LearnDash Plans for 2021

By: Justin Ferriman January 11, 2021
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Prepare for a very active year!

Happy New Year, LearnDashers!

I think we are all glad 2020 is behind us as we look forward to great things to come this year. No, we aren’t out of the pandemic quite yet (which has impacted everyone, including two of our very own at LearnDash), but I feel that there is a renewed energy!

The result of COVID has meant that many of you have turned to LearnDash for your online courses. Be it for your school or business, you have put your trust into us – and we are going to returning the favor with exciting, relevant, and innovative updates that you won’t find anywhere else!

So let’s jump into it!

What is in store for LearnDash Core.

LearnDash continues to be ranked as the best LMS in the WordPress space, and always ranks within the top 10 of all LMS solutions (something we are quite proud of). This year we’re going to push what’s possible more than ever before with online courses and WordPress.

We strongly believe that a best-in-class learning experience is critical to the success of any student, increasing their engagement and decreasing their frustration.

With this in mind, towards the beginning of a year you can expect new additions to Focus Mode which will further push innovation in the market and will result in making your courses more adaptable and easy to navigate for your learners.

Another item currently in development is the result of feedback we have received from many of you. I’m pleased to announce that the signup flow for students will be seeing an overhaul, allowing for a far easier-to-follow user experience flow.

We will put special emphasis on optimizing the learner progression from landing on your course page to taking your course (and every step in between). You can expect these improvements to the user experience to come within the first quarter of the year.

But what about the user experience on the admin side?

While I can’t say too much yet as the plans are in the early stages, we will be making it easier than ever to go from installing LearnDash to publishing your first course. This isn’t just a general menu change or something basic, we’re talking improvements across the board including a brand new certificate builder. You will be able to easily create stunning visual certificates without any code, using an easy drag-and-drop interface.

And we’re not stopping there. 🙂

In the latter part of this year you can expect to see additional improvements to:

  • Quizzes — including performance improvements and new quiz functionality such as saving a quiz in progress. We’re excited to share more about this with you later on in the year!
  • Memberships — you can’t escape the juggernaut that is memberships. Towards the end of last year we introduced our basic membership functionality, which you can expect to see that expanded in 2021 with more advanced features coming down the pipeline.

This is just scratching the surface of what we have planned. Less exciting (bust just as important) are structural and coding improvements “behind the scenes,” so that your LearnDash powered courses perform optimally for you and your learners.

Add-ons getting a-ton-of-love.

In 2021 we’re putting a lot more love into our add-ons with updates coming out rapidly, including this very week! So make sure you are updating your add-ons so that you have the latest, most secure versions.

Another part of our focus with add-ons this year is consolidation. Specifically, this means that we will be taking a more modular approach to our add-ons and how they are handled.

By way of example, add-ons that are close in functionality (like “events”) will be grouped together into one add-on called “LearnDash Events”. You then use the options of this one add-on to choose the platforms you want to integrate with and the associated settings. This means less add-ons for you to manage, which means less clutter on your WordPress dashboard.

But we aren’t just creating groups for add-ons. We also have some exciting entirely new add-ons coming in 2021, including the long awaited LearnDash Achievements add-on. This add-on will bring native badge and point delivery to LearnDash, and it will integrate with the other areas where we already have points (quizzes for example).

We want you to stay connected and engaged with the LearnDash community.

Throughout this year, we will be sure to communicate openly with you as updates are released.

While we plan to send more regular communications to your email, we will also continue engaging in the highly active LearnDash Facebook Group, and we encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel for livestreams and webinars. You can also follow us on our new Instagram for tips and inspiration.

Feel free to share your ideas with us as well – many of our updates are a direct result from the feedback that we receive from all of you!

We look forward to bringing you these updates (and much more) this year.

Stay safe!

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter