ibmcer/visionknowledgebase websites basic tutorial

In this article I’ll show you how to create your courses, lessons, topics and quizzes on ibmcer/visionknowledgebase websites.
Note: This tutorial works for both websites.

Courses, Lessons, Topics & Quizzes Overview

We’re now ready to dive into actually creating your first course. Before we begin, let’s take a look at the terminology used in LearnDash and better understand how this relates in terms of course structure.

Courses: Courses are the ‘container’ that hold lessons, quizzes and topics. You may choose to only ever build one course that covers the subject you want to teach (for example ‘How to read music’). On the other hand you might want to create multiple courses. These multiple courses might cover different subject matter or perhaps just explore the same subject but in different levels of depth. Courses are also useful as you can choose to allow free access to one course whilst charging for access to another. Offering a free ‘teaser’ course is a great way to get people to initially sign up on your website and offers you the opportunity to demonstrate the quality of your course material without the prospective customer having to pay at the outset.

Lessons: Lessons are the place where you actually build your course content. This course content can comprise of a wide range of material including images, text, PDF files, audio files and video. You might have just one or two long lessons or may choose to have multiple lessons. These lessons are arranged within your course in a way that leads the student through each one until the course has been completed.

Topics: If your lessons are complex and contain a lot of content then you might want to break these down further by using Topics. Topics must be added to lessons (you can’t have a course that comprises entirely of topics). If adding another layer of hierarchy seems too complex then you could of course just sub divide your lessons using section headings.

Quizzes: Quizzes are a great way for you to check the understanding of your students in relation to the material that has been taught.

Setting up a LearnDash Course

As discussed, Courses are the container which hold all of your lessons. It’s important to decide how you want to structure your overall eLearning experience before diving in with the actual course creation. For example, do you want multiple courses that cover a topic or perhaps one course with lots of lessons? Once you’ve decided on this it’s time to begin building.

To do this, head to the Courses tab that’s within the LearnDash sub menu in wp-admin. Click on ‘Add New’.

Enter the course name and then a course description. On the right hand side you’ll see various options, one of which is the ability to add course categories. In this example we have Free and Paid course categories.

 

 

With the initial course info set out you can now move to the course builder which is accessed via the menu at the top of the course page.

It’s within this section that you will now begin to add Lessons. For now though, click Publish/Update to save your Course and then click the ‘Back to Courses’ hyperlink in the top left of the screen.

Setting up a LearnDash Lesson

Lessons are where you will actually deliver your course content. Click on ‘Lessons’ in the LearnDash sub menu and then click ‘Add New’. A new post will open and it’s within this that you really can get started. It’s entirely up to you how many lessons you want to structure your course with and the content of each lesson is also entirely up to you. You can add as much text, video (embedded from a hosting service such as Wistia) and images as you need to deliver the information your students need.

There are a range of additional options that can be applied to each lesson via the Settings tab. These include things like a Forced Lesson Timer that stops a student moving to the next lesson until a certain period of time has elapsed. The LearnDash Knowledge Base offers a more complete description of these features.

Once you’ve created your lesson(s), make sure to publish/update these as you would any other WordPress post/page.

Setting up a LearnDash Quiz

As with Courses and Lessons, quizzes can be accessed via the sub menu in the LearnDash menu sidebar. Click on this to open the module and get started. You will want to first create the Questions for your quiz via the ‘Questions’ menu. You’ll need to decide on the question type (e.g. single choice, fill in the blank and so on) and this can be done via the sidebar menu.

Once you’ve got your questions you can build these into a quiz. Click on the Quizzes sub menu, click on ‘Add New’ and then enter some basic info on your quiz in the form of a title and description. Once you’ve done this click on the ‘Builder’ tab. Take a look at the next section in this introductory guide to see how the LearnDash builder works for quizzes and courses.

The LearnDash Builder

Now you have created the lessons and quiz questions that will populate your course it’s time to pull all of these into an overall course structure.

To begin, open up your course that was created earlier (LearnDash LMS > Courses > Course Name). Within this course you’ll see a tab near the top of the page which says ‘Builder’. Click on this and you’ll see something like this:

 

 

Now, drag and drop your lessons which will show in the Document sidebar into the grey box that says ‘Add a new Lesson or add an existing one from the sidebar’. When you’ve done this you’ll have a page that looks a bit like this:

You can drag these lessons up or down in order to re-arrange your lesson order. If you have created Topics to sub-divide your lessons, these can also now be added in the same manner. You’ll need to click on the arrow that is on the right hand side of the Lesson to expand the lesson. It is in these sections that both quizzes and topics can be added. The order of these dictates the order in which your students will move through the course.

Now the course has a structure it’s time to finalize some of the course settings. To do this head to the Settings tab from within the course. It’s here that you can dictate things like whether the course content is available to enrolled students only, whether or not the course is free or chargeable and if certain pre-requisites need to be met before a student can enrol on a course (for example, completing a previous course).

And that’s it! Click Update/Publish and you now have a working course onto which students can enrol.

 

How To Create Your First Course in LearnDash:

you’re ready to create your first course in LearnDash.

To do that, go to LearnDash LMS → Courses. Then, click the Add your first Course button to create your course:

 

Give your course a name and description.

Then, go to the Builder tab to set up your course’s content, including sections, lessons, and quizzes:

 

If you hover over an individual lesson, you’ll see an Edit link, which will open a new page where you can add lesson content and configure other settings:

In the main course settings, you can also go to the Settings tab to configure a variety of other settings. Specifically, you’ll want to make its Access Mode equal to Closed for now. Later in the tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up your payment gateway so that you can start charging for your course:

 

How to Setup LearnDash – Summary

I’ve only had time to touch on the absolute basics of setting up a LearnDash course in this article. There are TONS of options available to you but, hopefully this article has given you the basic information needed to get you started which is often the hardest part of setting up a LearnDash LMS. Once you understand the basics, more complex options become clearer.