How to Offer Courses in WordPress with LifterLMS

WordPress is a flexible content management system that can do just about anything with the right knowledge or plugin. The LifterLMS plugin is no exception as it allows you to offer online courses directly on your WordPress site.

This plugin includes everything you’ll need to build courses, and it even has eCommerce tools (premium add-on) that allow you to accept payments from students. Better yet, the plugin is free to use forever. That said, premium add-ons do exist.

These premium add-ons take some features to the next level while adding completely new ones, but most sites won’t need them as the core plugin offers enough options to build a fully functional set of courses in WordPress.

If you are looking to create and sell online courses, there is no better option than LifterLMS. And today, I will cover how to use it.

This tutorial is for:
WordPress 6.6.2
Plugin: LifterLMS v7.7.8

What Is An LMS?

An LMS, or Learning Managment System, is a tool that focuses on building courses and course material.

An LMS can be used by a variety of sites to create different kinds of coursework. There can be your traditional kind of content like math, science, foreign language, and so on, but that’s really just the starting point.

Some of these LMSs can be set up to offer trade courses like teaching students how to change their oil, DIY projects, makeup tutorials, and much more. There are a variety of LMS platforms available for WordPress.

While each one has unique features and behaves differently, here are some of the common features you can expect from an LMS:

• Course Builder
• Payment Acceptance
• Quiz Builder
• Student Forums
• Direct Messaging
• Certificate Builder
• Grade Calculator
• Course Analytics
• Course Registration

You can expect most of these tools in every LMS plugin in one way or another. And like everything else that WordPress offers, all of the coursework you create will be accessible to students via mobile devices.

How to Create Courses with LifterLMS

LifterLMS is a robust plugin for WordPress that allows you to build any kind of coursework. Yet, despite the large number of features and tools at your disposal, this plugin still manages to be accessible to developers at any skill level.

It’s worth pointing out that Lifter LMS is compatible with every major page builder plugin for WordPress. Thus, on top of its own features, you can integrate it to work with other tools to create the best-designed content possible.

Note: This plugin offers several premium add-ons. These include extra features for existing tools, entirely new tools, and eCommerce functionality. The free plugin is only intended for creating free courses in WordPress.

Step 1: Install Lifter LMS

Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for LifterLMS in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Find the Lifter LMS plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

Note: There are several plugins that mention LifterLMS. Be sure to install the main one.

Step 2: Setup Wizard

Upon activating the plugin, the setup wizard will appear. It is completely optional to go through this, but I highly recommend doing so. It helps you set up some of the major features that the plugin offers.

Click on the “Get Started Now” button to begin the setup wizard.

The first part of this setup wizard is to create a few initial pages that the plugin needs. These include the Course Catalog, Membership Catalog, Checkout, and Student Dashboard pages. These pages are blank by default and will need to be customized later.

Click on the “Save & Continue” button. The Payments section will ask you to choose the default country for student registration, as well as choosing which currency should be used at checkout. The default is the United States and the United States Dollar ($).

There is also an option to accept offline payments, which should only be relevant if you have a physical location.

The next part isn’t a real step. It simply asks if you would like to opt in so the plugin creators can collect data to help improve the plugin. If you do, you will receive a coupon. Feel free to allow this or not allow as it has no impact on using the plugin.

That concludes the setup wizard. The last screen will bring you to the import wizard. Here, you can choose sample courses and templates that you can import into WordPress. Feel free to import what you might think will be useful.

Alternatively, you can also choose to start from scratch and build your own. Personally, I would import everything, so you can get some ideas or repurpose the template into something you like.

And with this, we are ready to begin building courses in WordPress with LifterLMS.

Step 3: Building Courses

While you can start setting up this plugin in a variety of ways, I am going to start by creating a course. While you can start one from scratch, I am going to be using the Course Template I imported in the previous step.

Click on Courses and select the Courses option. If you are planning on building from scratch, click on the Add Courses option instead.

Here, you will find a list of your existing courses. I imported them all from the previous step. Feel free to look through them, but for this tutorial, I am using the Course Template.

Take a minute and look through the template. The template is essentially a sales page for your course. It describes what the course is about, the coursework included, plan pricing, and more.

All of the text in the template acts as instructions for you to follow. As such, you will need to fully edit every aspect of this template. I won’t go into too much detail as it is identical to using the regular Gutenberg editor. If you use a page builder, that editor will also be available.

This course, also includes several prebuilt courses for the students. To look at them and begin editing the courses, click on the “Launch Course Builder” button at the top.

Course Builder

The pre-built courses here act as a tutorial for the Course builder. They try to teach you possible structures you can use to create a lesson for students. Naturally, there is no one-size-fits-all all approach to coursework, but it’s a great starting point.

Let’s start with the basics.

You can create a section that contains multiple lessons. A section acts like a chapter and helps students identify what kind of content is within it. The lessons are part of the section and contain the actual coursework they will read or engage with.

You can find options to add this on the right side of the course builder.

There is no limit on the number of sections you can add to a course, and likewise, no limit on the number of lessons within each section. That said, be sure to make it manageable for students.

If you click on one of the template lessons, you will notice it is divided into three tabs. The first is the core lesson. This should be all of the instructions that students should read and review to learn from. The next tab is for Assignments.

As the name implies, this is where you can create assignments that students must complete to prove their understanding of the topic. And finally, there are quizzes, which allow you to test a student’s knowledge.

A lesson can contain one of these elements or all three, it is completely up to you.

Naturally, each one of these has its own elements that you can add to create a lesson, assignment, or quiz respectively. Unfortunately, Assignments are a premium add-on for the plugin. As such, we won’t talk about that.

Instead, let’s start with the Lesson Builder.

Lesson Builder

The lesson builder is once again done using the Gutenberg editor. As such, they are straightforward to create from scratch. If you were editing an existing lesson like we are, you open it up and select the Open WordPress Lesson Editor.

This will open up the Gutenberg editor. Within the editor, you can add all of the content you want your students to see. This can include text, images, and video content. As such, it’s no different than writing any other piece of content in WordPress.

That said, you need to focus on making the content as easy to consume as possible. Course content will usually make use of bullet points to help highlight important facts alongside graphs and figures.

If you scroll down to the bottom, you will find the Lesson Settings section. This is broken up into four tabs.

The first tab is General. Here you can find some basic settings. These include a video URL embedder, audio file embedder, and choosing if the lesson is available for free. The second tab is Prerequisites.

By default, there are none. However, if you flip the switch, you can choose other lessons that must be completed before they can take this lesson. Since you probably won’t have any other lessons to choose from, come back to the prerequisites at a later time.

The third tab is Drip Settings. Drip settings allow you to drip-feed the lesson material. For example, perhaps you want different sections of the lesson to appear on different days. This prevents the student from doing the entire course quickly.

Thus, it can result in longer membership periods. The final tab is Quiz. This asks if a student needs to pass a quiz to complete the lesson. Quizzes are made separately, so the only option here is to toggle it on or off.

Be sure to save the changes you made, and that covers everything you can do in the lesson builder.

Quiz Builder

If you rerun to the Course builder, you can add a quiz to any lesson. This is optional, so you can choose which lessons have one and which don’t. To do so, click on the Add Quiz option.

This will open some new options on the right side of the screen. Click on the “Create New Quiz” button.

This will open up the quiz builder on the right-hand side. The options at the top allow you to add a description to the quiz as well as set the score students will need in order to pass the quiz. You may also see some theme settings, but that depends on your theme.

At the bottom, click on the “Add Question” button.

This will open up a small menu that allows you to pick what type of question it is. This includes multiple choice, picture choice, and true or false in the free version of the plugin. There are 9 more question types, but they are locked behind a premium add-on.

Pick the question you want to use. Each one is slightly different to fill out, but also very easy to do.

Be sure to save the changes you make, and remember, you need to configure the lesson to make the quiz mandatory to pass for students.

Step 4: Memberships

If you plan on selling courses on your WordPress site, you will need to create memberships for your courses. It is worth pointing out that this is an unnecessary step if you are choosing to make all of the courses available for free.

It is also worth pointing out that the eCommerce tools are premium add-ons. These allow you to connect LifterLMS with specific payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and so on. Each one is an individual add-on that you will need to pay for.

While I will demonstrate how to create a membership, I will not be covering the eCommerce tools as they are specific to the add-on you purchase. Start off by clicking on Memberships and selecting the Add Membership option.

This will open up the Gutenberg Editor. Inside of the editor itself will be a space for the Membership Instructor. Here, you can highlight who created the course or who students will be interacting with.

If you scroll down below the editor, you will find the Membership Settings section. It has three tabs.

The first tab is for the Sales Page. You can link this membership with a specific page. It is a good practice to create an individual sales page for each membership. That way, you can highlight what that membership entails and what students can learn.

Simply use the drop-down menu to select a page. If you don’t have a page ready, you can skip this and add it at a later time.

The Restrictions tab allows you to choose what happens to non-members when they try to access the course material. The easiest option to pick, which is the default, is to redirect them to the sales page.

You may want to consider creating a trial so students can get a glimpse of what you are offering.

Lastly, you have the Auto Enrollment tab.

This tab will allow you to choose the courses students will be enrolled in when they purchase the membership. If you are just making a general membership, you could add all of the coursework.

Or, perhaps you are selling courses individually. In that case, you would just add the course that membership is for. Again, all of the pricing is handled by the premium add-ons.

Are the Premium LifterLMS Add-Ons Worth It?

If you take a look at some of the prices associated with the premium add-ons, you may have noticed some very high price tags. Thus, you may be wondering, are the premium add-ons worth the cost?

If you are serious about selling courses to students, yes, they are worth it. The extra features and support you will gain access to will help you build successful courses. It may be a high cost when starting, but the earning potential for online courses is huge.

After all, a single course could have a hundred students attend and can be reused over and over.

Start Offering Courses in WordPress Today

As you can see the LifterLMS plugin is a great tool you can use to create courses for WordPress. It has a simple interface that utilizes the Gutenberg editor, or the page builder of your choice like Elementor.

While the plugin can be used effectively for providing free courses, the eCommerce tools are locked behind a paywall. This can be a major drawback of the plugin since there are other LMSs that can integrate with WooCommerce.

In any case, LifterLMS is a great choice, as the number of features you have at your disposal is staggering. I hope you found this tutorial helpful in learning how to build courses in WordPress with Lifter LMS.

How easy did you find LifterLMS to create online courses for WordPress? Did you purchase any add-ons for LifterLMS?

The post How to Offer Courses in WordPress with LifterLMS appeared first on GreenGeeks.