Monthly Archives: June 2021

[ad_1] If you’re searching for the best WordPress LMS plugin, you’ve probably come across the name LifterLMS. LifterLMS is one of the more popular options if you want to create an online course with WordPress, thanks in part to releasing the core plugin for free at WordPress.org, where it has a 4.7-star rating and is active on over 10,000 WordPress websites. But is it the right plugin for your course? In our detailed LifterLMS review, we’ll help you decide whether you should use LifterLMS or go with one of the many other WordPress LMS plugins out there. Here’s how we’ll divide our 2021 LifterLMS review: Let’s get started! 🧰 LifterLMS Features To start, we’ll quickly go over the many features that LifterLMS offers. Course features: Drag-and-drop course builder. Multimedia lessons – support for video, audio, text, and image-based lessons. Assignments. Quizzes – with lots of different question types. Gradebooks to show progress, quiz scores, and more. Course prerequisites. Course tracks – e.g. offer a certification when people complete multiple courses in any order. Support for multiple instructors. Course discussion areas. Membership features: Content restriction. Content dripping. Offer sitewide memberships instead of selling single-course access. Special members-only pricing on courses. Payment features: Sell courses for one-time or recurring payments (or make them free). Dedicated payment integrations with Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.net. There’s also a WooCommerce integration that lets you use any of WooCommerce’s gateways. Payment plans (let people spread payments over time). Coupons. Bulk sales to sell access to groups. Affiliate network integrations. Course bundles. Private coaching upsells, along with bundling private coaching and course content. Social learning features: Course achievements to gamify your courses. Course certificates upon completion. Social learning to create course communities. Connect with learners using customizable emails or text messages. Integrations: Email marketing support for WP Fusion, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp. Direct integrations for popular WordPress form plugins – Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms. Zapier integration to connect to the thousands of apps on Zapier. Now, let’s get into the hands-on section of our review… 👷 LifterLMS Course Builder Creating an online course can be time-consuming because you need to set up a lot of different pieces of content and organize everything into a logical structure. To help make this as painless as possible, LifterLMS comes with a drag-and-drop course builder that lets you easily set up the overall structure for your course and then dig into more detailed sections when needed. Creating a Course When you first set up a course, you’ll see the native WordPress block editor, which is where you can set up the course overview content and basic settings. This is not the actual course builder. At the top, you just have the regular block editor, along with some special LifterLMS blocks. And below that, you have the Course Options meta box, which lets you set up basic details like: Estimated completion time. Prerequisites. A featured video. Scheduling. Maximum capacity. Etc. This is also where you can set up payment options, but I’ll cover those in a separate section. Once you’re ready to set up course content, you can click the Launch Course Builder button in the bottom-right corner. Using the Drag-and-Drop Course Builder To organize your courses, you get two levels of content: Lessons – the actual content of your course. Sections – these organize lessons into different categories/units. In the course builder, you can use the buttons and drag-and-drop to create the high-level structure of your course using lessons and sections. Here, you can see the basic structure of a course: You also have the option to compress the lessons under a section, which makes it easier to focus on a specific part of your course. You can see that each lesson has a set of icons beneath it (as well as a different set of icons when you hover over it). These icons let you quickly view/edit a lesson’s content. Some icons will quickly show whether a lesson has certain content attached to it, like video or audio. Other icons let you add a new quiz or assignment or open the lesson’s content editor in a new tab. You can edit basic lesson settings by clicking the icon to open a slide-out. However, you’ll need to open the full lesson editor to add text content: Adding Lesson Content The lesson content editor gives you access to the native block editor to add text/image content, as well as a Lesson Settings box that lets you attach a video or audio file and control other lesson settings. For example, if you’re creating a video course, you can add the video to the Video Embed URL box and then add some companion text using the content editor: The Lesson Settings box also lets you control prerequisites, a content dripping schedule, and some other settings. In the sidebar, you can also see where a lesson fits in the course and quickly jump back to the full course builder. Creating Quizzes To add a quiz, you can work from inside the drag-and-drop course builder by clicking the icon for the lesson to which you want to attach a quiz. Clicking the icon opens a slide-out where you can set up your quiz (or add an assignment): There, you can set up basic details like the passing grade, time limits, attempt limits, and more.  Then, you can start adding questions using a variety of different question types. You get the Basic Questions with the free version but you need the Advanced Quizzing add-on to access the Advanced Questions: And that’s a quick look at what it’s like to create quiz content with LifterLMS. 💳 LifterLMS Payment Options If you’re like many people, you’re probably creating online courses with the goal of monetizing your courses and earning money. Here’s how LifterLMS helps you do that… Charging for Course Access To charge for access to your course, LifterLMS lets you create Access Plans when you edit a course’s settings. When you create an access plan,