete). That’s because many sites have lesson and course completion trigger other things, like email notices and certificate generation. If the Manage Progress page executes these, the actions can’t be undone; emails can’t be unsent, for example. That’s why we force users to reflect and confirm that yes, they really do want to mark the course and everything beneath it as completed.

We’re really excited about this new addition to the Groups plugin. It’s just so useful and has been requested by a number of plugin users. And yes, we know the Groups plugin has really turned into a huge platform, but it just adds so much value for anyone using LearnDash Groups.

LearnDash 3.0 is out. Do you still need the Toolkit?

July 11, 2019/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

The LearnDash 3.0 release landed a few weeks ago, bringing with it lots of new features and a far better user experience for students and admins. It also added new login and registration options, meaning LearnDash site admins no longer need to rely on additional plugins to incorporate those features. With all of the LearnDash enhancements in the 3.0 release, it begs the question: Do LearnDash site owners still need the free version of the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit?

What’s in the Toolkit?

To consider the relevancy of the free Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit in a LearnDash 3.0 world, let’s review the modules included in the Toolkit:

Breadcrumb Links: Allow easy navigation from inside lessons and topics back up to the course and student dashboard level.
Certificate Widget: Output a list of earned certificates in a widget area with links to open the certificates.
Front End Login: A login form that allows easy branding, password reset, recaptcha support and more.
Groups in User Profiles: List groups that a user belongs to on the profile edit page in /wp-admin/.
Hide Admin Bar: Hide the admin bar for users based on role.
Log In/Log Out Links: Add links to menus to easily log in and log out from any page on a site.
Log In/Log Out Redirects: Control where users are directed when they log in or out on the site.
Menu Item Visibility: Show menu entries based on whether or not the user is signed in.
Not Enrolled Redirect: Redirect users to a sales, login or other page when they land on a course page when not enrolled.
Resume Button: Return users to where they left off in a course.
Show Certificates: Show a list of earned certificates with hyperlinks.
Show or Hide Content: Conditionally show content on a page based on whether the user is logged in or out.
Topics Autocomplete Lessons: Lessons are completed automatically when associated topics are all completed.
User Switching: Allow admins to switch to a student account and view the site as that student.

Those 14 modules are currently available in the free version of the Toolkit and offer an easy way for admins to add extra capabilities to LearnDash sites.

Are all Toolkit modules still relevant with LearnDash 3.0?

Now that we’ve taken a look at what the Toolkit offers, let’s review how their utility and relevance changes with LearnDash 3.0.

The Breadcrumb Links module is particularly useful on more complex sites where there is a dedicated page acting as a learner “dashboard”. This is typically where learners land after logging in and will often include a list of enrolled courses, instructions, and links to key tools and resources. LearnDash 3.0 offers an easy way for learners to navigate back up to the course level with breadcrumbs, but not back to a centralized course dashboard (if one exists). For sites using a learner dashboard or with more complex navigation needs, this module remains an important addition with LearnDash 3.0.

The Certificate Widget and Show Certificates modules may or may not be of value on LD sites. There are alternatives (the ld_profile shortcode in LearnDash, for example, includes certificate links) and certainly these aren’t must-have tools. If you prefer to display a list of certificates in a sidebar or independently of the ld_profile shortcode, then these modules may still add value to your site.

The Front End Login module is where things get more interesting. Until LearnDash 3.0, this is what made the Toolkit essential for LearnDash sites and was by far the most-used module in the Toolkit. Now that LearnDash 3.0 has login capabilities, should anyone still use the version in the Toolkit?

In our opinion, it depends. What’s in LearnDash 3.0 right now is basic and handles simple login functions only. What’s in the Toolkit handles branded password reset (LearnDash relies on WordPress default password reset functions), reCaptcha, manual user verification and more—features the LearnDash login tool doesn’t support. Of course, not everyone needs those features, and what’s in LearnDash is likely sufficient on some sites.

Groups in User Profiles is effectively redundant in LearnDash 3.0. It’s a legacy module that doesn’t add value to new LearnDash 3.0 sites and we may retire it.

Hide Admin Bar adds some role-based controls to hiding the admin bar that LearnDash doesn’t offer, and if you want to keep Group Leaders out of /wp-admin/ then this is still a very useful addition. If that capability isn’t needed, default LearnDash behaviours should be sufficient.

Log In/Log Out Links and Log In/Log Out Redirects are, or at least we believe they are, essential additions to LearnDash sites. We think Log In and Log Out functions should be easily accessible to users and available in site menus, and that learner dashboards should be used to provide a good student experience (and by using the redirect module, users can automatically land there after login).

Should learners see a different site menu than anonymous prospects? Absolutely, and that’s why we think the Menu Item Visibility module is also a must-have. LearnDash doesn’t currently support this capability.

Not Enrolled Redirect is an optional module that is useful if you display the same list of courses to both enrolled and not enrolled users (using something like a course grid, for example), and want users to be redirected to some sort of page optimized for sales instead of the course page when they click on a course in which they’re not enrolled. For sites with that type of user experience, this module can add a lot of value.

The Resume Button module is another must-have, especially if you use our Pro plugin and the course grid or dashboard modules. It makes it easier for students to see where they left off and pick up again from that point.

Show or Hide Content is another module that is very useful when you want to display different content to users on a given page depending on whether they’re logged in or out. There are growing alternatives for sites, especially with increasing use of Membership and CRM plugins, and in many cases the native and LearnDash shortcodes are suitable alternatives. But there are still situations where these shortcodes make messaging for students a lot easier to manage.

Topics Autocomplete Lessons does still offer a more linear flow through courses and better student experience in many situations. It’s widely used, and while not a must-have, it’s going to add value to most sites.

The User Switching is the final must-have module in the list. For troubleshooting problems this capability is invaluable for admins.

So, do you need the Toolkit?

Yes, the Toolkit still adds significant value to LearnDash 3.0 sites. Certainly we’re biased, but we believe that LearnDash sites still need the Toolkit to round out the admin and user experience.

We recognize that some Toolkit modules aren’t as essential as they once were. The Front End Login module moves from must-have status to a valuable add-on for most sites, and while all sites we build will use our Front End Login module (we want reCaptcha and branded password reset), we know fewer sites in the future will depend on our login module.

Nevertheless, that still leaves five Toolkit modules that we believe should be on all LearnDash sites: Log In/Log Out Links, Log In/Log Out Redirects, Menu Item Visibility, Resume Button and User Switching. Many others are likely to add some value, depending on the context, and there’s never a situation where we just recommend turning everything on without considering the value it adds to your site.

What about Pro?

Everything covered above is about the free Toolkit only. After all, it’s almost standard on new LearnDash sites and has a huge install base. But the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro add-ons plugin is extremely popular too, installed on thousands of LearnDash sites, and it adds dozens of additional modules. Are any of those redundant with the LearnDash release?

For our own LearnDash projects, the Pro add-on is our only other must-install plugin besides the Toolkit. (Our other Uncanny Owl plugins, like Groups, Tin Canny, Codes, and Continuing Education Credits certainly add value to some sites, but they’re not suited to every site.) At the time of publishing, Pro adds 25 modules to LearnDash sites, and on typical sites that use Pro we often see 5 to 10 of those activated.

For sites using Pro, we consider several of the modules to be extremely high value: Simple Course Timer, Import Users (directly into courses and groups using a simple checkbox interface), Course Dashboard, Enhanced Course/Lessons/Topics Grid, Import LearnDash Users, Email Course/Quiz Certificates, Drip Lessons by Group, Duplicate Pages and Posts, Autocomplete Lessons & Topics, and the Learner Transcript. LearnDash 3.0 doesn’t include anything related to the functionality these modules add to sites.

Two pro modules have been replaced by native LearnDash functionality in LearnDash 3.0 (with the LearnDash 3.0 theme active): Sample Lesson Label and Lesson/Topic/Quiz Table Colours. The LearnDash 3.0 theme now shows a visible Sample label on sample lessons, and lets users customize UI colours in settings. However, none of the other modules in Pro have seen their value proposition change with the LearnDash 3.0 release. While Certificate Preview is a new module to the Toolkit, it is another one where we can see future LearnDash development negating the need for this tool. For now, however, it still makes certificate production and testing more efficient.

Are we changing the Toolkit because of LearnDash 3.0?

Both the free Toolkit and Pro addons remain under very active development and we have a lot of great new features planned. Some modules (like the Groups in user Profiles module) may be retired as they become less useful, but that’s a good thing—we want deliver the best possible experience on LearnDash 3.0 sites and we’ll continue innovating and reassessing the value of our Toolkit modules.

xAPI Quiz Reporting: Beta

May 31, 2019/2 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

Today’s release of Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting added some extremely significant new features for anyone working with xAPI modules inside LearnDash. Because they are big changes and have not yet been tested extensively on live sites, for now we’re considering them “beta” additions and we recommend caution when trying them out.

Track xAPI Quiz Scores

The biggest change is that we now support collecting quiz data from xAPI records. For our current Tin Canny users, you know that in previous releases we collected scores and verbs from xAPI and SCORM records only. There were several reasons for this, but an important one was that earlier Tin Canny releases were not as efficient with very large sets of data and in early development we decided to capture and report on the most important data only so that we kept database records down and performance up. We estimate that around 10% of Tin Canny users requested that we add quiz data as well though, so now, in beta form, we’re making that option available.

Here’s what we came up with as a starting point:

This is going to be hugely beneficial to sites that offer quiz questions inside uploaded modules, because it now makes it possible to see specific questions in a quiz, the user’s answer, the choices available, the correct answer, and whether or not the user was right. Want to know who answered a specific question incorrectly? Now you can do that. Maybe you want to know how many users answered “C” for a specific multiple choice question? That’s also possible now. It’s a very big improvement, especially used in combination with the filters for LearnDash course, module, question, result and date.

And yes, we know that some of the columns are far too narrow for some quiz questions on sites. That’s why we made it possible to add and remove columns from the table using the Screen Options function at the top of the page. This one is really powerful and we haven’t seen anything like it from other xAPI tools.

Sorry SCORM users, the beta report for quiz data supports xAPI only, but we’re looking at SCORM support for an upcoming release.

Replace Content (beta), Site Check and More

Besides the lack of quiz data, the inability to easily swap out uploaded modules was a relatively common request from Tin Canny users. In previous versions, replacing a module meant deleting the old module, then uploading a new one and fixing all of the shortcodes if the module was embedded in multiple places. Now on the Manage Content page there’s a “Replace” link available for each module, which takes the new upload file, adds it, and replaces it in lessons and topics that used the old module automatically. If also deletes the old module and all related files. This feature should make a lot of users very happy. Please note that this feature is in beta, and requires the deletion of at least some of the stored progress data for users, so be sure to check the knowledge base article before using it on your site.

Next up, Site Check. We were getting too many of the same support requests over and over related to common environmental issues. Mark Complete button not updating? Something is probably blocking the endpoint, like a .htaccess password or security plugin. Content not showing up? Possibly an http vs. https mismatch. Nothing working? Maybe the permalinks are invalid. For some of these common issues, Tin Canny now offers a Site Check tool to rule out the most common problems, and if any are found, it suggests why they might be happening and how to fix them.

The 3.2 release also adds far more filters for developers, total course and learner stats to front end reports, and it takes care of a few additional translation issues (notably if you try to rebrand “Tin Canny”).

Most importantly: This update fixes an issue related to LearnDash 3.0 theme changes. If you use LearnDash 3.0 and controls over the Mark Complete button, you must use Tin Canny 3.2 or higher or the Mark Complete restrictions won’t work. LearnDash changed how the Mark Complete button is identified and the only solution is to update to the latest version.

That’s it for now. We hope you like the changes!

Pro Updates: Faster Learndash and a New Dashboard

May 24, 2019/3 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

Every time we make a blog post about one of our plugin updates it’s because it’s a huge update with new features, and for today’s Uncanny Learndash Toolkit Pro 3.2 update that’s especially true. This one has been in development for quite some time, and the new features are going to make a huge difference to LearnDash sites, especially ones with a lot of content.

Faster LearnDash Lesson & Topic Performance

We’re most excited about adding a new Lazy Loading Course Navigation tool. We get inquiries all the time about how to improve LearnDash site performance at the enterprise level. This includes sites with potentially hundreds of courses and thousands of LearnDash lessons and topics. On those sites, things can really get slowed down just because of the volume of content; queries get really heavy just to check course content relationships and progress within courses. On larger sites, we’ve seen these queries add seconds (yes, plural) to every page load that students make inside a course. You can’t really take away navigation aids from inside courses—but you can now load them after the rest of the page loads.

That’s what our new [uo-course-navigation] shortcode does. Use it in place of the normal LearnDash Course Navigation widget and all of the extra LearnDash queries will run AFTER the rest of the page has loaded. On a big site we tested on, this approach made lessons and topics load about 25% faster for students. (It adds a brief loading animation to the navigation tool and users don’t see the course hierarchy right away, but on large sites the tradeoff is absolutely worth it.)

New Dashboard Design

Our LearnDash Course Dashboard shortcode was due for a redesign, especially after seeing some of what’s coming in LearnDash 3.0. So that’s exactly what we did, and in a big way. While not shown in the screenshot above, it’s now really easy for users to know how to start a course, resume a course and retrieve certificates. The colour palette is very customizable, and the new dashboard is amazingly responsive. We’ll get a demo up on our plugin demo site at https://learndash.uncannyowl.com/ soon, but we can assure you that it collapses very well and looks great on mobile devices.

For users of the current dashboard, don’t worry, there’s a toggle to continue using the Legacy design. Everyone else will almost certainly want to try out the “3.0” design though.

Certificate Preview

If you’ve created many certificates with LearnDash you know how awkward and time-consuming it can be to set up certificates exactly as you want them. It typically involves setting up a test course, test lesson and/or quiz, then triggering completion and continuing reloading PDF files to try to get things right. You have one window open in the front end, the other in the back end, and you go back and forth to get things right.

Not any more. With the Certificate Preview module turned on, a Preview button gets added to the course edit page. And by clicking that button, right where you edit the certificate, you can preview the certificate. No more test courses and quizzes. Generating certificates is now far easier when you can do everything right inside the certificate edit page.

Note that because there is no associated course or quiz, our preview can’t actually render the shortcodes for things like completion date or course name. Instead, our preview tool substitutes placeholder data in the place of LearnDash shortcodes, so you can still focus on getting the layout right without having everything set up yet.

There’s More!

The Pro 3.2 release is big. We added some other great functions that will help a lot of our customers on their sites.

The Enhanced Lesson/Topic Grid module now supports WordPress category and tag attributes, so it’s easy to generate topic and grid listings with different content depending on the context.

Email Course Certificates adds %Group Name% token support to subject lines to make it easier for notifications to distinguish between users in different groups.

We also included a few fixes, notably for users that might have had issues with Drip Lessons by Group or automatically advancing on Gravity Form submission when the Autocomplete Lessons & Topics on Gravity Forms Submission module was enabled.

If you’re not yet an Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro user, there’s never been a better time to buy; the Toolkit is now up to 39 total modules!

Introducing Automatic Template Overrides

April 23, 2019/2 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

We’re in the middle of another big round of plugin updates and perhaps one of the most exciting addition to our plugins is support for template overrides. Basically, this feature allows you to take key HTML elements from our plugins, copy the templates into your child theme, make modifications to them, and not be worried about your customizations disappearing when you update the plugins.

Last week’s Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro (3.1) and LearnDash Groups (3.0.4) and this week’s Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit (3.1) updates are the first to support this new behavior. Using the overrides is really easy; find something you want to override in the /src/templates folders of our plugins, copy that file to your child theme (into an /uncanny-toolkit/ folder for the Toolkit plugins, /uncanny-groups/ for the Groups plugin), and then apply your changes to the new file. If the file is in a subfolder of the /src/templates folder, replicate the same folder structure inside the override folder, but drop the /templates path (e.g. /src/templates/frontend-login/default-login.php would go in /your-child-theme/uncanny-toolkit/frontend-login/default-login.php).

Certainly this feature is intended primarily for developers, who can build some very powerful features using our plugins as a base. Perhaps you want to add a new field to our Enhanced Course Grid, like an instructor name, or maybe on the Import LearnDash Users page you want to add your own instructions and branding. Template overrides make things like this much easier.

And while we’re talking about Pro and Groups plugins anyway, here are some other recent updates to the plugins you may have missed…

Recent Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro Updates

Improved Group Leader Interface: No more relying on third party plugins to redirect your Group Leaders! This module now supports login redirects for Group Leaders. If you use Pro with our Groups plugin, this is a great way to get your Group Leaders to land directly on the Group Management page.

Email Quiz Certificates: Tokens now available for including the user’s first and last name in the email sent to admins and/or Group Leaders. Use %First Name% to include the user’s first name and %Last Name% for last name. This makes organizing emails much easier.

Email Course Certificates: Pro 3.0.4 added a way to send certificates with a timed delay. Most users should not choose the “Use Cron to send certificate option”, but in some cases where a shortcode does not have course completion when the certificate is sent, choosing this option and then having the certificate sent 20 seconds after completion allows time for shortcodes in the certificate to render properly. If you find your certificate PDF files have some blank values, try turning this on.

Recent Uncanny LearnDash Group Updates

We’ve made a number of recent enhancements to our Groups plugin that will really help site owners:

Put the Key Redemption field anywhere in your Gravity Form registration form. This one is a huge improvement for several Groups users; the code entry field is no longer restricted to the bottom of the form. Instead, you can add the “Uncanny Code” field type anywhere on your form.

Include passwords in user uploads. CSV files can now include a specific password rather than the Groups plugin force a random password. This is a huge benefit on sites where students may not have an email address, as instead of requiring that an email be sent with their password, or a link to reset the password, nothing needs to be confirmed by email.

User verification in Gravity Forms is now supported, so you can have users confirm their email addresses before registration.

Tin Canny 3.0

March 6, 2019/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

We’ve had some big 3.0 plugin releases over the last few weeks, but today’s Tin Canny release is the biggest overhaul yet. It’s basically a complete rewrite of the reporting engine to improve performance and scalability on larger sites, with lots of smaller improvements and new features thrown in to round things out. Almost everything about reporting is now different, so if you’re an existing user, we highly recommend testing on a Staging site first.

Beyond the improvements behind the scenes, there’s a lot different on the front end too—starting with a complete redesign of all reports and charts. They’re far more mobile-friendly and easy to use.

Breadcrumb links are new, and now individual user reports include Gravatar images if available for your users. This helps to personalize reports and make them more visually appealing.

Tin Canny hadn’t yet fully supported Adobe Captivate 2019, but now it does! The 3.0 release of Tin Canny will help you get more out of Captivate on your LearnDash sites—as will even more controls over resetting Tin Canny SCORM and xAPI records. Tin Canny 3.0 supports purging records for individual users. For testing purposes or clearing bad data, this is going to be a big help to a lot of sites that need to reset user records independently.

Rounding out the list of new features, Tin Canny users can now disable the Tin Canny dashboard widget to improve load times, and more Gutenberg block support has been added for the quiz reports.

Tin Canny 3.0 includes dozens of other behind-the-scenes improvements, including:

Support for additional H5P module types
Better navigation between reports, like going from Course > User > Course report for a user instead of Course > User > Course List > Course report
Improved compatibility with MySQL 8
Better notices when no data is available
Better translation support
Better consistency of data across courses and groups

For a full list of the changes, make sure to read the changelog at https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/tin-canny-learndash-reporting-changelog/.

Existing users: Please do consider testing this on a Staging or Development site before you deploy the release on your live site. Tin Canny 3.0 has been through a lot of internal testing but there may still be slight differences in report output compared to what you’re used to.

Uncanny LearnDash Groups 3.0

February 12, 2019/5 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

It’s time for another 3.0 plugin release!

We’ve had some big 3.0 releases over the last few weeks, but today’s Uncanny LearnDash Groups 3.0 update is really in a class of its own with new features. If you use LearnDash Groups, you should be very excited.

One thing that really set our Groups plugin apart was the flexible ecommerce offerings it made possible. You could create and sell course bundles to organizations, let people pick and choose their own courses to create groups, even set up all of that with subscription support. But it never offered a way for learners to add themselves to groups with a purchase.

Well, now it does. Learners can buy a WooCommerce product that adds them to a LearnDash Group automatically. Just create a product, map it to a LearnDash Group, and anyone that buys it gets added to the group. No codes, no changing the user to a Group Leader, the learner just gets instantly added to the group. And did we mention full support for subscriptions with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin? That’s right, set up a subscription product, map it to a group, and the user gets access to the group but only for as long as they keep paying.

That’s a huge benefit to LearnDash sites, but it’s not even the biggest change in the Groups 3.0 release. We listened to feedback from our users and in 3.0 we added full front-end management of assignments and essay questions for Group Leaders. Definitely one of our biggest complaints since launch was that Group Leaders still had to visit /wp-admin/ for some Group Leader functions. Well, now they don’t. 🙂 There’s no longer any reason for Group Leaders to need wp-admin access if they use Uncanny LearnDash Groups 3.0.

We know that’s going to help a lot of sites out. We did the same thing for quiz essays as what you see above for assignments; links to questions, grading, the course, lesson, quiz, and comments. It’s all from a single, streamlined interface in the front end.

The Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin only recently added the ability for Group Leaders to email members of a group. However, Group Leaders could only email all users of a group, not just users that haven’t completed or started their training. in Groups 3.0 Group Leaders can send group members emails based on their course completion status:

But we didn’t stop here. Here are some other things that made it into the 3.0 release:

Our new Uncanny 3.0 plugin architecture for easier support and license management.
Basic Gutenberg block support
More hooks for developers.
No more “Existing User” option in the Add User modal! This was confusing; Group Leaders won’t necessarily know if a user is new or already exists in the system, so now we handle this automatically.
Better translation support, multisite support and third party email plugin support.

As always with our 3.0 plugin releases, this is a big one and we highly recommend testing things out on a Staging site before you take it live.

This release means only one Uncanny Owl plugin still has an outstanding 3.0 release, and it’s Tin Canny. Look for that one next week!

Uncanny LearnDash Codes 3.0

February 1, 2019/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Following up on our recent Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit, Pro and Continuing Education Credits 3.0 releases, today we’re excited to announce the 3.0 version of our popular Codes plugin for LearnDash!

The Uncanny LearnDash Enrollment Codes plugin makes it easy to add learners to LearnDash courses and groups using codes you can generate on your website. It’s often used to sell access to LearnDash courses and groups from another website (such as from Shopify), completely offline (a popular use is bundling codes in book sales or posting codes at trade shows), or even shared in newsletters. It opens up a world of opportunities for getting people onto your WordPress site and into LearnDash courses.

In the 3.0 release we’re adding some frequently requested features that make it even easier to manage large sets of codes. A recent client project that required generating and managing over one million codes inspired us to add powerful code search capabilities and a way to expire coupon codes by date and time—automatically.

As with all of our 3.0 releases, the new Codes update also includes some Gutenberg blocks as well as the new Uncanny 3.0 architecture. This includes easier access to support resources and our help desk.

For those of you struggling with the move to Theme My Login 7.x, we have added support for TML 7.x and you can now extend its registration forms to support code redemption. Gravity Forms users get support for User Verification, and both translation support and multisite compatibility are improved.

If you’re not yet using Uncanny LearnDash Enrollment Codes, now is the perfect time to check out what is by far the most powerful code-based solution for managing access to LearnDash courses and groups.

Continuing Education Credits 3.0

January 23, 2019/0 Comments/in Continuing Education, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

As part of our series of 3.0 releases for our LearnDash plugins, today marks the release of the 3.0 update for Uncanny Continuing Education Credits. While Pro, Tin Canny and Groups tend to get all the attention, the Continuing Education Credits plugin is one that has been invaluable for some of our own projects, especially for the permanent record it creates of LearnDash course completions. With the latest changes, we’re confident it will be an even bigger asset to sites offering continuing education credits and compliance training.

Here’s some of what’s changing in the 3.0 release:

New Report Designs: We’ve completely redesigned both admin and front end reports so that everything is modern, responsive, and more intuitive.
New Report Filters: Filter admin reports by date range, user or group. It’s even easier to get to the specific data you need.
Gutenberg Block Support: We’re adding eight new Gutenberg blocks for shortcodes and reports to make it easier to incorporate credit reporting into the front end of your LearnDash site.
Uncanny 3.0 Plugin Architecture: Now it’s even easier to get support right from your WordPress site and the control panel is aligned with our other plugins.

The 3.0 release also includes a number of fixes and support for the new CEU column available in the Learner Transcript in the 3.0.1 Pro release. All things considered, it’s a big update to the CEU plugin and brings important efficiency and aesthetic improvements.

If you’ve considered Uncanny Continuing Education Credits in the past but weren’t sure how it might add value to your site, make sure to check out our recent post on building compliance and recurring training programs that leverage some of the key features in this plugin.

Annual Compliance Programs with WordPress

January 21, 2019/9 Comments/in eLearning, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

It seems like a simple scenario: Staff need to complete the same courses every year and those completions need to be tracked. Yet, if you deliver your elearning programs with WordPress, you probably know how difficult this is to achieve. Here’s where things with a WordPress-based LMS start to break down:

WordPress LMS plugins don’t track historical completions. Once a learner completes the course once, that’s it. They can’t trigger a second completion.
If you reset course progress, it resets everything. That’s probably why plugins make it difficult or impossible to reset progress.

With the help of some addon plugins, however, it is absolutely possible to use WordPress as a platform to deliver annual compliance training. This article outlines how you can do it with the popular LearnDash LMS plugin for WordPress.

Create a Permanent Record of Course Completions

This is really the most important step. If you can’t track historical completions, you can’t offer annual compliance programs. Fortunately, one of our commercial LearnDash plugins makes this easy.

The Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin automatically creates a permanent record of completions as users finish courses. Don’t let the name fool you; the plugin does far more than award credits for completing courses. And, for our scenario here, we don’t even need to consider the credit or certificate features included with the plugin. We just need to use it for the permanent record, so ignore the CEU and Total columns.

The records in the table above are not pulling data from LearnDash, but rather the permanent course archive that the plugin captures automatically. As soon as the plugin is installed it records all new completions to the permanent record, so you never need to worry about progress resets or LearnDash changes affecting historical records.

Reset Course Progress

Now that you’re storing a permanent record of course completions, you need a way to reset user progress in courses so that they can retake them. After all, you don’t want to have to clone out a course each year and re-enroll students in the new one just so they can complete it again.

One very simple option here is to use the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro plugin, with its Reset Button module, to allow users to reset their own progress and take the course again. Once it’s turned on, just drop the [uo_reset_course_progress] shortcode onto any course page where users need to reset progress. The button that it adds will allow users to retake the course and wipe out their previous progress (which is why it’s so important to have the historical record in place).

Another option here is our Uncanny Automator plugin. With it, you can create “triggers” that reset progress for a course. An easy Automator recipe here would be to set up a recipe that resets a user progress in a course as soon as they complete it. This is what the recipe might look like:

If you’re a developer, you can even build your own workflows for resetting progress that better match your context. The Reset Button module mentioned above as part of Pro includes some tools that make it possible to incorporate our reset functions into your own code. More information is available in the Knowledge Base article.

Other Options for Compliance Tracking

The solutions above require the use of 2 to 3 paid plugins, but there are possible workarounds that can be used with a bit more work. If you use a CRM and a tool like WP Fusion, you could potentially use Tags to track completion records instead of our Continuing Education Unit plugin. On an annual basis, what you could do is change completion tags in your courses so that it identified the course and year. In other words, maybe on completion of a course called “Physics” you set a tag of “Completed Physics – 2019”. You could then filter on the CRM side to show only users with that tag to see who was assigned that tag. You will still of course need some way to reset course progress, and for that options are more limited.

By adding plugins to your LearnDash site like the ones mentioned above, it is very possible to offer annual compliance programs on your site that keep historical records and do allow users to retake the courses every year.

If you have your own solution for offering annual compliance training that’s different than what’s outlined above, let us know your solution in the comments!

The Biggest Toolkit Pro Update Yet

January 11, 2019/5 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Following up on our recent Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit 3.0 release, the 3.0 Toolkit Pro release is now also available! It’s a huge release that includes 2 brand new modules, several redesigns, new Gutenberg blocks and a whole lot more. Between the free Toolkit and the Pro modules addon, we now offer a whopping 37 powerful modules to improve your LearnDash sites.

New Modules

The Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Pro 3.0 release includes 2 new modules: Autocomplete Lessons & Topics When Quiz Is Graded and Group Login Redirect. We know, the names are long, but at least they describe and do what you expect!

The new Autocomplete module fills a gap for quizzes that are graded manually. With this new module turned on, lessons and topics associated with a manually graded quiz are completed automatically for the user when the instructor grades the quiz. It’s simple, but it makes things easier for students.

The Group Login Redirect adds a new section to LearnDash Group Edit pages that, when populated, redirects members of that group to any page you choose on login. Maybe you want to take members of a group with only one course straight into that course, or maybe you want to take group members to a branded dashboard page just for that school or company. It’s a great option if you offer training to organizations. You can even set a redirect priority, so that if a user is in multiple groups, you can make sure you they land on the right page when they sign in.

While it’s not a new module, our Learner Transcript module got a big overhaul, so it’s almost like new! It has a completely new, mobile-friendly design, better printing support, branded header and footer options, and you can sort data and include or exclude columns. This one is really exciting for us and we’re sure your students will love this improved way to see their progress across courses.

That’s Just the Start…

The LearnDash Toolkit Pro 3.0 release includes dozens of enhancements and fixes. Here are a few highlights

Gutenberg block support for many of the modules with shortcodes
Submit a ticket right from your WordPress site, including optional site information to help us troubleshoot your issue

Filter courses by Category or Course Category when using our Course Dashboard shortcode
A new license activation page to make it easier to track licensing status
New debug options for the Simple Course Timer
No more requirement to pass a course ID to the reset button shortcode when it’s on a course page
Support for quiz and quiz question duplication in LearnDash 2.6

Read the full list of changes here: https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/learndash-toolkit-pro-change-log/

Stay tuned for more 3.0 releases of our plugins over the next few weeks!

Announcing the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit Version 3.0!

January 9, 2019/4 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ken Young

We just released version 3 of our super-popular Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit plugin and it has some really fantastic improvements!

Our Front End Login module, which is the first thing learners see on many LearnDash sites, has been completely overhauled with new features and an updated design:

We've added support for the popular reCAPTCHA anti-bot service. Many more strings are now easily customizable through the module settings. The original design is selected by default, for backward compatibility with existing sites, so to use the new design you'll need to choose the new template from the module settings. If you are a developer and had overridden the previous template file, you'll need to update your template file with the new version as it includes many internal changes.

Toolkit version 3 brings a completely overhauled Modules page with a more modern, streamlined design and improved mobile support:

We've also added a help page with links to relevant knowledge base articles right inside the plugin.

And what would a new release be without improved support for the Gutenberg WordPress editor? Modules with front-end components (Breadcrumbs, Resume button and Front End Login) get new Gutenberg blocks to make it easier to add these elements to your Gutenberg pages.

Lastly, we've included a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements to other modules. Check the changelog for the full list.

We put a lot of effort into version 3 of the Toolkit and we hope you enjoy it!

Existing User of the LearnDash Toolkit?

Before you jump in and update your Toolkit plugins on a live site, we highly recommend giving them a try in a Staging environment first. Some of the changes are quite significant, especially the Front End Login module, and testing that everything still works as expected is important.

Here's a quick video that we recommend existing users watch before applying the update to your sites:

Tin Canny Meets Gutenberg

December 6, 2018/2 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

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 are now displayed in the block settings on the right, including the settings you’re used to, like insertion type and dimensions.

And that’s it! Making the transition to managing your SCORM and xAPI with Gutenberg might seem strange the first time you do it, but it really is a simple transition once you’ve added 1 or 2 modules.

Outside of the Gutenberg-specific additions, we created a new page to find and manage your uploaded modules. The Manage Content page makes it easy to search through your uploaded Rise, Storyline, Captivate and iSpring modules, as well as preview them and delete them. No more having to dig through the Uploader tab in a post to look through and delete your modules (and we know many people didn’t even know that function existed).

There’s a lot more that’s new in the 2.9.9 release; here are some highlights:

An easy option to clear Answered and Experienced xAPI records from your database, freeing up space taken by these often less important verbs. (More data management records are coming in 3.0, including resetting Tin Canny data for individual users.)
Better support for the H5P Course Presentation content type.
Improved time zone support for the quiz reports.

The next big release will be 3.0, so stay tuned for more news on that in the near future!

Easier LearnDash Group Management

October 11, 2018/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Our LearnDash Groups 2.6 release is big. It adds features that make it easier for Group Leaders to add and communicate with group members. That’s right, we added email functions! And there’s new front end group creation, more Theme My Login support, changes to filters… Let’s take a closer look.

Add & Invite Users

Because inviting individual users, uploading users by CSV and enrollment keys weren’t enough for Group Leaders to add users to groups, we listened to your requests and added a new interface to add users in bulk. Rather than having to add one user at a time, now Group Leaders can add multiple users from a single page. For large groups, this addition could save a lot of time.

Email Group Members

For a lot of sites this will be a big improvement. Uncanny LearnDash Groups 2.6 adds a new feature that allows Group Leaders to email their students right from the Group Management page. To use it, there’s a new optional attribute for the [uo_groups] shortcode of “group_email_button”. You need to turn this one on (so Group Leaders can’t suddenly send emails without you knowing about it), so make sure your shortcode looks like this to use the new button: [uo_groups group_email_button=”show”] (plus any other attributes you want to use). Please note that emails sent with this new functionality are sent on behalf of Group Leaders (so the reply-to address will be theirs) and that emails go to all members of the group.

What’s New in LearnDash Toolkit Pro 2.5?

October 2, 2018/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

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 Toolkit, version 2.5, includes a course-specific Resume button shortcode that outputs a button that takes users back to where they left off in a specific course. To make that button super easy for users to access, we’ve added a new attribute (resume_course_button=”show”) to the Enhanced Course Grid that displays a course-specific Resume button beneath the course when resume data is available. We’ve also added a second attribute (start_course_button=”show”) that displays a Start button for users that haven’t yet begun courses. Two big notes for this one: You must have the Resume toolkit module enabled to use the new resume attribute, and if no resume data exists for the user for that course then no button will be displayed. This means that if you turn this on, an existing user with 50% progress in a course wouldn’t see any button because resume data at the course level only gets tracked after you install the Pro 2.5 update. Confused? Check out the Knowledge Base article for more info. Also note that you must update to version 2.5 of the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit as well to use these new resume features.

To go along with this new resume functionality is a new shortcode included in the free Toolkit plugin. With the resume module in 2.5 we’re adding this new shortcode: [uo_course_resume course_id=”x”]. You can add that shortcode to any page (including course pages!) and it will allow users to return to the lesson, topic or quiz they last visited. It’s just like our regular resume button, except instead of being global this one applies to specific courses. The Knowledge Base article covers how to use it.

And one more big change: you can add category drop-downs to the Enhanced Course Grid! Use the categoryselector=”show” attribute to filter by WordPress category and course_categoryselector=”show” to filer by LearnDash course category. Make sure you use the right one! WordPress vs. LearnDash course categories are a frequent source of confusion for course grid users. The new attributes are included in the Knowledge Base article for the Enhanced Course Grid.

The 2.5 update includes a a few other changes, like the Import LearnDash Users module now supporting Display Name and better Gravity Forms detection.

New Front End Quiz Reports

July 16, 2018/6 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

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.)

Tin Canny users with version 2.9.5 or higher installed can add the new report to a page by using this shortcode:

[uo_group_quiz_report]

The second new report, also for the front end, outputs all scores for a particular user. Available to students themselves, Group Leaders and administrators, this one lists all LearnDash and scores tracked by Tin Canny across all courses.

Here’s the shortcode for the user quiz report:

[uo_individual_quiz_report]

The best part of the two reports is that they can be linked together for admins and Group Leaders using a shortcode attribute.

Here’s how to use it:

[uo_group_quiz_report user_report_url="%URL%"]

Just replace the URL in the example above with the URL that shows the new user report. And by doing that, all user names in the Group report will be linked to the user report with that person’s results. These 2 reports together make for a very powerful drill-down reporting solution for quiz scores, especially when paired with the CSV and PDF export options.

Please note that these 2 new reports are included in the Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin only. It can be used without SCORM/Tin Can data as a LearnDash-only quiz reporting solution, but it is still only included in the Tin Canny plugin.

Build Better Group Leader Front End Experiences

April 5, 2018/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

It’s really satisfying to see our LearnDash plugins grow and mature. Uncanny LearnDash Groups is still (at the time this article was published) our newest plug public plugin, and with the recent 2.x changes, we have reached a point where development is quite stable. It’s great to see how happy people are with the product too; in the last week alone, customers wrote to tell us that the Groups plugin is “absolutely awesome” (Jonathan B) and a “very useful addition [that I] strongly recommend” (Julia R).

As it is a very complex plugin, however, we know that some users still find it challenging to create great user experiences around it on their sites. Recently we have particularly seen an uptick from customers asking how to make things easier for Group Leaders, especially how they should manage groups both post-purchase and on an ongoing basis. How should I get new Group Leaders to the Group Management page? How do I separate Student and Group Leader experiences? How do I teach Group Leaders what they should be doing? These questions and others do pose a challenge for some of our plugin users, especially because designing the right workflows aren’t necessarily part of the plugin itself.

In this blog post we outline some of the recommendations we often suggest to people, along with some simple code samples that might improve your workflows. Not all of these suggestions are likely to be relevant to your site, but maybe within the suggestions you’ll find some ideas about how the Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin, along with some complementary solutions, can improve the Group Leader experience on your sites.

Restrict Menus by Role

This is really a key starting point. With our Groups plugin there are some pages only intended for Group Leaders, and it’s important not to expose them to regular students and other roles. For setting this up we like the Nav Menu Roles plugin, which allows you to set up your menu entries so that you can control what people see based on their role. Set up an entry for the Group Management page that only Group Leaders can see; this will help a lot. (If you use that plugin, make sure you disable the Menu Item Visibility module in the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit if you use it; they will conflict otherwise.)

Use Redirects

Login redirects are great to get Group Leaders straight to the Group Management page. To make sure other login redirects are overridden and that you target Group Leaders only, we like Peter’s Login Redirect. Set a Group Leader role redirect to your Group Management page and you’re all set.

But what about post-purchase? WooCommerce signs the user in automatically after a purchase but takes them to a confirmation page. If you want to take the new Group Leader (as this applies to purchases of group products only) straight to the Group Management page, add this line of code to the functions.php file of your child theme:

add_filter( ‘uo_redirect_after_checkout’, ‘__return_true’ );

Add a Link to the Group Management Page

An underused shortcode included in our plugin takes users directly to the Group Management page:

[uo_groups_url text="Button Text"]

Just drop that shortcode onto a page (we like Learner Dashboards, or wherever users are most likely to spend most of their time), and it will display a link to the Group Management page. The link is only shown to Group Leaders, so you don’t have to worry about restricting who can see the link!

Send Instructions

It’s very helpful to send instructions to your new Group Leaders to help them get started after a purchase. This can be pretty hard though, since you don’t want instructions going to regular students too after buying a course product. Our preferred solution here is to use an integration with a CRM system, as we often have something set up anyway to pass details over and send automated email campaigns. If you do use one, and you turn on the “Automatically include Group Course products in Group License purchases” setting the the Uncanny LearnDash Groups settings page, you can add tags to your Course Products to trigger emails to anyone that buys them. Since that would normally be Group Leaders only, setting up an automation to trigger welcome instructions on those tags is a great way to send communications.

A plugin WooCommerce Follow Ups, could also be used and is simpler, but we prefer the CRM approach if you can do it.

Add Instructions to the Group Management Page

Getting Group Leaders to the Group Management page is easy with some of the instructions above, so if they’re going there anyway, consider adding some instructions to the top of the page.

Get Help From a Developer

There are some other code-based options available, but to execute them properly you’ll need a pretty good Developer. You could potentially modify the WooCommerce receipt email to include instructions based on the products purchased, or modify the confirmation/thank you page to include messaging and buttons based on what the user purchased. Both of these approaches require coding and can be complex to manage.

Whatever options you choose, we hope the guidance above does give you some ideas about how to set up your own workflow for Group Leaders as they manage their groups in the front end. And if you have any ideas that we may have missed, let us know about them in the comments below!

Uncanny LearnDash Groups: Part 2

March 26, 2018/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Uncanny LearnDash Groups users: This is the update you’ve been waiting for.

Everyone else: Time to get excited about LearnDash Groups.

Version 2.0 of the Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin is out, and it’s a huge upgrade. Version 2.0 includes LearnDash Group Subscription support, major UI changes, many new shortcode parameters for front end customizations, better translation support, and over a dozen other important fixes and updates.

Yes, there is finally support for WooCommerce Subscriptions! Certainly our most requested feature, you can now collect recurring payments for group purchases. Note, however, that we only support subscriptions for Group License products created by an administrator, not custom Group Licenses built by customers using the [uo_group_buy_courses] shortcode, and once purchased, the number of seats and courses for the group cannot be changed by Group Leaders. We’re constrained by limitations with the Subscriptions plugin, but we’ll be looking into possible solutions for those barriers in the next few months.

Our documentation will be updated shortly to fully explain subscription use, but if you’re a current plugin user and want to get started, create the LearnDash Group Course products as you normally would, then use a Simple Subscription product (instead of a Group License product) to bundle the courses and sell the group with recurring payments. The screenshot above will hopefully point you in the right direction.

We also have a new introductory screencast to help out if you’re new to Groups or need more information about how to set it up and coordinate things on your site. It’s a long video, but setting up group licensing of courses is a fairly complex process, so watching it will help new users get a quick start with the plugin.

The front end LearnDash Groups pages (Group Management, Progress Report and Quiz Report) have all been completely rebuilt. In the original plugin we tried to use some common theme styles in the plugin so that the pages would inherit styles and better fit in with the theme, but it just didn’t work as well as we hoped. Now we are adding our own styles so that we can make sure that everything looks good across all sites, without needing any knowledge of CSS or having to worry about conflicts. In the back end you can even control the colour palette! Here’s a sample of how things look now:

Existing plugin users will find that their pages look quite different after updating to 2.0. The location of some elements, including buttons, has also changed so that they have better context.

The Group Management page is now extremely customizable. Maybe you don’t want your groups to use enrolment keys or for Group Leaders to be able to add additional Group Leaders. Now you can change what’s on the page very simply, as the [uo_groups] shortcode has a dozen new parameters to control almost everything about the page. Have a look at this knowledge base article to better understand how you can now control everything. To see what else has changed in this release, have a look at https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/uncanny-learndash-groups-changelog/, especially if you’re an existing user.

Tin Canny Users: Last week also saw a big (though less exciting) update for non-English users of the Tin Canny plugin. The most recent release made 99 new text strings available for translation, making the plugin much more translation-friendly and more usable on sites that aren’t in English.

Finally… We will soon be celebrating the 5 year anniversary of Uncanny Owl. It’s been a very long time since we released a new plugin, but to coincide with our anniversary we’ll be releasing our most ambitious product yet. We’re all very excited to share more news about it soon, as we’re confident that it will completely transform how you configure your WordPress sites. Stay tuned!

Improve Your LearnDash Course Sales Workflow

February 5, 2018/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

Do your visitors get confused about how to buy your course?

Course pages in LearnDash tend to have two audiences: enrolled students and potential students. That can make things a bit confusing. Do you tailor the content and experience to the learner, or do you make the experience more intuitive for prospective buyers? You can absolutely do both (the visitor and student shortcodes come in handy here), but it does make managing the content and using page builders more difficult.

In the latest version (2.3) of our free Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit plugin, we added a very simple new module that can make things easier for some sites. What it does is simple: If a person trying to access a course page is not enrolled in the course, the system redirects them to another URL. That’s it, the behaviour is very simple.

Where this comes in really handy though is with both our course grid module in the Toolkit Pro plugin as well as the LearnDash grid add-on. Using either of those, now you have a way to control the behaviour when users click courses in the grid. If they click a course in the grid and they have access, the users get to the course. If they’re not enrolled, they go straight from the grid to a sales page (or to checkout, or to whatever other page you define). No middle step, no making the course page work for 2 different audiences.

Another great use of the module is redirecting a user to a page that explains that he or she doesn’t currently have access to the course with instructions on how to become enrolled. This can be a single global page, making maintenance much easier than editing all course pages.

Using the new module is simple. Just turn it on from the Toolkit settings page, and in course edit pages, add the URL you want to redirect users to when they’re not enrolled. That’s it! If you want the redirect to work for some courses and not others, just add a URL for courses where you want to redirect people that aren’t enrolled and leave the URL blank if you want all users to be able to access the course page.

We hope this new workflow option improves your conversions and the user experience.

Front End Reporting Solutions for LearnDash

December 8, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can, Uncanny LP/by Ryan Moore

It’s been a constant request from LearnDash users ever since we started building WordPress platforms: “We need better front end reports.” End users don’t like CSV files. They also get confused in the back end, even if they’re Group Leaders. LearnDash users needed a better way.

Gradually some viable solutions started to appear in the LearnDash community. ProPanel add front end widgets a few months ago, and third parties like 247digitalclassrooms started to fill in some gaps. We added some compelling options ourselves, but after a year of countless requests, we’re finally bringing our most requested reports to the front end.

Front End Reporting Comes to Tin Canny

Version 2.2 of our Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin adds the Course and User reports you’re familiar with in the back end to the front end. Group Leaders can finally access drill-down summary and student reports without requiring access to the back end of your WordPress site. On top of that, we have also added a filter for groups, so Group Leaders no longer have to look at combined data for all of their groups if they don’t want to.

It’s super simple to use the new front end reports. Simply drop a [tincanny] shortcode on any page of your site. If the user viewing the page is a Group Leader or Administrator, they’ll have access to the same reports they’re used to on the back end. (For technical reasons, the Tin Can report, which is separate from the Course and User reports, is still only available in the back end.) This is what it looks like:

Of course, the reporting tables appear below that, but we didn’t want to make the image too large here. When you do add the shortcode, we strongly recommend that you only use it on full-width pages and that no other content be on the pages. It’s a big report.

Updates? We’ve Got Updates!

November 21, 2017/4 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

It’s been a very busy 2 weeks in the LearnDash world.

Version 2.5 of LearnDash was released on November 7, bringing long-awaited features like a visual course builder and the ability to include lessons and topics in multiple courses. The latter is a fundamental change to how courses can be organized and developed.

For LearnDash users, the changes bring welcome new features and far more flexible ways to author courses. And for plugin developers like us, we have to rethink how course relationships work and find new solutions when there are significant architectural changes to the plugins we depend on.

For the last 2 weeks we’ve been working tirelessly to add proper support for LearnDash 2.5 to our plugins. This wasn’t always easy, as LearnDash changed how lessons, topics and quizzes mapped to courses—and with plugins as big and as complex as ours, we have a lot of code that has to look up course relationships, labels, and more.

We released a significant update to the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit 2 weeks ago that addressed several 2.5 related issues and also added a simple new module for easy User Switching. That plugin has now crossed the 8,000 active installs barrier (yay!) and no issues tied to 2.5 have been reported. (As an aside, with 8,000 installs and only 6 reviews, I think we may have one of the lowest review to install ratios in WordPress; if you use the plugin, don’t forget to leave your review!)

Last Wednesday we released a big update to Pro, addressing multiple 2.5 issues (with the timer, course expiry, group drip and autocompletion) and we added a completely new way to track time for courses. It’s still in beta, so we suggest testing it on Staging sites first, but it’s a more efficient way of recording time and can potentially reduce the resources used by our old timer by 80%. On less powerful sites where resources were already being pushed, we do suggest giving the new tracking method a try. And because it’s lighter, we do now allow a polling interval down to the 5 second level for increased accuracy (the previous limit was 10).

The update to our LearnDash Groups plugin was released on Thursday. It’s less related to 2.5 but covers a lot of fixes to our Groups plugin. It’s still our newest plugin and it receives the most feedback and suggestions for improvement, so if you use Groups, you should absolutely update. There are a lot of improvements.

The Tin Canny update with LearnDash 2.5 fixes was released earlier today. We had a lot of complications with this one to make sure course attributions were correct with the 2.5 changes, so it unfortunately took the longest to release.

That’s it! Those were a lot of plugin updates for us in a short span. Let us know if you do notice any new issues related to LearnDash 2.5 and we’ll happily take a look.

How We Made LearnDash 75 Times Faster

October 31, 2017/10 Comments/in Best Practices, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Important: This article examines how we modified certain parts of LearnDash to improve performance on high volume/enterprise sites. LearnDash itself is not slow, but some parts of it are designed for convenience rather than performance. For the vast majority of LearnDash sites, the optimizations discussed below are unnecessary and could be dangerous. This article is intended for very large sites where scalability and performance are critical.

We see a lot of projects that really push LearnDash to its limits, and for a sub-$200 WordPress plugin, those limits are surprisingly high. LearnDash is generally an efficient plugin that serves the vast majority of its customers very well, but every so often, an organization wants to see how well it can really perform at scale.

The typical LearnDash site we see might expect up to 15 simultaneous learners (even on sites with upwards of 1,000 users) and perhaps 200 LearnDash posts. We support several, however, that have hundreds of simultaneous learners and thousands of LearnDash posts (courses, lessons, topics and quizzes). At that level, everything gets harder and keeping everything running smoothly requires tuning performance wherever we can.

What we observed on extremely large sites, especially after total courses crossed the 100 level, total quizzes exceeded 1,000 and we started going over the 100 simultaneous user mark, was that performance significantly deteriorated in 3 main areas: user profile pages in /wp-admin/, quiz listing pages, and quiz submissions. In some cases users and admins were even seeing 503 errors, which is catastrophic for any live LearnDash site, but especially ones with hundreds of people online at the same time.

In user profiles we found that database operations could often exceed 150 seconds of processing times and require 10s of thousands of SQL queries to render (perhaps 200 queries is typical on most pages). What we found was that the “Course Progress Details” section of the profile page was looping through all courses to retrieve records for the user and the courses for every course the user was enrolled in. It was pulling everything down on page load too, so even if an admin were just going in to change a password or something else unrelated to LearnDash, the site would be affected by severe load.

Loading all of this data does make things a lot more convenient for admins, and in most cases this section wouldn’t be an issue. But when loading tens of thousands of records on a site with lots of courses, it’s a problem. Fortunately, our developers were able to override this section completely with an alternative solution that combines queries and reduces loops when the admin drills down into that specific course. The approach means we only load data when it’s needed and only as much as is needed. We also removed the edit links to LearnDash posts from the profile page, which are generally rarely used, and we added some transients to speed things up further.

The net effect of these changes?

We took profile page load time for admins from 150 seconds to 2 seconds.

The difference was night and day. It made profile pages usable again.

The list of quizzes inside LearnDash was another interesting performance challenge. With well over 1,000 quizzes (and thousands of lessons and topics) on a site, just listing the quizzes was a 120 second exercise that adversely affected learners on the site at the same time. Why so slow? Well, LearnDash adds filters to quizzes to make it easy to choose a course (or something else) and only see quizzes under it. But to populate that list of filters, it needs to look up all the associations between quizzes, courses, lessons and topics—which takes a long time on a big site.

This was a case where we really gave up convenience for performance. We didn’t care about only showing objects with quizzes in the filters. So instead we just loaded all courses, then on course selection in a filter we showed all lessons and topics. If the administrator filtered and there were quizzes, great. And if not, we just showed a message that there were no quizzes. That change took loading the quiz listing from 120 seconds to 2 seconds. It was well worth the slight inconvenience.

Next we looked at quiz submission performance. On sites with a lot of content, saving quiz answers that include essay questions can be extremely slow—in the case of a site with 120,000 rows in the wp_posts table, it was taking 35 seconds to save quizzes with essay questions. Obviously that was trying learner patience and slowing down the site. To address this one we took a shortcut, and instead of looking for a matching post title or name to avoid duplicates when saving an essay answer, we skipped the check and just forced a unique post name.

That new approach took quiz saving time from 35 seconds to 3 seconds.

As you can see from our results, it is possible to significantly increase LearnDash performance on big sites. What’s especially nice is that LearnDash allows us to make 2 out of the 3 overrides above without changes to LearnDash code (and we’re hoping the third can be handled outside of LearnDash in a future LearnDash release if additional filters are added). This means it’s easy to bundle our performance improvements into a portable plugin and the optimizations will survive updates.

Another factor that did help us really push LearnDash performance on these sites was assistance from Pressidium, who are hosting the sites. They went out of their way to help us look at opportunities for performance enhancements and they applied some database changes to their environment to improve performance further.

Where to Find LearnDash Training, Tutorials and Documentation

October 11, 2017/0 Comments/in Best Practices, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Building a robust and polished LearnDash site can be quite difficult. We’ve been doing it for over 4 years now and we’re still discovering new and better ways to build sites. We definitely have an edge with a team of skilled developers and LearnDash experts at our disposal, but we’re all too aware of some of the challenges faced by for new WordPress users and even experienced developers.

This article came about because we still get countless inquiries from people who recognize that LearnDash is a powerful tool that can probably help them—but that’s really as much as they know. They don’t know how to get started and don’t know where to turn to find more information, guidance, and support. We unfortunately find, time and again, that people simply aren’t aware of some of the great LearnDash resources (including tutorials, screencasts and documentation) that are available. We’re hoping that this article saves those users some confusion and frustration.

Start with the Source

The LearnDash Support Site is an invaluable resource that not all LearnDash users seem to know about. If you haven’t bought a license yet, you might not even know it exists! It’s easily as valuable as the plugin itself though. There are countless screencasts, Knowledge Base articles, FAQs, and more. Perhaps the most valuable tools are the forums (which are very active and full of useful information to solve common LearnDash problems and share best practices) and access to the LearnDash support team, who we routinely see go out of their way to help LearnDash customers.

Go to the Experts

Outside of the LearnDash support site there are still lots of great resources. On YouTube there are hundreds of videos from many different authors (including ours; our popular How to Make a LearnDash Site video has helped thousands of LearnDash users). Agencies and developers that work with LearnDash often have great tutorials and articles covering best practices (the LearnDash blog, this blog, WisdmLabs, and others are examples), though it can sometimes be difficult to find the right articles among so much information. Google can be your friend to narrow things down to specific subjects.

The LearnDash Facebook group is very active and has hundreds of members ready to jump in and provide advice on everything from the basics to complex code solutions. You’ll even find some of the Uncanny Owl team on there!

There is also our introductory LearnDash course for our Uncanny LP hosted LearnDash platform. Although it is targeted at a modified WordPress platform, it does still cover all of the WordPress and LearnDash basics someone would need to get started—it just demonstrates everything with a streamlined interface that could be confusing if you’re not using LP. It is free and anyone is welcome to use it, or you can skip the course and jump right into the hours of useful LearnDash useful LearnDash screencasts.

LearnDash can seem overwhelming at first, but there really are many helpful resources available and a large community of users eager to help.

If you have other sources of useful LearnDash training and documentation, add them to the comments below!

Use LearnDash Groups? You Need This.

September 29, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

We heard your requests for better group management in LearnDash and we listened! Today we’re releasing our Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin, and it’s going to completely change what you and your Group Leaders can do with LearnDash groups.

The plugin adds features in 3 main areas to your LearnDash elearning sites:

Selling courses and seats to organizations.
Managing groups in the front end.
Front end reports for Group Leaders.

This plugin has something for everyone—maybe you just need front end group reports, or maybe you simply need a way to sell custom course bundles to organizations that you support. Use as much or as little as you need. Here’s a video that explains how the plugin adds new opportunities for using LearnDash Groups on your site:

Group Management Made Easy

If you currently manage groups or support Group Leaders, Uncanny LearnDash Groups will make your life a lot easier. After installing the plugin your Group Leaders can do everything themselves. No more emails to you and spending your time settings things up! Whether groups are set up through a purchase or by you, Group Leaders can add or remove users (with limits; no-one can cheat the system) and monitor progress. There are lots of options for making group management easy, including code-based invitations and redemptions, CSV uploads, and manual user changes.

In the screenshot above you can see how easy it is for Group Leaders to manage everything from one place. See how many seats are available; review what courses the group has access to; add individual users; upload users; download codes users can redeem for group and course access; buy more seats for the group; add and pay for more courses for the group; see progress for group members at the course level; review all quiz completions and drill down into individual results; and manage group leaders (not shown). All of this is possible from a single page and from the front end of the site. We know many site owners don’t like giving access to the back end to Group Leaders, and this plugin goes a long way towards making that possible.

Easy Front End LearnDash Reporting

Uncanny LearnDash Groups makes the reports people ask for most—course progress and quiz results—available in the front end to Group Leaders. No more working with CSV files or confusing widgets. Choose a group (if a Group Leader has more than one), the course or quiz, and get instant results.

The course report is the easiest way for Group Leaders to track progress at a glance, especially with the filtering and search options available. The quiz report adds drill-down capabilities to see all quiz details for a learner, including how they answered LearnDash quiz questions and how long it took them.

Sell to Organizations Without Lifting a Finger

Wish there was a better way to sell to organizations that didn’t require you to create a group, create a Group Leader, invoice the organization offline, add their courses, upload their users and explain how everything works? (And yes, that’s usually what’s required for every group you add.)

Uncanny LearnDash Groups integrates with WooCommerce to let organizations create their own groups with as many courses and licenses as they need. And they can do all of it completely independently.

The screenshot above is what users see when they’re buying a course. They set the group name, how many seats they need, and what courses they want for their learners. But the best part is that they can add more seats and courses later. Groups created with our plugin are completely flexible and organizations can change them themselves as their needs change. No other plugin can do this. It’s an entirely new way of selling to organizations that want your courses, and it’s finally feasible to sell to hundreds of organizations without needing a full-time resource to manage everything.

There’s a lot more to it (including an amazing shortcode to show different course content to different groups!), but we’ll leave the finer details to our Knowledge Base. We know this plugin will help a lot of LearnDash users and we’re excited to finally get it out to the public!

Uncanny LP Is Now Available

September 21, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LP/by Ryan Moore

WordPress has become a very strong platform for elearning over the last few years. With such wide use, great elearning tools, flexibility and strong development community, there are a lot of advantages over proprietary Learning Management systems and platforms that only do elearning. There is a tradeoff though: it’s hard to build and support robust elearning sites with WordPress. It typically takes months to get a site off the ground and a skilled developer is needed to do things well. For many people that puts a WordPress elearning platform out of reach—until now.

Uncanny LP, a hosted platform powered by WordPress and LearnDash, finally makes it possible for businesses to launch polished elearning sites quickly and easily without any development. Uncanny LP includes the basics that every site needs to launch and to deliver an engaging learning experience. From LMS tools and ecommerce to event management and gamification, it’s a complete platform that works seamlessly for everyone wanting a working LearnDash site without the need for an experienced developer.

What is Uncanny LP?

Uncanny LP is a complete learning platform that we built from the ground up to provide what many organizations tell us they want in a WordPress LMS platform. We look after the platform—including maintenance, security, performance, and backups—so you can focus on the design and content. It’s the fastest, safest, and easiest way to build out a LearnDash-powered platform for your business, and it comes ready to go with all of the following:

Strong LMS capabilities powered by LearnDash, the most feature-rich WordPress LMS plugin available.
Support for almost limitless content types, including video, audio, quizzes, tables, Captivate, Storyline, iSpring, Rise, H5P and more. There’s even support for Tin Can (xAPI) and SCORM tracking. You won’t find this level of elearning content support in any other WordPress solution.
Intuitive group and license management. Go B2C or B2B; it’s easy to support both audiences with ecommerce and enterprise features like self-managed groups and front end management reporting.
Certificates, Continuing Education Credits, and badges that make it easy to recognize achievements online and offline.
Event management for live events, including paid tickets and attendee management.
eCommerce that supports one-time payment, subscriptions, coupons and code-based registration. Accept payment with PayPal or Stripe; we also secure your site with SSL
Deep CRM integration and compatibility with Infustionsoft, Active Campaign, Ontraport and more. Sync data from optins, purchases, user profiles, course behaviour and more.
Discussion forums for online collaboration, both public and private.
Great performance on specialized WordPress hosting where security, backups and other admin headaches are taken care of for you.
Extensive documentation and training materials.
Support from a North American team of experienced Learning developers and educators.

Who is Uncanny LP for?

We get a lot of inquiries about custom WordPress elearning platforms but we only work with about 10% of the organizations that reach out to us. Why is it such a small number? Almost without exception, it comes down to cost and timing. LearnDash development can be expensive; our average project budget is over $10,000. Many people not familiar with custom development are sometimes surprised by the cost. Development time can also be unexpected. We typically have a 4 week lead time, and there are a lot of people out there that leave LearnDash projects or enhancements to the last possible minute. After the lead time, sites often take 4 to 10 weeks to build. Finding this out left a lot of potential customers very scrambling for a solution—and there really was no alternative for getting a robust LearnDash site up quickly.

Uncanny LP addresses that gap. It’s for the thousands of people and small businesses that need a simple, flexible learning platform. Maybe the per user cost of a cloud LMS are prohibitive, or maybe they don’t want separate websites for everything they’re doing. We hear from hundreds of these users every year, in need of a robust solution but overwhelmed by the complexity of building it themselves. These are people that don’t have the budget or time for a full-blown, custom LMS when 90% of their needs aren’t that unique. Until now, these organizations had no easy solution in the marketplace.

Here are just a few examples of organizations that would find significant value in Uncanny LP:

The author/keynote speaker selling video-based training directly to the public. She can turn on the eCommerce, CRM integration and Marketing LP modules and be ready to go. From there it’s just a matter of adding branding and content.

The mid-sized company doing internal training that needs an easy way to track self-directed compliance programs and CPD/CEU credits. All LP modules can be turned off and the system can be hidden from search engines; LearnDash Groups can be used to track training by department.

The small business offering niche sales training can turn on eCommerce, events, gamification and marketing modules to coordinated blended learning programs. They might even incorporate interactive Storyline modules and discussion forums to augment their training offer. Selling B2B licenses to organizations is even supported.

The professional coach might use the event, gamification and marketing modules to offer long-term, facilitated programs to groups of students. Incorporating the CRM integration module allows him to set up campaigns in Infusionsoft to promote automated engagement based on learning activities.

The college professor can turn on discussion forums and gamification to build supplementary modules that augment the classroom experience and promote more learning opportunities.

There are countless scenarios where Uncanny LP will be the right fit for an organization. Some of the best reasons include the following:

Hundreds or thousands of active monthly users means per-user costs with cloud LMS providers are prohibitive
Tight integration of common features that a traditional LMS lacks (like event management and CRM integration)
Time is limited and a robust, secure elearning platform is needed quickly
WordPress seems like the right fit but the site owner is new to WordPress and just needs things to work
The organization doesn’t have a $10,000 plus budget and can accept a platform that does 95% of what they want for a 95% discount

Whatever your reason for choosing Uncanny LP, you’ll get a solid, safe platform backed by one of the most experienced LearnDash development agencies out there.

Get Started with Uncanny LP

To learn more about Uncanny LP features and benefits, be sure to check out our new site at https://uncannylp.com. It’s the best way to see how the platform can benefit your organization.

To better understand how LP works and how to set things up, we’ve made some of the free training available in our introductory course. We hope you’ll check it out! There are dozens of screencasts and it’s about a 10-hour training program.

To get started with your own Uncanny LP site, click here. You can start using your own LP site as early as tomorrow.

The Uncanny LP Beta is Ending!

September 14, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LP/by Ryan Moore

Here’s something our clients and followers may not know: we’ve been running a beta for a secret LearnDash hosted platform for the last month. We didn’t want to attract too much attention while we were testing it, but for some of our dedicated followers and a few very determined searchers, they’ve had a month to explore Uncanny LP (Learning Platform). Uncanny LP is our easy-to-use, complete LearnDash platform that will make launching and managing a WordPress LMS a lot more accessible to everyone.

The Uncanny LP beta will be closing on Sunday, September 17, so that we can officially launch LP on Monday, September 18. There are 3 spots left in the beta at the time of this posting to lock in LP permanently at the discounted beta price. This is the only launch discount we will be offering.

To find out more about the platform, visit https://uncannylp.com.

We’ll talk a lot more about LP and how it can be used after launch, but at a high level it lets anyone deploy a polished WordPress elearning platform in 24 hours at very low cost. It supports elearning (with LearnDash, of course), ecommerce, event management, gamification, social sharing and more, plus it includes all of our plugins. There are dozens of hours of screencasts and lots of documentation; combined with a simple admin interface, our goal is to really reduce the learning curve for setting up and managing a LearnDash site.

Beta results have been positive so far and we’re excited to start promoting the live version of the platform next week. Interestingly, we’ve had the most inquiries about LP from agencies and designers that want multiple LP sites that they can deploy quickly for their clients. The platform will really help individuals, developers and agencies focus on building out great designs and content rather than spending weeks and countless thousands of dollars on the platform.

No beta discounts will be offered after 9 PM Eastern on September 17. There are also only 3 beta spots left, so if you want to sign up, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible by clicking here. The beta will be closed early if the 3 spots are purchased before Sunday.

A LearnDash Course Completion Report for Everyone

August 19, 2017/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Have you ever wanted an easy way for learners, managers, parents, administrators, or anyone else to verify course completion records? Especially if they don’t have WordPress accounts? Until recently, there has been no way to make this possible with LearnDash. Administrators and Group Leaders have several options, between LearnDash CSV reports, ProPanel, Tin Canny and other plugins, but access to the data is heavily restricted.

We introduced a great way to verify course completions a few weeks ago but we didn’t draw a lot of attention to it. It’s part of our new Continuing Education Credit plugin, and the front end course completion report was one of the features we were most excited about. Even though the name might suggest otherwise, the plugin does not require you offer credit for your courses. In fact, it offers several features (multi-course certificates are another) that don’t depend on courses with credits. EVERY LearnDash site stands to benefit from having the plugin.

[et_bloom_inline optin_id=”optin_2″]

Check out the screenshot below of our course completion report (notice the lack of CEU reporting in this version!). This is in the front end on a regular WordPress page and it can be used by anyone, regardless of whether or not the user has an account on the site. (We protect privacy by requiring that at least 3 characters be entered in the search field. Otherwise, it’s wide open for easy reporting.)

If you’re familiar with our Continuing Education plugin you may recognize this report—except that it’s missing a column. That’s because it normally includes a column for CEU values, as it was designed as a CEU report. With a tiny code tweak that column can be hidden and it becomes a comprehensive completion report for any LearnDash site!

To make the change, simply add this string inside the Text tab of the WordPress editor for the page (instead of just using the shortcode by itself):

And with that, you’ve got an easy-to-use LearnDash course completion report in the front end of your LearnDash site!

Here are just a few scenarios where this type of report could be helpful:

Allowing an employer to verify staff course records without requiring a site account or the use of LearnDash Groups.
Allowing a parent to check on their child’s progress.
Allowing a third party certification or accrediting body to verify member training.
Allowing a student that no longer has site access to retrieve their records.

We would love to hear about your own creative uses of the course completion report in the comments!

LearnDash Required Course Credits

August 4, 2017/2 Comments/in Continuing Education, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

Two weeks ago we introduced Uncanny Continuing Education Credits, a plugin that helps LearnDash sites track, manage and report on CEUs and CPD continuing education credits for their learners. While a great plugin on its own, we felt like it was missing something at launch: the ability to set credit requirements. Sure, version 1 could report on credits earned and track annual credit totals, but there was no way to compare what someone had earned against what they should earn.

Today, in the first major update to the Continuing Education plugin, we’re adding an exciting new feature: Required Credits. With version 1.1, administrators can set and track credit requirements for individuals and groups. Credit requirements are really easy to set up and track.

Here’s a screencast explaining the new features and how they work:

In the front end, we’re adding new shortcodes to track how many days are left to earn credits against the rollover date ([uo_ceu_days_remaining]) and to look up how many credits a user still needs to earn ([uo_ceu_credits_remaining]) before the annual rollover date. These are great tools for helping your learners plan their training activities.

You can also send out email reminders to students that haven’t met their credit requirements. Just turn on reminders, set the number of days before the rollover date to send it, and even customize the email. Anyone that hasn’t met their annual requirements by the reminder date will receive an email.

Finally, we’ve added a powerful new Deficiency Report to the plugin that will tell you exactly who hasn’t earned enough credits so that you can follow up with them. And that report, of course, comes with the usual search, group filter, and CSV export capabilities for easier analysis.

That rounds out version 1.1 of the plugin. We’re excited about the new options this update provides for sites offering compliance and other types of annual training. Let us know how you’re using the Continuing Education Credits plugin in the comments!

Continuing Education Credits for LearnDash

July 20, 2017/17 Comments/in Continuing Education, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

If you have a LearnDash site that offers any kind of continuing education or credit-based program, our newest WordPress plugin will make your life a lot easier. Uncanny Continuing Education Credits, our fifth public plugin for LearnDash, adds a comprehensive way to track course-based credit, report on it, and even award certificates for it.

With this plugin, every LearnDash course on your site can be assigned a credit value. Show earned and available credits in the front end. Track cumulative and course-level credit in the back end; records can also be exported to CSV files for analysis. What’s especially great is that earned credits never go away. Records are permanent. Credit records are designed to survive course changes, progress resets and even course deletions; your students never have to worry about changes to their credits. Because we keep records outside of LearnDash and they aren’t affected by progress resets, this makes the plugin extremely useful for programs that learners complete on a recurring basis, like compliance and certification programs.

Where the plugin gets especially interesting is with our front end reporting. With some important steps to protect privacy, we’ve created a front end report that allows learners, managers, accrediting organizations and others verify course completion and credit records for students. No user account is required to query the CEU records and full completion details are published in the front end (as long as the person searching knows a learner’s name or email address).

For recurring training programs we add the ability to track credits earned since an annual rollover date. The admin report allows date and group filters and is an easy way to search large sets of continuing education records.

As an added bonus, we’re releasing the plugin with some new options for LearnDash certificate triggers: earned credits and completion of course combinations. It’s the first time an easy way to recognize completion of multiple LearnDash courses has been made available and can be a great asset for certification programs and sites with a large volume of courses. Certificates can be emailed as PDF files automatically to learners, Group Leaders and the site admin.

Since this is the first release of the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin and it’s a limited feature set, we’re offering a 25% off discount until July 31. Use coupon code ceulaunch during checkout to claim the discount. Unfortunately, the coupon code cannot be used after the end of the month and is only valid for this product.

We hope you enjoy the new plugin! Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Also be sure to check out the product page to buy the plugin and the Knowledge Base for more information.

New Course Certificates and Lesson/Topic Grids!

June 23, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

As we head into the 1-year anniversary of our Pro plugin for the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit, our most popular product, we’re excited to announce 3 new features that will make life easier for many LearnDash admins! Today’s 2.1 release, available to all new and existing Pro users, adds the ability to send course certificates as PDF files on course completion, a new grid option for lessons and topics, and a new attribute that makes our dashboard module a lot more flexible.

Send Course Certificates by Email

We’ve supported sending LearnDash certificates as PDF files with quizzes for a long time, but the ability to send course certificates to learners, Group Leaders, administrators and other users was a gap. In this release we’re adding support for emailing those certificates, which are triggered on course completion and sent exactly as quiz certificates would be.

The functionality is largely the same as the quiz certificates function but this is set up as its own module. It can be used with or without the quiz certificate emails; there are no dependencies. For easier retrieval of certificates, you can save the files to your web server and we’re including the user’s email address in the file name. (You could also retrieve them from a user’s profile with LearnDash, of course, but this makes it easier to manage large sets of certificate files if required.)

Enhanced Lesson and Topic Grid

Our Enhanced Course Grid was one of the earliest modules in the plugin and introduced a very flexible way to organize LearnDash courses into a visual grid. But it only ever supported courses, and on almost all of our sites we were limited to pretty basic tables listing available lessons and topics. We had done some interesting things with CSS to restructure the tables as grids for some clients, but until now we didn’t have a robust grid model for wider use.

This new module effectively brings the basics of the Enhanced Course Grid to lesson and topic tables. Instead of a flat table with text and checkmarks only, you can now show users a highly visual grid format that can incorporate featured images. The module allows control over the use of featured images and the number of columns displayed. For more flexibility, you can either enable these grids globally or add the grid shortcode to specific course or lesson pages on which you want them to appear. You can even use shortcodes for these grids on non-LearnDash pages and posts.

LearnDash Course Dashboard

On several of our client sites we found that we had outgrown the default behaviours of the dashboard shortcode. For one thing, it was useless for signed out users—and we unexpectedly had a few clients want to use it that way. In this iteration of the dashboard shortcode, you can use a new “show” attribute to populate the table with only enrolled courses (which is the current behaviour), all courses (show everything, regardless of enrolment status), and “open”, which we’re using to show open courses to logged-out users (signed in users see enrolled courses). We think these additions will make the shortcode a lot more flexible.

We hope you enjoy the updates!

How to Choose a LearnDash Developer

May 5, 2017/0 Comments/in Best Practices, eLearning, LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

As LearnDash developers with some visibility in the WordPress LMS community, we get a lot of requests to fix bad projects. It’s so easy for things to go wrong, and selecting the wrong partner can often mean the project is doomed before you even start. In this post we’ll explore the most important things to consider when choosing a developer for any WordPress elearning project. Our expertise is in LearnDash, but all of this applies equally to LifterLMS, Sensei, and any other WordPress LMS plugin that you’re building your platform around.

This post isn’t about selling our services; we’re already at capacity and have unfortunately had to stop accepting new clients several times recently. What we want to do with this blog post is raise awareness so that when you are looking for a partner to help build your LearnDash site you better understand how to choose an organization that is competent and will be able to deliver a robust platform that meets your needs.

If you’re starting out on your first LearnDash development project, here are some things to consider as you look for a partner:

Start with a conversation. We really find that emails don’t work well enough to ensure all parties are on the same page and to ask questions easily. It’s great if you can come to that conversation with clear goals and questions. The vendor should have questions too. Relationships are absolutely critical to successful projects and this is where they start. Take notes and be thorough. If you’re comparing vendors, make sure you have a consistent way to assess them and document everything immediately after the conversation. Also be prepared for several conversations; it’s rare that initial discovery and planning can be completed in a single session, unless it’s a very small project.

Ask if you can see some of the company’s other projects. Do keep in mind that for LearnDash projects most of the development work tends to be behind registration or a paywall, so the access developers can provide is limited. Again, this is where a call (or preferably web conference) can be very helpful, as on a call the developers can actually sign into sites and show how things are set up or created. Experienced LearnDash experts should have easy access to a variety of representative samples. Ask for some walkthroughs and get more information about what specifically the developers did. Give consideration to what works and what doesn’t, and how similar previous projects might be to your own. Experience is extremely important when setting up intuitive, effective elearning platforms with WordPress.

Check out community feedback. This can be really hard to find in the LearnDash space, but it’s still important to make an effort and solicit experiences about working with the vendor. Maybe there’s feedback on social media, plugin reviews for things they may have developed, the LearnDash support forums, even reaching out to previous customers. Also look for negative feedback, which can often be more telling than positive comments.

Don’t just look locally. There are very few WordPress agencies and developers that have a significant amount of LearnDash experience. We’ve seen a lot of projects where businesses chose someone they know who’s done other work for them (LearnDash is just one plugin, right?) but couldn’t transition to considerations like the signed-in experience, student workflow, making things work together, etc. To get the best partner, expand your search range, potentially even to other countries. We’re in Toronto but we have many clients in Australia; it’s not as hard as you might think to make projects like that work.

Get to know who you’ll be working with. Without question, the #1 reason we’ve taken over several projects from experienced LearnDash developers hasn’t been bad code quality or poor implementation—it’s been a communication breakdown. Communication issues are painfully common with these projects and site owners come to us because they have a site they don’t know how to use, isn’t what they expected or they’re tired of saying the same thing over and over. Whoever is setting up your site is someone you’ll be working with for over at least several weeks, perhaps even several years. There has to be a rapport. There must be trust. And it has to be really easy to communicate and make sure everyone is always working towards the same goals and scope. You don’t want to be talking to 5 different people and for discussions to only happen by email with week-long gaps between them.

Try to assess technical competence and workflow. While communication issues abound, there are still a lot of developers out there that simply bite off more than they can handle with LearnDash and don’t really know what they’re doing. They might be great people that really want to help, but that doesn’t mean they should be building LearnDash sites. Just last month we took on a site where the developers had made changes to LearnDash core and even WordPress core—and that should never, ever happen. The client, of course, wondered if it was normal for everything to break and have to be fixed on updates (it’s not). So ask LearnDash partners how they work and look out for red flags. How do they implement changes? How do they test updates? How do they work collaboratively? Who’s responsible for testing and validation? How does a project actually come together? If they have public plugins, what are the reviews like and what issues are people having? We have also seen individuals take on projects that were just too big for one person and then, when they’re overwhelmed, they’ve walked away. Try to get a sense of whether or not the developer or development team has the right skill set and/or the right people in place to handle everything that’s needed.

Ask about training and maintenance. Building a LearnDash site means a lot more than setting up a site and installing some random plugins—yet we see that happen a lot. Your goal also shouldn’t just be to have a site that seems functional at the end; it should be to have a LearnDash site that you understand how to use and leverage to improve your business. When we’re investigating a new site, we almost always have a conversation that goes like this: “Do you know why this is set up this way?” “No.” “Do you have any documentation that might explain it?” “No.” “Is there any way you could find out?” “No.” As a site owner, we understand how scary it can be for you when we ask those questions and you realize you don’t really understand your site. From the beginning you need to make every effort to ensure you’re working with a partner that won’t leave you in that situation. Training and communication throughout a project are absolutely essential. We average creating maybe 4 screencasts per project so that clients always have a point of reference for how things work and why. Find out what your partner’s process is to make sure you’ll be left in a place where you’re comfortable. Also confirm what’s typically required following projects in terms of maintenance and who will be taking care of that. For most projects we are able to hand things off in a way that clients can safely make updates themselves and we’re only needed for answering questions on an ongoing basis—not to keep things up and running.

Don’t be driven just by price. You will inevitably get what you pay for. We’ve taken on a few projects that we scoped out months or even years previously; the business decided to go with a different vendor that was a lot less expensive, and then they came back to us to fix them, often at a higher price than they would have paid if we’d just done the project originally. Budget is a huge consideration, of course, but it should be carefully balanced against other factors like the competence of the developer, your relationship with them, the developer’s experience in similar projects, etc.

Understand exactly what will happen during the project. If you start a project, then leave it in the developer’s hands for 2 months and suddenly get an email at the end saying it’s all done, you’re going to end up with a bad site. Take some time to understand what’s going to happen during the project and how collaboration will work. What do you need to provide? What are your responsibilities and what are the developer’s? What are the milestones? To meet the timelines, how do reviews work and how quickly do things need to be turned around from both parties? Are there any dependencies or bigger risks that everyone should be aware of? How will you and the developers keep each other updated and make sure things are progressing as expected?

The tips above should go a long way in helping you select and retain a vendor that’s the right fit for your LearnDash project. Sometimes, however, it’s still not enough, and due to unforeseen circumstances projects can still go off track. While this is just a quick list, here are some things you should be doing during the project to encourage positive outcomes:

Be involved. Some of our worst projects (and yes, we’ve had a few that disappointed both parties) were when clients just dropped communication. They got too busy or had other priorities, or just stopped caring about the site. We’ve had projects delayed 6-12 months because of client delays, and when that happens it inevitably leads to bad outcomes. Objectives get lost, people stop caring as much, the results just aren’t there. The best projects are when everyone is on the same page and working collaboratively at the same time. We’re adding features and testing while the client is adding content and providing feedback. We’re having discussions to address scope creep or new problems. Being active and engaged is one of the best ways to see good results.

Test continuously. Very recently we took over a project where testing on the site by the client didn’t begin until the day before launch. The site was extremely complex and, of course, everything was broken. That’s when the developer realized they were in over their heads and the client realized they were in an unimaginable amount of trouble. It’s an avoidable situation though. With WordPress LMS sites it’s not like everything is suddenly ready one day; pieces will be finished throughout the project that can be tested independently. Be involved and testing often not only helps identify issues early but it’s a chance to understand your site better and work collaboratively.

Maintain a good relationship. Yes, even if your developer is doing a terrible job and you’re miserable, try not to throw the entire relationship away if you’re in the middle of development. We’ve seen angry developers lock companies out of their sites. Like it or not, and the legal side can be messy when you’re working with partners in other states or countries, your developer can make things very difficult for you if they host and/or have admin access to your WordPress site. If you need to sever a relationship with a WordPress developer try to gain control of the site before things sour too much.

The goal of your LearnDash development project is to always end up with win/win situations for you and your developer. They are possible, and by following some of the guidance in this article we hope you’re able to partner with a great LearnDash development team for your WordPress LMS project.

A Pro 2.0 Easter Egg!

March 24, 2017/1 Comment/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

We’ve had some great feedback on our 2.0 update to the Toolkit Pro plugin after it was released last week. It included the new Import LearnDash Users module (which is huge and essential with large user import lists) as well as lots of other improvements and new features. But did you know that it included another brand new module?

We didn’t! Oops. Due to an oversight with the move to 2.0 (and what that meant behind the scenes in our repository branches), a module we hadn’t planned on releasing yet was included. Luckily it did work and had been through testing, but we only discovered that it had been included this week.

So, now that it’s out, we’re pleased to introduce the Autocomplete Lessons & Topics on Gravity Forms Submission module! That’s a very long name for a module that does exactly what it says it will do—complete LearnDash lessons and topics on submission of a Gravity Form. The module came about because we’ve seen so many users lose their form entries on LearnDash pages. By adding a form, users then see a Submit button (for the form) and Mark Complete button (for LearnDash). It’s not always clear that Submit must be clicked before Mark Complete so that entries aren’t lost. By making this module available, we can avoid that confusion by hiding Mark Complete and having lessons and topics completed automatically on form submission.

Now that we’ve explained it and its utility, you may be wondering why it wasn’t intentionally released. That’s because we hadn’t quite figured out how to handle forms inside lessons that contain topics. We can’t complete those lessons on form submission or users would then be allowed to skip topics. But normal workflow when completing the last topic in a course is to be directed back to the lesson level, which would then show an empty form. That’s really confusing for the user, as they already saw the form previously but it will look like their submission was lost. We could have added persistent data capabilities to forms, hidden the form or something else, but every scenario seemed like it would cause complications for some subset of our clients. That’s why we just released 2.0.2 of the plugin today, which will show the form again but also exposes the Mark Complete button when it detects a previous submission and an incomplete lesson.

But we still recommend you not include forms inside lessons that have topics. 🙂 Put them in topics or standalone lessons instead.

We hope you enjoy the new module!

What Else is New in Toolkit 2.0?

March 16, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

The new Import LearnDash Users module may have stolen the show on Monday’s release of 2.0 versions of both the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit and the Pro Modules add-on, but there were actually a lot of significant enhancements that deserve more attention. Some of them fundamentally change how you’ll interact with the Toolkit on your sites.

Module Settings

We’ve added a lot of new modules to the Toolkit suite since we first launched it and the settings page for it was starting to feel too busy. To make things easier to manage, we’ve added new filters for module type, module category and status. Now it’s a lot easier to see the modules in a more organized way.

We also recognized that having to turn modules on and off and then save the changes at the bottom of the pages was causing some confusion. A lot of people expected clicking the switches alone to turn modules on and off, so that’s what we did. Now you can click the switch and you’ll get a confirmation almost immediately that the status change was saved. We know a lot of users will appreciate no longer having to worry about forgetting to click the Save button.

Enhanced Course Grid

The LearnDash official course grid has had the ability to include short course descriptions in the grid for some time now, so we figured it was time to add support to our module. When the Enhanced Course Grid is active, a Short Description field is added to course edit pages. Enter text here and it will be displayed in the course grid. The grid shortcode now also includes an attribute to show or hide this description field.

One important note here is that our implementation is different than the LearnDash one, so if you currently use the LearnDash Course Grid add-on, any descriptions entered in the field it uses will have to be resaved in our field.

Group Drip & More

There was some debate about how we were handling lesson drip date when a user was in multiple groups with different drip dates. We changed the behaviour in this release so that in this situation the user gets access to the lesson on the earliest date of the groups for which the user is a member.

Our Group Leader module previously blocked access to some ProPanel items so we have unblocked them again. We’re still uneasy showing too much in the back end to Group Leaders but this is the safest approach.

Finally, as always, there are numerous tweaks and improvements in both plugins to deliver an even better experience on your sites. We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Import LearnDash Users

March 13, 2017/3 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

The Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit is now trusted on our 4,000 LearnDash sites to improve the learner experience and make things easier for site admins. It is by far the most popular free LearnDash plugin in the WordPress repository, and our Pro modules add-on continues to bring new improvements and capabilities to LearnDash sites.

Today we’re very pleased to introduce version 2.0 of both the Toolkit and Pro modules. The free Toolkit makes configuration activities less confusing, and the Pro plugin adds one of our biggest module additions ever: the ability to import users via CSV file and add them directly to LearnDash courses and groups. If you’re asking yourself why that might be needed when there are several plugins that support importing users via CSV and adding them to groups by including usermeta values, once you see our module it will be very clear how much safer and more efficient our approach is.

The new Import LearnDash Users module, available today to all Pro plugin users at no extra cost, gives you an easy-to-use interface to choose which courses and groups to add users to. It allows custom (and optional) notification emails with lots of variables to make sure learners get the right messaging to start using your site. It adds group and course enrolment in a safe way that doesn’t risk what we call “ghost groups” with regular CSV import plugins (which add extra fields to user profiles which, on save, can incorrectly add users to groups they’re not supposed to be in). It includes extremely thorough validation steps so you know exactly what will happen on import, and then it allows you to correct your files before they’re uploaded and add unexpected data to the system. Following import, it confirms exactly what actions were taken, so you’re never guessing about what succeeded and what didn’t.

It’s a long video, but we encourage you to skim through the screencast below so you can see just how powerful and useful the Import LearnDash Users module can be.

This plugin isn’t just for adding new users to LearnDash courses and groups. It can be used as a general user import tool if you exclude LearnDash column headings. It can also be used to update user profiles or add new groups and courses to a list of users, so if you have a list of users you want to add to a new group, it’s easy to do that without affecting their existing course and group enrolment.

As with many of our plugins, this is a powerful and complex tool, so we strongly encourage you to read the Knowledge Base article and the instructions in the tool before you upload your first CSV file.

We hope you find this new addition to the Pro modules as helpful as we do! Let us know your comments and suggestions below.

LearnDash Groups for Tin Canny

February 10, 2017/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

Wednesday’s update to our popular Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin, which adds easy LearnDash and xAPI/Tin Can reporting to WordPress sites, introduced Group Leader access to the Tin Canny reports. With this change, LearnDash Group Leaders now have access to a powerful reporting tool to better understand the learning activities and training records of learners in their groups. Group Leaders can drill down into the courses and users assigned to their LearnDash Groups to see both summary and granular details about the activities of their learners.

As always, Tin Canny remains a back end reporting tool, making access consistent with ProPanel and LearnDash Group Leader tools. Access for Group Leaders is automatic; nothing needs to be turned on and Group Leaders can immediately see all existing records. Do note that Group Leaders see everything for their assigned groups as consolidated data, so if Group Leaders are assigned to multiple groups, they will see all data together in the LearnDash reports. (Tin Can reports can, as before, be filtered by LearnDash Group.)

We’re really excited with this release and it’s a very big change that took weeks of development. The new addition is going to make it a lot easier for Group Leaders to gain actionable insights about the activities of their learners. Combined with the SCORM support introduced in version 1.2 (which has seen a lot of positive feedback from users), Tin Canny is perhaps the most comprehensive reporting platform available for elearning in WordPress.

Be sure to check out the Tin Canny Knowledge Base articles, which have already been updated with information about the Group Leader changes. We hope your users find the addition of Group Leader support helpful!

Introducing Native SCORM Support for WordPress

January 9, 2017/20 Comments/in eLearning, LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

The Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin has been a very interesting initiative for us. It opened up LearnDash in a bigger way to enterprise users and proved that it was possible to use WordPress as a viable Learning Record Store (LRS) with advanced reporting. Organizations around the world are now using it, but one thing that’s always been missing is a way to capture SCORM data inside LearnDash. Maybe a business had some content output to SCORM that they couldn’t republish to Tin Can/xAPI, or maybe they were using a product like Articulate Rise, which doesn’t even support Tin Can/xAPI. Whatever the case, today we’re very excited to announce that SCORM modules can be tracked natively inside WordPress with our Tin Canny plugin.

At this time of this post, the Tin Canny plugin officially supports SCORM 1.2 and 2004 as well as xAPI / Tin Can for Articulate Storyline 2, Storyline 360, Articulate Rise (SCORM only), iSpring, Adobe Captivate 9 and H5P (xAPI/Tin Can only). It’s been a lot of work but we’re especially excited to welcome Rise, iSpring and Storyline 360 to the plugin.

Please note that this is the first release for supporting all of this modules, so it’s a good idea to test your modules first and make sure data is being tracked as you expect it to be. The SCORM support is especially important to consider here, as what we’re doing is capturing the SCORM data and then using a wrapper to essentially translate it into Tin Can statements. This makes it reportable along with all Tin Can/xAPI data for consistency, but this also means it may look different than expected if you’ve been using another Learning Management System (LMS).

Version 1.2 of Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting includes all of these updates and more. We also added an easy way to clear all Tin Can data for testing purposes, additional quiz data validation and made some minor changes to user experience.

We hope you enjoy the addition to the Tin Canny plugin!

New Modules for LearnDash Pro Toolkit

December 23, 2016/4 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

Yesterday we released version 1.4 of the Pro modules plugin for the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit and it’s one of our biggest updates yet. Along with the usual suite of improvements, we introduced three entirely new modules: Send LearnDash Certificates by Email, Complete Lesson/Topic on Quiz Completion, and the Group Leader Experience. All 3 have been very popular requests and we’re very excited to be able to include them in the Pro plugin. All new features are, of course, available at no extra cost to existing users.

Here’s a screencast that outlines how the new modules and other changes work:

The biggest addition to the plugin is the ability to send LearnDash PDF certificates by email on quiz completion. Certificates can go to learners, of course, but even more exciting is that the site admin, Group Leaders, and even custom email addresses can be notified and also receive the certificate attachment. It’s a great way for managers and organizations to track staff achievements. One caveat with this module is that it works with quiz certificates only for now (not course certificates), but we know a lot of people are going to be excited about easy certificate distribution by email!

The Autocomplete Lessons & Topics on Quiz Results Page module addresses a common user experience issue on LearnDash sites–users must click a Click here to continue button to save results and be able to mark an associated lesson or topic as complete. If they didn’t, administrator intervention may have been required in order to complete associated lessons and topics properly. This module automatically marks an associated lesson or topic complete as soon as the quiz is completed so that users that accidentally forget to click the button won’t be negatively affected. (Clarification: LearnDash 2.3 did complete quizzes earlier in the workflow; our plugin allows easier autocompletion of associated lessons/topics.)

We have always found the Group Leader experience with LearnDash a bit confusing. For us, it was unusual for Group Leaders to have access to the WordPress Dashboard and back-end profile management, but not to have easy access to the courses they were managing and reports. This simple module, when enabled, grants Group Leaders access to the courses their groups are enrolled in and changes the back end user interface to something more suited to typical Group Leader functions.

Along with the modules themselves we’ve added some new organizing options for the course grid (including a fixed sorting option by menu order that ignores groupings), expiry date sorting for LearnDash Groups, better translation support and more.

If you don’t already have a copy of the plugin, make sure to check out the other modules already included in the Pro Modules plugin for the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit!

New Code-Based Enrolment Plugin for LearnDash

November 23, 2016/14 Comments/in LearnDash, News/by Ryan Moore

If you’ve ever wished for an easier way to get your learners into LearnDash Groups or courses, our newest plugin is perfect for you! We’ve built a really easy way to generate codes that can be used by learners to self-enrol into LearnDash groups and courses when they register, make a purchase, or are simply signed in.

If you sell course access to organizations, you can use the Uncanny LearnDash Codes plugin to generate and distribute codes that can be redeemed for LearnDash access. Using Gravity Forms, Theme My Login or the included registration shortcode, users can enter a code during registration that adds them directly to a group or course. Create codes with custom prefixes and suffixes to identify clients, and distribute codes in CSV files to your partners. You can also control how many times a code can be redeemed, so if it’s better for your situation to distribute a single code with multiple uses, that works too.

Here’s a screencast that walks through exactly what the plugin does and how it works:

The plugin also supports integration with WooCommerce and independent enrolment. For ecommerce transactions, you can identify specific products that can only be purchased with a valid code, making it possible for learners to buy access to a LearnDash Group. For signed in users, we also make a shortcode available so users can enrol themselves in additional courses and groups using a code.

Here are 3 business scenarios that are a perfect fit for Uncanny LearnDash Codes:

Offer a promo where the first 50 customers to enter a code from their profile page get early access to a new course. (Use the plugin to generate a single code with 50 uses that enrols the user in a course.)
Send a CSV file with codes to a college professor that allows students to self-enrol directly into a LearnDash Group and associated courses. (Use the plugin to generate 100 single-use codes in bulk for a group and download as a CSV file, and force code redemption on registration.)
Generate codes on your LearnDash site and sell them from another website. One of our clients is now able to sell course access from a Shopify store by creating the codes with our plugin, loading them into Shopify, and then letting users redeem them on the LearnDash site.

All codes have a detailed audit history, so you can see when codes were generated, when they were redeemed and by whom. Codes can be used for one or more courses or groups.

We hope you enjoy the plugin!

ProPanel 2.0 or Tin Canny for LearnDash Reporting?

November 16, 2016/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

Yesterday marked the release of the ProPanel 2.0 plugin for LearnDash, which is a very exciting improvement for LearnDash users. We’re very pleased to see it available and it makes sense to include it on many of the LearnDash sites we support. Now that it is available, we expect to see a lot more questions from LearnDash users about whether it makes sense to use our Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin or ProPanel, so in this post we’ll explain some of the differences and why one and/or the other might be appropriate for your site.

ProPanel 2.0

First, the 2 plugins are not directly competitive and they serve very different purposes. We fully expect to use both ProPanel 2.0 and the Tin Canny plugin on many of our sites. They actually work quite well together as complementary tools.

Our Tin Canny plugin is purely a reporting plugin for site administrators (at the moment). ProPanel 2.0 includes an invaluable tool for emailing learners by group and completion status, a learning activity stream, a Group Leader view, and easy access to assignments and essays. Tin Canny doesn’t do any of these things, and we never expect to add anything related to emailing, essays or assignments. If you rely on these things, you’ll want ProPanel.

Tin Canny, of course, does some things that ProPanel does not. The obvious, of course, is facilitating the upload and tracking of Tin Can modules, including Storyline, Captivate and H5P content. ProPanel doesn’t consider Tin Can/xAPI activity reporting. Our reporting also looks at activity trends and additional data points like time spent in LearnDash courses, quiz scores, specific activity inside a course, etc. Tin Canny is also going to push server load more, as it looks at a lot of data; it’s not recommended in shared environments where resources are limited, and it will provide the most value to large sites with a lot of users. If price is a consideration, our plugin is significantly more expensive than adding ProPanel.

In the end, both plugins can be invaluable additions to LearnDash sites, and choosing one doesn’t mean you can’t also use the other. The combination of both plugins really extends the reporting power of LearnDash.

What’s New with Uncanny Owl Plugins?

November 5, 2016/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

We’re continuously improving our plugins and making sure they’re the best possible products for our users. Unfortunately, sometimes we overlook communicating new features and talking about how they can make your LearnDash sites even better. Here’s what you may have missed over the last few months:

Pro Modules for Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit

In version 1.2 we added a new module to clearly label sample lessons. Out of the box it’s not always obvious to users which lessons are samples in LearnDash, so in tables that list lessons we add a very clear label and introduced controls styling that label. You can even change the text, so instead of “Sample” you could use “Preview” or “Free”. More information is available at https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/sample-lesson-label/.

In version 1.3 we added a new quiz time control that restricts access to a quiz unless users have spent a certain number of minutes in a course. For courses where you need to prevent learners from completing a course unless they’ve spent a minimum amount of time within it, this can be invaluable. We also added some navigation controls that were removed in LearnDash 2.3 that make workflow more intuitive for learners when autocompletion behaviours are enabled. Finally, version 1.3 of the Pro modules plugin is more translation friendly.

Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting

In version 1.1 of the Tin Canny plugin, we added a new dashboard metric, CSV export options, more control over Mark Complete behaviours when Tin Can modules are present in a lesson/topic, and data for total time spent in a course (to supplement completion time. We’re very excited about all of the improvements, but version 1.2 will really change what’s possible for tracking elearning in WordPress—especially for our enterprise users. Stay tuned for most news in that area, because it will be a first for elearning in WordPress.

Coming Soon

Our next paid plugin will make it possible to manage free enrolment to courses and membership in LearnDash Groups in a much more polished and accurate way. We don’t want to give too much away just yet, but watch for an announcement in the next month. The new plugin represents the accumulation of months of development and has been used very successfully on 5 client sites.

Is there something you’d like to see next in the Pro plugin? The list below includes features we’re considering for the next release. Let us know what you would like most!

If You Use Our Plugins

If you run one of the 2,500 LearnDash sites using our plugins, we could really use your help to make them even better.

First, we field a lot of support requests. If we’ve helped you with a question, it’s always extremely useful when you let us know if our guidance worked, especially if you posted on the WordPress.org support site.

Second, if you do use the free Toolkit, let us know how it helped your site by leaving a review in the WordPress repository. We do read them all and always appreciate feedback.

Great LearnDash Plugins You Don’t Know About

September 30, 2016/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan Moore

LearnDash users are fortunate to have dozens of plugins available that extend its functionality and make it easy to integrate with other plugins and apps. Some of those plugins enjoy very wide recognition, including our own useful LearnDash plugins (our free LearnDash Toolkit is now installed on over 7,000 LearnDash sites and is the most installed LearnDash plugin in the WordPress repository). Other plugins are showcased on the LearnDash site, but there are many others still flying under the radar. We want to introduce a few of them to you in this article.

WP Fusion

We love it when LearnDash clients incorporate marketing automation tools into the delivery of their elearning programs to make them more engaging and improve learning outcomes. Historically this was the realm of Memberium and Infusionsoft, and while both tools work reasonably well, as developers we were never particularly fond of using either (and invariably ran into complications setting them up for clients). We much prefer using Active Campaign for simple marketing automation (it’s what we use ourselves) and WP Fusion does a great job of integrating LearnDash with Active Campaign. We’re so pleased with it, in fact, that we’d actually built a competitive plugin and abandoned that work after we discovered and started using WP Fusion. The code is not obfuscated and doesn’t have special server requirements (unlike Memberium) so it’s easier to work with. Moreover, Jack, the developer, has been very receptive to feedback and has added features we’ve requested, like the recent addition of tags for LearnDash groups.

Learning Templates

Dennis at Learning Templates has created some very compelling LearnDash plugins for LearnDash Groups, including an assignment gallery and a plugin that isolates comments on LearnDash posts to a user’s LearnDash Group. While we haven’t used the plugins on any of our client sites yet, they address some gaps in LearnDash Groups that we’ve also experienced and it’s great to see another Canadian company doing LearnDash development.

LearnDash Topic Progression Using Storyline/Captivate

Chris over at Discover eLearning released a plugin that makes it a lot easier to integrate Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate files into courses by building a clever solution to have Storyline and Captivate modules control the LearnDash Mark Complete button. Our Tin Canny Reporting plugin does this as well, but for simple integration with Storyline and Captivate, the Discover eLearning plugin can’t be beat—and it’s free!

Do you have any favourite public plugins for LearnDash that didn’t make the LearnDash extensions page or our list here? Tell us about them in the comments!

Create a LearnDash Site in 1 Hour

September 25, 2016/2 Comments/in eLearning, LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan Moore

Creating your own WordPress LMS with LearnDash doesn’t have to be a complicated ordeal that takes weeks or months (and endless frustration) to set up. If your needs are simple, it’s entirely possible to have your platform set up and working well in under 1 day. In our most recent screencast, we run through all the most important steps in an hour, from setting up hosting to installing plugins and building an intuitive learner experience.

This demo platform does rely on a few key plugins and paid tools to make things a lot easier. Doing this with a free theme and your own plugins is possible, but site creation take many, more times longer. The first paid item we use is the University theme, and we added it because it takes care of styling LearnDash and WooCommerce elements so that you don’t have to spend hours fiddling with CSS and template files (which may not be styled at all with some things). I will add the disclaimer that we don’t use the University theme at Uncanny Owl, but that’s because we can take care of our own styling and work with something more flexible. For beginners and fast projects, however, ease of use and ready-made styles are a lot more important that flexibility.

The LearnDash plugin itself is of course a requirement, and paired with both our free Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit and the associated Pro modules, it’s easy to build intuitive learner workflows and helpful pages in a few minutes. LearnDash and out Pro modules are paid plugins, but they both really are invaluable in building LMS platforms with WordPress.

The site in our demo is hosted on WP Engine. For beginners, we can’t understate how important it is to have hosting that’s easy to use and well supported. This is our main reason for doing the demo with WP Engine. Everything that’s needed is cleanly laid out and everything just works, including automatic daily backups, proactive security, a CDN, caching, a Staging site (that works seamlessly with SSL, unlike some other WordPress hosts), and much more. The difference for a novice WordPress users on WP Engine vs. a generic shared host with cPanel is like night and day.

We created this screencast to target enthusiastic DIY LearnDash and new WordPress users. We especially hope that it helps the people that aren’t able to use our consulting services (perhaps because of time, budget, location, or other considerations). For those users, we really hope the video helps you get your site off the ground.

Tin Can for WordPress is Coming!

August 15, 2016/2 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan Moore

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.

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.

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:

Average 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.

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!