Online Course Creation Has Just Evolved!

By: Justin Ferriman • November 7, 2017
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Create your content once and you’re done! Re-use your Lessons, Topics, and Quizzes in any course – at any time!

Writing new update announcements is always enjoyable.

But even more so for today’s update!

After many months of development and testing it is with great pleasure to tell you about LearnDash Version 2.5 – a game changer for LearnDash and the way you create your online courses.

Let’s jump right into it!

Re-Use Your Content in Any Course

Have you watched the video at the top of this page? If not, please do.

And subscribe to our new YouTube channel while you’re at it. 😉

For years, one of the more frustrating aspects of any WordPress LMS has been the inability to take a lesson that you have created and re-use it in an entirely different course.

To do so, you have to create a copy (or clone) of the content and assign it to your new course, resulting in hundreds of lessons that are exactly the same.

This is no longer the case in LearnDash.

Starting today, any Lesson, Topic, or Quiz that you create can be used over-and-over again in any course. No need to create copies or clones of your content. Truly, it’s “one and done”.

Not only does this save you an incredible amount of time when creating new courses, but it also significantly decreases the amount of duplicate content (clutter!) on your site. Managing your course content just got way easier.

When you create new course content it gets added to your Content Library, available for use at any time!

Need to whip-up a quick Micro-Course? Easy, just select the Lessons you need and Publish.

LearnDash Course Builder

In order to make re-using your content quick & easy you can use the new visual course builder capabilities.

However, it’s not just useful for creating courses with existing content – use it to create brand-new courses in minutes!

The course builder is actually quite sophisticated, giving you the ability to:

  • Drag and drop your Lessons and Topics into the order you want
  • Create Lessons, Topics, & Quizzes in one click
  • Add nested Quizzes (Course-level, Lesson-level, Topic-level)
  • Shortcut editing of the content you create
  • Bulk move content
  • Re-use your existing content

To use the new builder, just create a new course and the Builder is located just below the Course Options.

You will also notice a “Builder” link next to each course listing so that you can navigate directly to the Builder if desired.

If you’re currently a LearnDash customer then you can find additional documentation on the support site.

New Permalink (URL) Structure

This update will make many of you quite happy. 🙂

When the option to re-use course content has been activated you will notice a new (nested) URL structure for your courses.

Instead of:

yoursite.com/lessons/lesson-one-title

You now will see:

yoursite.com/courses/course-title/lessons/lesson-one-title

Besides being visually more appealing, this structure is also more SEO friendly.

This new structure is optional and you can continue using the current permalink structure if you prefer. However, if you activate the ability to re-use content in multiple courses, then this new permalink structure is required (and will update automatically).

Additional Updates Based on Your Feedback

In addition to these major updates we also made some tweaks to some other LearnDash functionality based on your feedback. For example:

  • Set upload size and file type limit for Assignments
  • Ability for users to delete submitted Assignments
  • Display non-enrolled courses with the [ld_course_list] shortcode
  • Option for the Admin to remove Quiz attempts from a user’s profile

For a full list of updates and fixes please see the changelog.

All of this new functionality is available for you today in LearnDash v2.5.

Giving You Access To The Latest E-Learning Trends

E-learning is always evolving, and this new course building capability will allow you to capitalize on the quickly growing micro-content trend.

Going forward we will continue to ensure that in LearnDash you have access to the latest trends and best practices in our industry.

On behalf of the entire LearnDash team I want to first thank you all for entrusting us with your online courses and learning programs. We are so incredibly grateful for the feedback and comments that you provide us on a daily basis. You have helped to make LearnDash what it is today – thank you!

As we close out the year we will be starting the planning phases for 2018. We already have some exciting updates mapped out, least of which being LearnDash 3.0!

Until next time!

PS: Subscribe to our new YouTube channel where we will be posting regular tips & tutorial for creating (and selling) your online courses!

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