This month’s Customer Showcase is Bitesize Bio – a community platform that brings bioscientists together to share experience, wisdom, and insight. Bitesize Bio’s mission is to facilitate better science by improving scientists’ technical skills, scientific fundamentals, personal development and wellbeing, careers, and funding.  

Bitesize Bio support their mission by empowering their community to share advice, tips, practical experience, training, knowledge, and insights from hundreds of scientists worldwide. This information is provided through informative articles, webinars, podcasts — and courses created by LearnDash, of course. 

Let’s explore how Bitesize Bio uses LearnDash to make practical knowledge and training information accessible, understandable, and actionable for their community of scientists.

The Home Page

Right away, on Bitesize Bio’s homepage, you’ll see their courses advertised at the top of their page. The banner entices the user to enroll by revealing the benefits of the course. With a promise to improve a tangible skill important to many academics and scientists, it’s hard not to click the enroll button! 

Following their course banner are dozens of articles, podcast episodes, and resources open and available to anyone interested in them. The abundance of resources on the homepage entices the user to find out more about their course offerings  – they show the site as a reputable source of information. 

LearnDash In Action

When you click “enroll,” you’re taken to the course landing page. Bitesize Bio makes use of LearnDash’s Course Access Setting to allow users to register and gain access to their course without payment. 

Course access settings allow you to define a set of criteria for how a user gains and maintains access to your course. You can set a course as completely open, free with registration required, one-time payment, recurring subscription, and so on. 

When setting a course to free, no payment is required, but a user must be registered/logged in to access. The Free access mode is a good choice if you want to manually enroll students into the course and capture their emails. With an email list, you can send out newsletters advertising your other course offerings as soon as they become available. 

If you’re using LearnDash’s customized login & registration along with your course access settings, you can change your language on the registration button, as Bitesize Bio has done. They’ve changed their text to say “I’d Like to Join this Course” to happily welcome folks into their free course. 

Focus Mode Keeps Learners Engaged

Once inside the course, Bitesize Bio makes use of our Focus Mode feature. Focus Mode aims to eliminate distractions & streamline your user’s learning experience – increasing learning retention and completion rates.

When you enable Focus Mode, your main navigation and footer elements are removed from the page. Course navigation is always visible in a sidebar tray, as well as course progress at the top of the screen. Control movement through the course with Next/Previous, Mark Complete, or Back to Course. You can also still access your account in the top right corner. 

Focus Mode is an exciting LearnDash feature that keeps your learners engaged in the coursework and not other tabs on their browser. Paired with the gamification of a progress bar, you should see higher engagement and completion rates with Focus mode enabled.

Do More with LearnDash

Bitesize Bio has created a vibrant community of knowledge using LearnDash, and you can too! There are a variety of ways to utilize LearnDash on your website. You can use a free course paired with Focus Mode, just like Bitesize Bio has done to promote open knowledge sharing all while capturing emails and growing your audience. 

How can LearnDash help you achieve your education goals for your students, company, or product? 

If you’re ready to find out, take LearnDash for a test drive in our demo. You can experience LearnDash from a learner’s or a course creator’s perspective in our free demo. When you’re ready to experience course creation, you can transfer any work from your demo right to your first LearnDash licensed course.