Uncanny Automator

Let’s go back to the beginning! Reset LearnDash course progress with Uncanny Automator for all of your compliance, education, training and certification needs.

Going back to where you started isn’t always a bad thing. Just think of what happens every time you pass “Go” in Monopoly!

LearnDash LMS users know, better than most, the value of starting over again. Especially in the realms of compliance training and recertification, the ability to hit the reset button is vital for learners and administrators alike. That’s why so many LearnDash users trust Uncanny Automator.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the step-by-step process of resetting your LearnDash users’ progress with the #1 teacher’s assistant, Uncanny Automator. Provide your learners with the chance to start their educational journeys anew while simultaneously streamlining tasks for your busy course administrators.

Without further ado, let’s push that reset button!

Uncanny Automator for LearnDash

LearnDash is the #1 LMS for WordPress users. Likewise, Uncanny Automator is #1 automation and integration tool for WordPress. Together they make an unbeatable elearning platform!

Using combinations of triggers and actions, Automator can help you streamline your administrative workflows, save time and reduce costs.

Furthermore, Automator seamlessly integrates LearnDash with all of your other favorite apps and plugins. This means that you can connect course progress to your CRM, ecommerce platform and even external apps like Google Sheets.

Resetting course progress is an Automator Pro feature, meaning that you’ll need to get a Pro license. Fortunately, a Pro license unlocks tons of powerful features that will make managing your LearnDash courses much easier.

Take advantage of a 14-day money back guarantee and get started with Automator Pro so you can follow along.>>>

Uncanny Continuing Education Credits: Create a Permanent Record of Course Completions

We know that just because you want to reset a user’s course progress in LearnDash doesn’t mean that you don’t want to keep some record of their academic progress. That would be like giving up all of your Monopoly money every time you passed “Go”!

For this reason, we have developed the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin (Uncanny CEUs). This plugin has tons of amazing features for the LearnDash LMS but the standout feature is its ability to create a permanent record.

Uncanny CEUs stores LearnDash course completions independently of LearnDash itself. This means that you can reset course progress as many times as you want and still maintain a record of your users’ course completion.

For WordPress developers and/or educators with more than one LearnDash site, we highly recommend getting the Uncanny CEUs plugin as part of Uncanny Toolkit Pro All Access Pass. In addition to all of the amazing features in Uncanny CEUs, you’ll also gain access to Tin Canny, Groups, and Codes along with a whole suite of powerful modules.

Reset LearnDash Course Progress for Compliance Training

One of the many reasons why you might want to reset your users’ LearnDash course progress is for annual compliance training purposes. With Uncanny Automator, you can easily reset LearnDash course progress for multiple users with the click of a button.

In the recipe pictured above, we’re able to single out all of our LearnDash users with a specific email domain and reset their course progress in bulk. In the next steps, we’ll walk you through how to recreate that recipe—and how to customize it to suit your learners’ needs!

Step 1: Create and Name a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Everyone.

Give your new recipe a name that makes it easy to recognize at a glance. For example, we’ve named this recipe Reset LearnDash Course Progress: Compliance Training.

Step 2: Configure Your Trigger(s)

In the Triggers panel, from the menu of available integrations, select Run now.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Trigger recipe manually.

Step 3: Configure Your Action(s)

In the Actions panel, click Add > User loop.

In the Loop panel, click Add action and select LearnDash from the menu of available integrations.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Reset the user’s progress in a course. You can also select Reset the user’s progress for all courses associated with a group if your compliance training consists of more than one course.

Automator will prompt you to select a course. Once you’re finished, click Save. Your Loops panel should look something like this:

Step 4: Add a Filter

By default, Automator will reset the course progress for all users who are not Administrators. More often than not, however, you’ll want to target a specific subset of users. You can do this using filters.

In our example, we’re targeting a subset of users from a particular organization using their email domain.

To add a filter, hover over the LearnDash action and click Filter. A window, labeled Condition, will appear. Select A token meets a condition.

A new window, labeled Configure the rule, will appear. In the field labeled Token click the Asterisk and select User email.

(Note: In Automator, tokens are dynamic data pulled from your WordPress website or even from within recipes.)

After selecting the User email token, you can fill out the remaining fields, Criteria and Value, to target specific users.

Once you’re finished, click Save filter.

Step 5: Hit the Reset Button!

You’re just about to reset your users’ LearnDash progress. All that’s left for you to do, is to click the Run now button!

Whoever said that there are no “do-overs” in real-life never used Uncanny Automator! In fact, there’s more than just one way to reset LearnDash course progress with Automator.

Reset LearnDash Course Progress Individually

You won’t always want to reset your LearnDash users’ course progress in bulk. Even if you are running a compliance training program, you may have users with individualized learning schedules.

Fortunately, there’s an Automator recipe for that too!

With the recipe pictured above, we’re able to reset LearnDash course progress on an individual basis, one year after each user completes the course. Here’s how to recreate this recipe.

Step 1: Create and Name a New Recipe

From your WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

We’ve named this recipe Reset LearnDash Course Progress Individually.

Step 2: Configure Your Trigger(s)

In the Triggers panel, from the menu of available integrations, select LearnDash.

From the drop-down list that appears, select A user completes a course.

Automator will prompt you to select a course. Once you’re finished, click Save.

Step 3: Configure Your Action(s)

In the Actions panel, click Add action and select LearnDash from the menu of available integrations.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Reset the user’s progress in a course. Once again, Automator will prompt you to select a course.

Once you’re finished click Save.

Step 4: Add a Delay

Likelier than not, you won’t want to reset the user’s LearnDash course progress immediately after they complete it. As such, we’ll need to add a delay.

Simply hover over the LearnDash action and click Delay.

A pop-up window will appear where you can set a delay or schedule a specific date and time to execute the action.

In our example, we’ve configured a one-year delay.

Once you’re finished, click Set delay.

Step 5: Go Live!

Recipes that don’t use the Run now trigger can either be in Draft or Live. To automate the reset process, simply toggle the recipe from Draft to Live.

With this recipe, you can set individualized learning schedules for your WordPress users. But, trying to remember all of those dates can be a challenge.

Once again, Automator is there to help. You can add reminders for you and your LearnDash users with your CRM of choice or take advantage of Automator’s built-in Emails integration.

Reset LearnDash Course Progress with Ecommerce

Automator also allows you to integrate your ecommerce platform, such as WooCommerce, with LearnDash.

A recipe like the one pictured above is great for certification purposes. Every time a user purchases access to a certification course, Automator will reset their course progress.

Try adding filters and delays to a recipe like the one pictured above in order to suit your learners’ needs.

Conclusion

Hopefully, now, you have everything you need to reset LearnDash course progress in whichever way suits your workflows. Whether you want to reset users’ progress in bulk, individually or in connection with other actions on your WordPress website.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line in the comments section below. Until then, just remember: it’s never too late to hit the reset button as long as you have Automator at your fingertips!

Do you spend too much time overseeing your e<earning programs and supporting students? Are completion rates lower than you hoped? Do you worry that your one-size-fits-all courses only meet the needs of some of your students?

They’re questions that every eLearning site owner and facilitator wrestles with. You want students to have a positive learning experience and benefit from the training, but your resources are limited and you need to focus on where you can add the most value. What you create doesn’t always work for everyone, so you end up spending countless hours poring over LearnDash reports and sending follow-up emails. And even those tend to go out later than needed and not deliver the impact you hoped.

There is a better way, and it’s by using automation on your LearnDash site. Solving the resource problem—maximizing learning outcomes and engagement with minimum time and cost—was one of the main reasons we built Uncanny Automator. It’s one of several tools we’ll explore here that make it make it easy to add automated workflows to your eLearning programs.

In this article, we’ll look at 15 easy automation ideas you can add to your LearnDash sites in minutes that help to deliver a personalized learning experience, better learner engagement, more sales, improved knowledge transfer and better course analytics. After applying some of the automations in this article, you’ll end up with better courses and more revenue with minimal effort and cost.

Personal Learning Paths

Creating personalized learning experiences can help to deliver improved student satisfaction, higher completion rates and better knowledge transfer. Not everyone learns the same way, and it’s important to give learners both control over the learning and the right learning interventions at the right time. With automation, a few simple recipes make it easy to support weaker learners, keep advanced learners from getting bored and provide alternatives to students that need them.

1. Let advanced users skip ahead. If users demonstrate mastery of a subject in a pre-test, why not let them skip the rest of the course? You could just autocomplete LearnDash lessons in a course that were covered by the pretest materials, or you might autocomplete that course entirely.

2. Give struggling students extra help. Sometimes students get left behind and don’t get the attention they need, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are easy ways to identify struggling students, like poor scores in LearnDash quizzes or a lack of progress. Without automation, these are hard to track; you have to run reports to see quiz scores and there’s no easy way to track reduced course activity over time. But with automation, it’s instant; quiz scores can instantly trigger interventions and you can create easy workflows in a CRM using a plugin like WP Fusion (e.g. a user has a completion tag for the first lesson of a course but no course completion within 7 days of the lesson completion tag). When triggers like those happen you can serve the interventions automatically, which could include the following:

• Enrolling the user in a remedial course automatically.
• Sending the student an email with suggested learning activities.
• Adding users to a study group via BuddyPress.
• Notifying the user’s manager or instructor so personal intervention, like coaching, can be offered.

3. Incorporate personalized content. Contrary to what you might think at a glance, every LearnDash lesson and topic doesn’t have to be the same for every user. It’s easy to add user or group-specific variations to your courses—as long as you have the right tools. Users of Uncanny Owl’s Pro Toolkit can use LearnDash Group shortcodes to show content just to users of particular groups, and with membership plugins or CRM integrations, you can show content to users with a particular level or tag. Remedial users might see an extra video or download, or maybe users you’ve tagged as benefiting from auditory resources are offered an audio recording of the lesson. Interventions like these help learners receive the most suitable experience for their learning needs, all without facilitators having to get involved during the course.

4. Give users more control over their learning experience. With automation tools and more learner-facing controls in the front end, it’s easy to give users more choice about how they learn. With Uncanny Automator, you might create recipes that add buttons throughout your courses that let users skip ahead by autocompleting lessons, reset course progress to get extra practice, trigger an email to a Group Leader for assistance, self-enroll into additional courses, etc.

Improve Learner Engagement

5. Celebrate Learner Accomplishments. Self-directed programs can sometimes make the learner feel like they’re on their own, making it easier for them to lose interest and even stop the course altogether. Gamification is an easy way to reward progress and achievement, and with Uncanny Automator, this can become even more powerful. Besides awarding a badge with a plugin like GamiPress, you might send a congratulatory email from the instructor automatically, notify the learner’s manager, even send a tweet from the organization’s Twitter account with a congratulations message. To make congratulations emails more natural, leverage a CRM to tag the user based on a specific condition (like scoring over 80% on a final exam) and then send the email the next business day during working hours so that to the user it feels less scripted.

6. Add users to a study group for peer collaboration. Use learning metrics to add users to an appropriate study group and encourage students to get involved with the community. Maybe if a user scores 50% or lower on a course-pretest they’re added to a remedial group, and 90% or higher they’re added to an advanced group. This action might be combined with a series of dripped emails outlining how to participate in the community and encouraging involvement.

7. Check in on incomplete courses. Not all automations have to be triggered by something; it’s also extremely useful to trigger automations when something doesn’t happen. These types of automations are easier to set up with the help of a CRM and plugin like WP Fusion. These types of automations might send the user an email after a tag has been set indicating the user has access to a course but X days later does not have a tag confirming the user completed the course. They might also trigger interventions if a user hasn’t visited the site for several days or the user has viewed a lesson but hasn’t completed it.

Improve Course Sales

Certainly not every eLearning site is revenue-driven, but for ones that are, it’s easy to build in simple automations that increase sales opportunities.

8. Recommend products on course completion. One of your users just completed a course; what should they do next? Instead of leaving them guessing, you can send them an email with a product recommendation. If you use a CRM you can even make this recommendation based on previous purchases and course completions (you don’t want to recommend a course someone has already purchased or completed).

9. Offer upsells that fit the learner’s needs. Is a student consistently showing poor quiz performance? Suggest some private coaching sessions. Does a course evaluation form suggest interest in a particular topic area? Suggest a deeper dive in a more advanced class. More advanced behavior tracking through automations and CRMs means you can make better product recommendations, and better time the recommendations for when the user most needs them (and is most likely to buy).

10. Create certification programs. LearnDash on its own doesn’t support certification programs, but they can be a great way to encourage users to complete or purchase extra courses in order to be “certified” in a particular subject. The Uncanny Owl Continuing Education Credits plugin offers a way to offer certificates for completing combinations of courses, and with tools like GamiPress, BadgeOS and Uncanny Automator, you can award badges or other certification rewards to users that complete a series of courses. You could even make users “buy” a certification by having users both complete a series of courses and purchase a certification product.

Improve Knowledge Transfer

11. Reinforce training outside of the WordPress site. With automation, it’s easy to integrate the LearnDash courses with other learning interventions. After a set of important lessons, create a recipe with Uncanny Automator to send the learner a summary of what they learned and next steps. With Automator and Zapier, you can even pass training data to HR systems or other apps to deliver related training materials through other platforms used by your learners.

12. Offer more blended learning opportunities. If you offer live events and eLearning courses, why not sync the two together? Perhaps signing up for a live workshop unlocks an eLearning course to help users better prepare for the in-person session. Or offer bundles that reinforce learning across multiple channels for better engagement.

13. Keep learning manageable. It’s easy for students to feel overwhelmed when they look at a course listing and see a huge list of 30 courses that they need to complete. Instead of throwing everything users have access to at once, as is typical on a LearnDash site, you can use automation to unlock courses and other content only when it’s appropriate to do so. Have the completion of one course unlock the next 2 courses in a learning path, or perhaps reaching key milestones in a course unlocks other resources.

14. Set users up for success. This is a step we see routinely overlooked on LearnDash sites. When users start a course, why not send an introductory email that welcomes users to the course, sets expectations and offers tips for success? Make users feel more comfortable and understand how to get the most from a course to promote better learning outcomes.

Create Better Courses

15. Make course evaluation automatic—and more meaningful. You probably already have simple post-course evaluations on your site to capture a learner’s immediate (emotional) feedback. But do you measure knowledge transfer and retention? With tools like Uncanny Automator and Zapier, you could use pre and post-tests in a course to automatically pass quiz scores to Google Sheets and automatically compare results and learning as a result of course completion. But you can go further, and with a CRM perhaps trigger timed tests to go out 30 days after course completion to better assess application of learning to the workplace or retention of what students learned in the course.

Get Started with Automation

Many of the automation solutions outlined in this article can be added to your LearnDash site in minutes using tools like Uncanny Automator (which was used for all screenshots in this article). The benefits are significant and well worth the modest investment. For users, you can deliver more personalized user experiences, better support, personal learning paths and improved knowledge transfer. For administrators and facilitators, the time and cost savings can’t be understated, so it’s a win-win situation for everyone on your LearnDash site.

And the best part is that it’s easy. With Uncanny Automator, create your first recipe in minutes and add dozens of site-enhancing automations in a few hours. Get started now or find our more about how Automator can improve your LearnDash site!