The Uncanny Owl Blog

how to do more with the learndash achievements addon

How to Do More With LearnDash Achievements

December 7, 2021/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny Automator/by Sandipan

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 […]

Group Hierarchy Reporting support for LearnDash

November 4, 2021/3 Comments/in Learning/by Ryan

It’s time for a huge Uncanny Groups for LearnDash release that adds some important new tools for site owners, end users and developers. Let’s jump straight in to what’s new. Group Hierarchy support for LearnDash reports This has been a popular request for months now but we needed to be very careful about how we approached it. We didn’t want to slow report generation down too much, nor did we want to potentially confuse users with new views of consolidated data. As such, the very first thing we did was to make the hierarchy support optional. To use it, turn on group hierarchies in LearnDash and enable this new option in your Uncanny Groups settings page: Once those changes are made, and you have some groups set up in hierarchies, visit your Group Management page on the front end. If you select a parent group from the drop-down (or you view it as a user with a single group that is a parent), you’ll see a new checkbox to include data from child groups in the table. When you check this, the page will reload and students across the current group and all child groups will be output in the table. The list […]

Tin Canny 4.0 with xAPI and SCORM support

Expanded SCORM and xAPI/Tin Can support for LearnDash

June 24, 2021/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan

At long last, the Tin Canny 4.0 release is now available! And it includes one major new feature that will transform what’s possible for small businesses running LearnDash sites: full SCORM and xAPI support. Back when we originally launched Tin Canny it was an easy way for LearnDash sites to upload their modules from popular elearning tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and iSpring. Over the years we added support for Lectora, Quizmaker, H5P, Presenter, Rise… but all of that support was explicitly defined and we couldn’t offer fully SCORM or xAPI compliant solutions. Introducing full SCORM and xAPI/Tin Can support The 4.0 release should work with any standards-compliant SCORM 1.2, 2004 and xAPI / Tin Can file. It took us close to a year to get there, but the effort was absolutely worth it. Now we can stop saying “no” to people every time we get requests to add support for a custom authoring tool or something third party that we don’t support. Better yet, there’s no longer a need to ask! With this update, he’s a partial list of authoring tools we will be supporting with Tin Canny: Camtasia Elucidat Adapt Easygenerator Of course, there are hundreds of authoring […]

Uncanny Groups 4.0: Dozens of enhancements

June 22, 2021/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan

The Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 4.0 release has been in development for months and focuses heavily on reliability and marginal improvements. And there are a lot of those; this release includes almost 50 plugin enhancements and fixes. Let’s jump right into some of what’s new: More form support Use Gravity Forms, WPForms or Formidable Forms? Now you can add enrollment key redemption fields from the form editor so you can link any form in those plugins to key redemption in Uncanny Groups. New edit group page options Ever wish administrators could see invited users? That’s in, so is the ability to see orders and products associated with groups that were created from a purchase. You can even unlink a group from an order if you no longer want users to be able to add courses or seats to a group via purchase. New group list page options We modified the group listing under LearnDash LMS > Groups to show seat counts and to make enrollment keys downloadable by admins. Both of these changes will make it a lot easier for administrators to get data they need without drilling down into a group or switching to the front end Group Management page. Shortcode support in […]

Two Factor Authentication for LearnDash Login Forms

May 3, 2021/1 Comment/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan

Version 3.5 of the Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash was released today with one very important addition: new support for Two Factor Authentication (2FA). We have had a number of requests to improve security options for our login module and we’re pleased to now support a direction integration with WP 2FA, a popular two-factor authentication plugin for WordPress. Easy 2FA for WordPress sites What this new integration means is that it’s easier than ever to integrate the flexible, clean login forms in the Uncanny Toolkit with the additional security of the WP 2FA plugin. It’s the best of both worlds. Using both plugins together, you can now: Require some or all users to authenticate with 2FA (including setting rules by role) Allow users to add a secondary login check using an email or supported 2FA app Beyond the additional account security, LearnDash site owners may appreciate that this additional security measure makes it much harder for users to share WordPress accounts. Here’s what the login process looks like for end users when they try to sign in: The use of two-factor authentication is of course completely optional, but we’ve made it as easy as possible to install the WP 2FA plugin […]

Uncanny Codes 4.0 for WordPress

March 16, 2021/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan

Our Codes plugin for WordPress has gone through many iterations since we first launched it in 2016. It started off as a simple code redemption tool to unlock LearnDash course and group access. Then we linked codes to registration and purchase, added expiry dates, allowed custom codes, then built in advanced code generation and redemption rules. Despite being a very capable and scalable plugin, it was never particularly popular and was limited to LearnDash use. With the release of Uncanny Codes 4.0, however, everything changes. Introducing Uncanny Codes 4.0 For about a year, the Uncanny team has wrestled with 2 big questions about our Codes plugin: How far could the plugin go if we supported more than LearnDash alone? What if instead of building integrations for other plugins we just linked it to Uncanny Automator? Uncanny Codes 4.0 will answer those questions, because the plugin no longer requires LearnDash and we have linked the redemption of codes and code batches to Automator recipes. (For anyone not familiar with Uncanny Automator, it’s a plugin that connects lots and lots of things together. When something happens somewhere, Automator can make something else happen, like the redemption of a code adding a user […]

Uncanny Groups 3.10: Easier classroom management

February 17, 2021/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan

There’s one thing in our Uncanny Groups plugin that I felt had been a gap for some time, not just in our plugin but in WordPress in general: Why do users always need a valid email address to set up an account? The answer is straightforward, of course, it’s an identifier and allows users to reset their passwords independently. But in many K-12 classrooms, manufacturing and industrial environments, students simply don’t have email addresses. This makes using LearnDash and our plugins exceedingly difficult. We did offer a workaround for CSV imports; files can include a password column and this password would be set for new users, allowing administrators and Group Leaders to create users that didn’t actually need an email address. With this approach, account info (email and password) could be set up and given to students directly so that setting up a password by email confirmation wasn’t needed. Privacy concerns aside, this at least offered a path for students without an email address to use LearnDash and our plugins. CSV files are hard to work with though and outside the technical abilities of many Group Leaders. Enter Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.10. Password field in Add Users New in […]

Tin Canny Single Page Courses and Column Sorting

Tin Canny 3.6: Microlearning for LearnDash xAPI & SCORM courses

February 16, 2021/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Tin Can/by Ryan

It’s time for a new Tin Canny update! Version 3.6 adds support for microlearning using Single Page LearnDash courses, more flexible user details in reports, new column sorting options, a more visible X icon for modules in a lightbox and more. Single page xAPI & SCORM LearnDash courses Today’s Tin Canny 3.6 release adds support for something LearnDash and Tin Canny users have been wanting for years: the ability to build standalone courses with Articulate Storyline, iSpring, H5P and other module types without having to use LearnDash lessons and topics. What does that mean? Well, with most (non-WordPress) LMS platforms, you can upload self-contained zip files and that uploaded module becomes the entire course. A user sees the course name, launches that uploaded course in a new window or lightbox, and that’s it — no digging into lessons or topics first, it’s just the course. LearnDash, however, normally requires that courses be structured into a hierarchy of WordPress posts that requires at least one “lesson” beneath a course. The SCORM or xAPI file would then be uploaded inside the lesson or topic, so students would have to click through a “course” level first that sometimes served no purpose. Tin Canny […]

Toolkit Pro 3.7: Usermeta in reports, transcript changes and more

February 12, 2021/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan

We try to avoid Friday releases where we can, but with the upcoming holiday weekend in Canada and some exciting changes from LearnDash, we couldn’t wait to get version 3.7 of the Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin out. It’s a big release with several really compelling new features. Group Drip notification changes We do need to start the list of new features with a change that Group Drip users may need to make on their sites. LearnDash is releasing version 1.5 of their Notifications plugin next week, which is a big overhaul and improvement. That’s great news, but because of how it was rearchitected, it does break compatibility with existing notifications linked to our Group Drip module. Any current notifications on sites set up to alert users when lessons are available to the group will stop working, but there is good news: we have a new trigger available to support Group Drip notifications. If you upgrade to LearnDash Notifications 1.5 and want notifications to be sent to group members when lessons become available via group drip, you must create new notifications with this new trigger: “A scheduled lesson is available to user with Uncanny Drip by Group”. If you don’t use group drip […]

BuddyBoss Groups Sync with LearnDash Groups

Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.9 Update

February 2, 2021/2 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan

The version 3.9 update of the Uncanny Groups for LearnDash plugin includes some interesting updates that may really transform how the tool is used by some customers. Given the magnitude of the changes, this is also one that we recommend testing on a Staging site first. Let’s jump right in to what’s new in the release and how it might affect your site. BuddyBoss Social Group sync You asked, we listened. A lot of people use the BuddyBoss theme and platform with our Uncanny Groups plugin. BuddyBoss does include a sync tool for LearnDash groups, but it doesn’t work properly when users are added or removed from groups managed by our plugin. It also doesn’t sync LearnDash groups created with our plugin to new BuddyBoss groups. So, in the Uncanny Groups 3.9 release, here’s what’s new if LearnDash Group Sync and Auto Create Social Group settings are enabled in BuddyBoss > Integrations > LearnDash on a BuddyBoss site: When a LearnDash group is created by the Uncanny Groups plugin, an associated BuddyBoss social group is created. When a user is added to a group from the Group Management page in our plugin, the user is added to the associated BuddyBoss group. If the […]

The Uncanny Blog

How to Do More With LearnDash Achievements

Group Hierarchy Reporting support for LearnDash

Expanded SCORM and xAPI/Tin Can support for LearnDash

Uncanny Groups 4.0: Dozens of enhancements

Two Factor Authentication for LearnDash Login Forms

Uncanny Codes 4.0 for WordPress

Uncanny Groups 3.10: Easier classroom management

Tin Canny 3.6: Microlearning for LearnDash xAPI & SCORM courses

Toolkit Pro 3.7: Usermeta in reports, transcript changes and more

Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.9 Update

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