How to Launch an E-learning Website on WordPress

Growth in the e-learning industry has risen 900% since 2000, and experts predict that the global market of e-learning is going to reach $325 billion by 2025 so if you’re to launch an e-learning business now is a good time. Plus with WordPress setting up your website is straightforward.

Why WordPress for e-learning?

Nowadays, WordPress is an all-in-one service that can be used for building a high-quality website for any purpose, though it’s considered as CMS (Content Manager System) that can be transformed into LMS (Learning Management System) easily. All you have to do is to choose the right tool for that.

Top 6 Popular WordPress LMS Plugins

There are many LMS plugins for WordPress, so in this blog article are six WordPress Plugins worth consideration for your new business.

LearnPress

Today LearnPress is found as the best free LMS plugin. It’s a perfect choice for classrooms online. There is a pack of the premium, but still free, add-ons applied, use them for creating lessons, quizzes, events. Yet, it doesn’t support such features as assigning homework, certificates, and enrollments, etc.

LearnDash

Choosing LearnDash, you will get a wide range of useful options such as quizzes, private lessons, scheduled content, certifications, enrollments, user rewards, sell courses, etc. A weak point of the plugin is the integrated themes – they can be much better. Anyway, thanks to the other robust features, the plugin remains in the top plugins for LMS.

EduPro

EduPro is a plugin designed and used for schools, colleges, universities, and it’s perfect for creating courses online too. The package of the plugin includes LearnDash and WooCommerce. Besides that, you will get:

• Drag-and-Drop Page Builder Tool
• Creative Customization Options
• BuddyPress and bbPress plugins
• Event Management
• Supported MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro

Sensei

Sensi is a popular e-learning plugin, with seamless integration with WordPress theme. Here you will get access to a wide range of useful and worthy features, and it’s often compared to LearnDash. Sensei is preferred for its feature of customising quiz question types.

LifterLMS

Variety of add-ons like scheduled content, custom course builder, quizzes, homework, etc. will be at your disposal, in case LifterLMS plugin is your choice. Besides that, the plugin supports multiple types of subscriptions as well as payment systems. What’s more, it enables such features as bundle lessons, analytics, progress, and management.

Zippy Courses

Zippy is a standalone plugin for LMS. You can use it without any other plugins needed. Zippy Courses has a user-friendly and straightforward interface that is easy to work with. The highlight is that you can launch several courses per website at once. However, certificates, coupons, and quiz bank are not supplied here.

Guide: Build an E-learning Website on WordPress

When you choose the right plugin, it’s time to mastermind your online courses. Don’t know where to start? Here we are with our step-by-step guide that is bound to help you to succeed in the e-learning market.

Identify your goals and audience

Of course, if you’ve reached this part of the article, more than likely you know the topics and the niche you are going to teach. Anyway, you’re to decide beforehand. It’s better to choose the niche where you can teach people many skills you are good at. Also, you should ask yourself:
What challenge/problem is the course going to overcome/help with?

What outcomes are expected?

After that, you need to define whether it is a free or paid online course. That is crucial for the design as well as for a plugin to select. Combine both approaches offering a part of the content for free and another one to hide and provide for a determined price. That will drive the conversion. The next step you’re to do is to learn your audience and their needs to offer only relevant and useful information/content as well as not to make the courses too easy or too difficult.

Plan out a structure of your e-learning website

As soon as you set a goal and learn the audience, plan out a structure of your LMS website. What pages, lessons, classes, quizzes, menu, etc. you are going to include. The basic e-learning site can be:

• Homepage
• List of courses and lessons
• Page “About Us”
• Student testimonials and forums
• Actual course pages

The main rule is to make your website intuitive, user-friendly, easy to navigate and keep it secure from cyber attacks. You’re to create the sections that are really necessary and contain the useful info about you and what you offer. Remember: the more complex the e-learning website is, the harder it’ll be for you to build.

Choose a WordPress Plugin and Theme

Theme

Once you’ve completed all the previous issues, choose a plugin and a theme. Select plugin accurately, because the range of features you get access to depends on it. The fastest way is to select themes already integrated into the plugin. Thus, choosing the plugin pay attention to the themes offered. That will reduce your time and costs. Among the popular themes for LMS websites are:

• Course Builder
• Education WP
• eLearning WP
• Academ;
• Education Pack

Choose the one that has all the tools and features you need and meet your demands at most.

Create your first course and add lessons

When the goal, theme, and plugins, as well as the design, are chosen, create your first course and add lessons. We advise you to start with a prototype first to test and make sure that everything looks and works in the way you want. It’s bound to save your time and resources.

The process of creating a course and adding lessons to it depends on the plugin. However, the following steps are standard:

• Structure your course
• Write the course page, description, title
• Add lessons/quizzes and their content in the needed order

Equip a course with dynamic assignments

Using dynamic assignments, you can reduce overall administration time along with the costs by over 90%. That’s all because of equipping a course with dynamic assignments that allows you to collect and grade assignments in one centralized location.

Thanks to the tool, your students will be able to attach their homework, exams and other files for you to review. What’s more, you can use it to provide your students with extra materials for the lessons as well. That will ease your work with reports too. No search who, where and what, all needed info will be in one place.

Provide certificates on course completion

You’d provide your students with a certificate of completion. Though, such certificate can’t be used for formal accreditation due to the online courses are not accredited institution, the students will be able to share it with co-workers, friends, relatives, and potential employers. That’s a good way to promote your online courses.

A course completion certificate means that your student attended all the classes, made all homework tasks, and passed all the exams. Providing such a document, you will add the element of the gamification. That is an additional motivation and aim for your students to go through a course successfully.

Bottom line

Because e-learning gains popularity every day, it’s a great idea to set up your own online courses and monetize on the shift. Having read the article, you see everything is much easier than you may have realised. Especially if you choose WordPress for the purpose. All you need is to think about the goal of the LMS solution, audience and plan out a structure. The rest and, probably the hardest part, is to select the right plugin to use for your future site that will meet your unique needs.