Instructor Led Training with WordPress

Facilitated training isn’t just for the classroom and complex Learning Management Systems. Even though WordPress learning solutions are primarily targeted at self-directed programs, it is absolutely possible to build facilitated learning with them. In this post I’ll share some of the ways we do this for our clients at Uncanny Owl.

Let’s suppose you want to offer a 4-week paid course to the public. Each week, you want learners to go through some self-directed lessons (that include text, video, and offline readings), participate in online discussions with you and other learners, and then complete a weekly quiz. At the end of the 4th week everyone must complete a final test. If they pass the final test and all weekly quizzes, they’re issued a printable certificate.

WordPress probably wouldn’t be your first thought when delivering this type of common course structure, but it should be! With a few plugins, like LearnDash as your LMS and a membership plugin, it’s actually quite easy.

To build this kind of program, your first step is probably going to be to create 4 courses, 1 for each week of the program. You can then build lessons for each week that include your readings and video. Creating the quizzes and test might come next. These are the easy parts.

Ah, but you want all participants to complete the courses at the same time, and you don’t want to give them access to content from week 2, 3 and 4 when they’re in week 1. The tricks here are using a membership plugin (which allows you to restrict access to course materials) and scheduling WordPress posts. For every course you publish you can tell WordPress when to make it available to learners. So your first course (for week 1) might be automatically published on Monday at 9AM of the first week, the second course at 9AM of the second week, etc. And by assigning the courses to membership levels, you can restrict the courses to paid participants.

Next up are the online discussion and collaboration pieces. For group discussion, add a forum tool like bbPress and create forums for each week; you can then embed them in lessons for each week. That way they’re easy for learners to find and you can stay on top of the discussion. For communication between session participants, BuddyPress enables private messaging and other social networking features.

That really just leaves the final test and certificate, and that’s where an LMS like LearnDash makes everything easy. The final test can have the previous quizzes as prerequisites, it can be scheduled to only be available to learners on a certain day and it can automatically generate a course certificate with the learner’s name on completion.

Of course, this is a very simple example and getting everything running properly will require some more work. As an example, you may need to stop selling the membership level for 1 session once it starts (so you don’t have people joining in week 4 and skipping the earlier discussion). And you’ll probably want to offer sessions more than once, which means expiring membership levels, incrementing course publishing dates, clearing out forums and more.

What are your own solutions for delivering instructor led training with WordPress? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below!