Better Notifications for LearnDash

With the LearnDash Notifications add-on and Uncanny Automator, students and staff can stay in touch, communicate more and learn together.

In self-directed elearning courses, it can be difficult for instructors to stay engaged with their students. While reports help instructors gather summary-level details on their students’ progress, they don’t keep educators in the loop as the learning unfolds. The LearnDash Notifications plugin, however, addresses some of the challenges associated with real-time feedback. Even so, LearnDash Notifications can’t quite always accommodate the needs of both students and instructors.

For example; how do students become aware of new course availability, new feedback from instructors, or new group discussions? To promote engagement and increased learning, elearning websites require a way to reach out to students beyond the website itself.

LearnDash Notifications

In the LearnDash ecosystem, the easiest and most common way to send notifications to students and instructors (typically “Group Leaders” in LearnDash) is by email using the free LearnDash Notifications plugin. It’s a powerful add-on that allows key LearnDash events, like course completion or assignment approval, to trigger email notifications to students, Groups Leaders and administrators. And with the new (at the time of publication) 1.6 release, it even adds conditions, so you can choose to send notifications only to users in certain groups, who have not completed a quiz, who are enrolled in a course, etc.

LearnDash Notifications is a great plugin that supports email notifications for a variety of scenarios, and since it’s free, it makes sense to use it on most LearnDash sites. It even has support for dozens of shortcodes so that you can include dynamic content (like the user’s name or course name) in the emails.

Better LearnDash Notifications - LearnDash Notification Add-On Triggers

With over 15 trigger types, a dozen conditions and dozens of shortcodes, there’s support for the most common email notification scenarios.

But what if you want to reach out to students via more than just email? And what if instead of a few dozen options, you had hundreds of triggers, multiple communication channels and thousands of conditions?

Enter Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is our no-code automation platform for WordPress that we originally created as a way to personalize elearning for LearnDash. Five years later, it has evolved into a robust system that connects LearnDash activity to more than 100 other plugins and apps. If LearnDash Notifications gives you the ABCs of email notifications, then Uncanny Automator gives you the post-doctoral thesis in elearning linguistics. But while an actual PhD in linguistics night cost you an arm and a leg, there’s even a FREE version of Automator that connects some of the core LearnDash (and other plugins!) triggers to email and other channels!

More triggers

The LearnDash Notifications add-on covers 15 basic scenarios. But what if you want more? Uncanny Automator adds several extra options for LearnDash, including:

  • A user achieves a percentage, score or point value above or below a certain amount (“passing” or “failing” a quiz is great, but what if you want certain notifications based on score instead, like maybe notify the Instructor the first time only that someone gets a perfect score on a quiz?)
  • A new course, lesson or topic is created–or perhaps a new course is added to a group
  • A Group Leader is added or removed from a Group (keep other instructors in the loop about teaching staff changes)
  • A user completes a group’s courses
  • A user is removed from a group or course

But that’s just the start. No LearnDash site runs with the LearnDash plugin alone; it takes several, maybe even dozens, of plugins to run a LearnDash site effectively.

Want to know when new feedback forms are submitted for your course, but only on completion of the course? Here’s a recipe that notifies Group Leaders when the feedback form has been submitted and the user has completed the course:

Better LearnDash Notifications Automator WPForms/LearnDash Recipe

Maybe Group Leaders need to know when students have attended a live onboarding seminar that also enrolls the student in the next course? There’s a recipe for that too:

Better LearnDash Notifications Events Calendar/LearnDash recipe

Perhaps students receive a special certificate of congratulations after attending a live event that follows a course, so both LearnDash course completions and the Group Leader marking them attended triggers a special certificate:

Better LearnDash Notifications Events Calendar/LearnDash recipe graduation

More channels

Sending email notifications is great, but what if it’s not the best or only way to reach your students? By connecting LearnDash to Uncanny Automator, you can open up new channels of communication with your staff and students.

If your instructors work at a large institution, they’re likely flooded with emails everyday—and sending even more emails only results in more noise that gets ignored. But, if you had a dedicated support channel in Slack, you could get live updates any time users in a particular group fail a quiz or receive a low grade:

Better LearnDash Notifications LearnDash Slack recipe

Alternatively, certain scores on a quiz might open a ticket directly in your Help Desk system so important updates are easily tracked and followed up on. And one of our favorite examples for students who prefer more social messaging applications such as WhatsApp, SMS messages via Twilio or forums and groups in BuddyBoss, you can celebrate student achievements by sharing them with other students and staff. Perhaps, like in the example below, your students can celebrate their course completion or high grades in a specific group’s activity feed in BuddyBoss (and add multiple triggers to mark each accomplishment):

Better LearnDash Notifications LearnDash BuddyBoss recipe

With your students’ consent (perhaps via an opt-in form when they register), some site admins might even choose to share key accomplishments such as certification on social media in a private Facebook group.

More conditions

Adding filters to notifications is a great way to ensure that notifications only go to the right people at the right time. Conditions are a very recent addition to the LearnDash Notifications plugin, and at the time of writing, supported conditions are:

  • User is enrolled to a group
  • User is enrolled to a course
  • User has completed a course
  • User has completed a lesson
  • User has completed a topic
  • User has submitted a quiz
  • User has completed a quiz
  • Essay has just been submitted
  • Essay question has just been put into graded status
  • User has uploaded an assignment
  • User’s assignment has been approved
  • User has not completed a quiz

It’s a great list, and on the LearnDash side of things, it absolutely covers the highlights. So what can Uncanny Automator bring to the table that LearnDash doesn’t have?

  • A lot of “not” in or “not” completed conditions. Maybe a notification simply doesn’t apply to a tester group. Instead of explicitly adding all of the other groups to the notification, you can just say “this notification applies to everyone except members of this group”.
  • Group hierarchy support. Maybe you support a hospital network with multiple departments and divisions, and maybe a certain notification applies only to members of one specific organization. If they have 50 groups in their group hierarchy, and perhaps those groups sometimes change, managing notifications for those groups would be a nightmare. With Automator, you can just set up a condition to have a notification run for everyone in a selected group and its children.

Of course, your LearnDash site is likely running more plugins than just LearnDash. What if you only want notifications to go out to users with a certain membership level in MemberPress, a matching WordPress role or a specific CRM tag via WP Fusion? No problem.

Taking things a bit to the extreme, here’s a WhatsApp notification that will only go out to users with an uncannyowl.com email address that have an “opt-in” tag in FluentCRM and are active Platinum members in MemberPress:

Better LearnDash Notifications WhatsApp Action with Automator conditions

You can keep notifications as simple or as advanced as you want in Uncanny Automator. You can even schedule and delay them.

More data

Suppose you want to send a confirmation notice to students when they complete a course—some type of congratulatory message. The LearnDash Notifications plugin makes this really easy, and in the email you can include details like first name (or really any user data) as well as the course name. For many sites, this is enough.

Uncanny Automator, of course, currently has support for over 5,000 unique tokens. Some are based on user and system data, some based on the trigger, others even based on data in other actions in the same recipe. Here are just a handful of examples of other types of data you could include in the notification above if you used Automator instead of the LearnDash Notifications add-on:

  • The number of courses the user has completed.
  •  Custom meta for the course, like continuing education credits earned, course duration or course author.
  • The course expiry date.

Or you could just do more with it, like include a coupon code for the user’s next course purchase or attach a printable PDF certificate along with the notification.

Get started for free

Many of the notification types outlined in this article are fully available in the free version of Uncanny Automator and run without restrictions. Triggers related to quizzes and course, lesson and topic completions are unrestricted in the free version of Automator, as are sending emails to students, Group Leaders and admins. By signing up for a free account, you can also try out notifications via Slack, WhatsApp, Twilio and more with complimentary credits.

With the right notification system in place, improved knowledge transfer and community building are just a few clicks away. Between the LearnDash Notifications add-on and Uncanny Automator, LearnDash users have easy access to a class-leading notification system for elearning platforms.

 

How Are We Doing? Part 2

One year ago today we posted a reflective article about feedback from our customers about our performance. At that time we had been using a Help Desk system for over a year, and that allowed us to start collecting metrics and feedback from some of our plugin customers and development clients.

A year later, we wanted to look back and reflect on how things have changed for us. For one thing, we’re definitely a lot busier! And, as we come up on our 5 year anniversary (next week!), it’s even more important to take a look at what growth has meant to our level of service. Here are some key stats for Uncanny Owl over the last 12 months:

Uncanny Owl 2018 Stats

(The number of sites using our plugins may actually be a fair bit higher than 10,000, as we can only accurately say that it’s somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000; we suspect it’s around 11,000 at the time of writing.)

It’s a lot of growth! Installs and support requests have more than doubled over the last year. And even with that growth, we’ve been able to improve the level of satisfaction across our support channels. Keep in mind too that those are only users that had issues or questions and took time to leave a rating or comment.

And what are people saying about us in the feedback they provide? Here are some selected comments from our users:

All of the features work and if you ever run into issues, the support team is top notch. They go out of their way to help and you can really tell that they care about their product. Thank you UO team for being so AWESOME!
- $avageMan
Ryan has been fabulous! His solutions correct the issue, and he is always so fast to reply. Uncanny Owl has provided fantastic support and their plugin is great!
- Kristie
Fast and clear reply. Took my vague query and provided a concise and brilliant answer. Thanks for making things much clearer... as a result I'm buying more licences today.
- Michael N
Very responsive. Direct and helpful.
- Thomas O
Excellent support and very fast!
- Nathan H
Always responsive!
- Alan C
A great detailed answer to my inquiry that will really help me! So appreciate it.
- Richard M
The support I have received has been phenomenal. Thank you very much!
- Abena E
I really appreciate the quick, knowledgeable, and detailed reply. Great!!
- Lisa D
Great response and very fast. Thank you very much for your efficient support.
- Sara C
Thanks for going above and beyond! Your service is amazing.
- Jacqueline H
You guys are amazing! Thank you for your incredible products.
- Will P
Ryan was very prompt with a response to my question and was very informative. I appreciate the quick assistance as this is time sensitive for us.
- Dan P
As someone who is new to the WP and LMS game, I find Uncanny Owl’s products and service to be a life-saver. I can’t recommend them enough!
- Leah
Ryan quickly pointed me in the direction I needed to resolve the answer. Within minutes of reading his response I had both issues resolved.
- Chris T

Of course, maintaining this level of service as we continue to grow is only possible with a great team. If you know LearnDash and are as committed to great products and service as we are, please consider checking out our open positions at http://jobs.uncannyowl.com/.

Websites, LearnDash and More

At Uncanny Owl we do a lot more than just create engaging elearning programs. While that’s certainly our core business, we have completed some interesting work in other areas over the last month that’s worth sharing.

We continue to get a lot of attention for our LearnDash work. We’ve helped both a boating company and transcription business set up LearnDash platforms and course content recently (names withheld because they haven’t launched) and we start another big LearnDash project next week. Most of our inquiries for LearnDash work seem to come from California now; a number of startups are turning to LearnDash as a low-cost way to develop Minimum Viable Products in the edtech industry. For basic hypothesis testing and model validation, it works quite well—even if some manual interventions are still needed in the workflow. If you’re looking to build your MVP and need some LMS features, we may be able to point you in the right direction or lend a hand.

ManchesterCF LogoWe’ve also been busy with some web development projects recently (which does tend to go hand-in-hand with LearnDash development). A few days ago we launched a redesign of ManchesterCF.com, a Toronto-based company that provides financial crime training and advisory services. We also recently launched torontotrackdays.com, a pet project for Ken that helps Southern Ontario track enthusiasts find events and support. We’ve also taken over a marketing automation cleanup and reengineering project for a mid-sized software company.

The work is busy and diverse, but it keeps things interesting and really hones our ability to serve as a one-stop shop for everything elearning, from creating courseware to building the platforms to deliver it effectively (and profitably).

First eLearning Project? Start Here

elearning projectA lot of our website visitors come from Google and are looking into elearning for the first time. I’m sure it’s the same for many elearning companies; new clients find you because they need web-based training, but they don’t necessarily know what’s involved or how projects work. We really want people to know we’re a trusted partner that’s looking out for their best interests, so we decided to put together some guidance to help businesses tackle their first elearning projects.

To help businesses, Uncanny Owl now offers a free 7-day email course to introduce businesses to elearning projects. We don’t want to mislead businesses or sell services that don’t add significant value, so the email program we created is simply to help businesses make informed choices, whether it’s with us or with someone else. We cover whether or not elearning is the right choice, how to prepare for elearning, how to promote success, how to choose a vendor, how to manage implementations and how to measure outcomes.

If you’re a business interested in elearning, sign up below to learn more about elearning projects!


If you’re another vendor reading this blog and want to create something similar, we’re happy to provide some technical details. The sign-up form is integrated into a few pages on our website with custom code, but there are great plugins available if you have room in your sidebar. The form is linked to a Mailchimp list, which is where we set up Autoresponders to deliver staggered emails. The course content is all original; if you offer something similar, please don’t steal our lessons! 🙂

We hope you enjoy the course!

Captcha is the thermal port on Yahoo’s Death Star

Yahoo’s captcha system is broken.  Horrendously, tragically broken.  Today, my colleague (who holds a Master’s degree) tried to sign up for a Yahoo/Flickr account.  On the last page of the registration process, he ran into a captcha.  After about five attempts to successfully enter the code, he started to laugh and called me over.  But since I’ve only got a Bachelor’s degree, I wasn’t much help.  We would both stare at the image, try listening to the horrendously garbled audio rendition, discuss the possibilities, then submit our best guess.  Unfortunately, even with both of us straining our visual cortexes to their breaking points, it took us five more tries to finally get it right…10 attempts total.  How many people would have given up before making 10 attempts at a captcha?  I’ll give you a hint: Probably the same number of people that choose Google search over Yahoo.

I decided to go back later to try again because I really believed a company like Yahoo couldn’t screw up their registration process – something that is so vitally important to their survival.  The first time must have been a fluke.  Here’s what happened:

First Attempt:

attempt1

Looking good?  No, “Please try this code instead”:

attempt2

 

Okay, this time I must have it right.  Nope!  Wrong again!

attempt3

 

What could this possibly be if not 3G46czFpy?  Nope.

attempt4

 

This one looks like a sure thing.  Right?  Wrong again.

attempt5

 

Fifth time’s a charm?  YES!!  An improvement of 50% over our first attempts.

done

If someone can tell me what I should have entered those first 4 times to have gotten it right, please leave a message in the comments.

There are a few key lessons here:

  • Test everything.
  • User registration is important.  Don’t screw it up.
  • Even big companies sometimes fall over little (but very important) things.
  • Don’t make it hard for someone to be your customer.

Hopefully Yahoo recognizes the importance of this issue and fixes it ASAP.  Their users, employees and shareholders are counting on them.