How to Do More With LearnDash Achievements

LearnDash is one of the most popular LMS (Learning Management System) plugins in the WordPress industry. You can create and sell courses, award certificates, create quizzes, and much more using this powerful plugin.

LearnDash offers a number of free and premium addons to enhance the functionality of your eLearning site. One such addon is LearnDash Achievements. It is a free plugin for LearnDash customers used for creating and displaying achievement banners on your eLearning site.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to the LearnDash Achievements addon, discuss things you can do using this addon, and show how you can do more with the addon by connecting it to popular WordPress plugins. Let’s dive in.

Introducing LearnDash Achievements Addon

LearnDash introduced the Achievements addon to add gamification features to your eLearning site. You can increase the engagement level of your students by awarding badges or points using this addon. It will also help you to improve the learning experience of your students.

The Achievements addon offers a number of LearnDash course-specific triggers to choose from. Whenever a particular condition is triggered, the addon will automatically award points and/or a badge to the user.

For example, you can award and show a specific achievement for completing a lesson or course. You can also display achievements for passing a quiz. You can even show an achievement banner when a student’s assignment is approved.

The addon also supports triggers for non-course activities like reading an article, commenting on an article, user registration, and more.

The LearnDash Achievements addon is available for free. You can install and activate the addon by visiting the LearnDash Addons page on your WordPress admin panel (of course, you need a valid license of LearnDash to use the addon).

How to Create Achievements Using the Achievements Addon

It’s time to show you how you can easily create an achievement using this addon. We’ll be creating an achievement for enrolling in a course.

First, you need to head over to LearnDash -> Achievements from the left sidebar of your WordPress admin panel. This will take you to the Achievements page where you’ll see 3 tabs: Achievements, Settings, and Shortcodes.

Achievements

The Achievements tab is the place where the admin can see and manage all the achievements. Let’s create a new achievement by clicking on the Add New Achievement button.

A new page will open up now with a number of fields.

In the Add title field, you should add the achievement name that’ll be displayed to the user. You can also add some text to the Message field.

The Details section is the most important part of any achievement.

The Trigger field controls when you want to award or display the achievement to the user. Go ahead to select User enrolls into a course (LearnDash) from the dropdown.

This will open up some new fields.

First, you need to select a course from the Course dropdown. Whenever someone completes that course, the achievement will be displayed to the user. You can also select All Courses to trigger the condition on completion of all the available courses.

Want to award points to the user? You can do that by configuring the Points field. And you can add any numeric value of your choice to that field.

Note that the achievement points are useful for displaying leaderboards. Also, you can allow users to buy a particular course using these achievement points (you need to enable the option in the course settings).

Next, you can add an achievement image from the Image box. You can select a pre-built image by clicking on the Select Image link.

Finally, you should click on Publish to make your achievement live.

Settings

Want to change the look of the achievement banner? Maybe, you want to match it with your brand colors. Just visit the Settings tab to change the background color, text color, and even the time after which the banner fades away.

Shortcodes

The LearnDash Achievements addon offers some shortcodes to display the user achievements:

• [ld_achievements_leaderboard] – It’ll display the list of users along with their points. For example, [ld_achievements_leaderboard=”10”] will display the top 10 users based on their points earned.
• [ld_my_achievements] – This shortcode can display all the achievements earned by a user.

The Achievements addon also offers 2 Gutenberg blocks for displaying the individual achievements and the achievement leaderboard.

Do More With LearnDash Achievements Addon

The Achievements addon is a great addition to the LearnDash plugin. The addon makes it easy to create multiple achievements for different activities on your eLearning site.

Presently, the Achievements addon offers limited course and non-course triggers only. Want to do more with the addon? You can use the Uncanny Automator plugin and the Achievements addon together to take your gamification strategy to the next level.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Uncanny Automator is a powerful automation plugin for WordPress. You can use it to connect WordPress plugins, WordPress sites, and third-party web apps together.

You can use the Automator plugin to collect achievements across all the plugins and tools you use, not just LearnDash. Not only that, but you can also connect our LearnDash plugins to the Achievements addon using the Automator plugin.

By connecting Uncanny Automator and LearnDash Achievements together, you can award badges and points to otherwise unsupported achievements, including the following:

• A user attends a live event (via The Events Calendar or Modern Events Calendar)
• Someone completes 3 specific courses in a series
• A user submits a course evaluation form (built using Formidable Forms, WPForms, or Divi Forms)
• A user earns 50 credits (via Uncanny Continuing Education Credits for LearnDash)
• Someone redeems a code using Uncanny Codes
• A user purchases an eBook
• Someone attends a webinar (via Zoom Webinar or GoToWebinar)

The above examples are just some ideas – you can connect the Achievements addon to 75+ WordPress plugins and web apps and create unlimited achievements for your users. That means the simple Achievements addon could replace the need for additional gamification tools, all at no extra cost beyond the LearnDash license.

How to Integrate the Achievements Addon With Uncanny Automator

Let’s briefly show you how to use the Uncanny Automator plugin and the Achievements addon together with the help of an example – award an achievement to a user automatically for submitting a course evaluation form.

We’ll be using WPForms as the form plugin in our example. However, Uncanny Automator supports a wide range of form plugins like Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, Formidable Forms, and more. So you can use any form plugin of your choice – the process will remain the same.

Whenever you need to automate a task using the Uncanny Automator plugin, you’ll have to create a recipe. And every recipe needs at least one trigger and one action. In our case, the trigger will be a user submitting a form and the action will be awarding an achievement to the user.

To create a new recipe, you need to head over to Automator -> Add new from the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard (we’re assuming that you’ve already installed the Automator plugin). Next, you should select Logged-in users as the recipe type and then click on Confirm.

After that, you need to add a recipe title to the Add title box for future reference.

Setting Up the Trigger

The next step is to configure the trigger for our recipe. To get started, you should select WPForms from the list of available integrations.

Next, you need to select A user submits a form as the trigger option.

Selecting that option will open up the Form field. Just select the course evaluation form from the dropdown and then click on Save.

You’ve successfully configured the trigger. Let’s set up the action in the next step.

Setting Up the Action

To configure the action, you need to first click on the Add action button. Next, you’ll have to choose LearnDash under Select an integration (the Achievements addon is part of the LearnDash integration in Uncanny Automator).

You’ll see a list of options now. Just find and click on the option Award an achievement to a user.

This will open the Achievements dropdown field. Here you need to select the achievement you want to award to the user for submitting the course evaluation form.

Finally, you need to click on the Save button to make your action live.

Publish the Recipe

It’s time to publish our recipe. To do that, you need to change the toggle option in the Recipe box from Draft to Live.

Your recipe is live now. That means, whenever someone submits the course evaluation form, you can automatically award an achievement to that user.

Endnote

The LearnDash Achievements addon is a powerful tool for adding game-like elements to your eLearning site. You can even use it with the Uncanny Automator plugin to connect it to 75+ WordPress plugins and web apps. And you can use the recipe example in this article as a reference to create multiple achievements for your eLearning site.

The best part is you can add multiple triggers and actions to any recipe to create complex workflows using the Uncanny Automator plugin. For example, you can add actions like getting a notification on Slack or adding the user to a mailing list to the above recipe.

Have any questions on how to use Uncanny Automator and LearnDash Achievements addon together? Please feel free to comment below.