Whether you’re looking to get started in the digital marketing or business world, there are online courses available to help you launch your career. Online courses are helpful for people and students to level up their lives by spending less of their money to grab a new skill. You could use a video collage as a way to deliver your information to make it interesting. They can learn anytime while staying at their homes. If you’re interested in sharing your knowledge via courses online, it’s essential to choose the right LMS plugin to build a website to sell your courses online and earn money.
LearnPress
LearnPress is the best free LMS plugin for WordPress developed by the company ThimPress. With LearnPress you can build a complete LMS website at a low cost. It minimizes your time in setting up an LMS website. Learnpress offers both free and paid course creation. You can manage courses, quizzes, lessons, questions, orders, etc., Each course includes lessons and quizzes. The free version comes with Paypal payment gateway support.
Here are some features of the LearnPress plugin you need to know:
- LearnPress can work with any WordPress Theme. Also, it offers many themes.
- Lets you create, manage and sell courses.
- BuddyPress Integration.
- Offers more addons to improve the LearnPress website functionality
- Supports many payment gateways like Stripe, Authorize.net, and 2Checkout(but these are all paid extensions)
- Allows multiple instructors to manage a course.
- Includes Badges and Points
- Content dripping, paid membership, and more features are installed as extensions
How to Install and Configure LearnPress
Create a website using WordPress. For creating, you may require a domain name, WordPress hosting, and SSL certificate to safely accept payment. Read our article on how to create a WordPress website. After you completely set up the WordPress site, the next process will be installing the LearnPress plugin. Move to the WordPress admin dashboard → select Plugins → Add New. Search for LearnPress you will find the plugin. Click Install Now and Activate the plugin on your website.
How to set up LearnPress
You can find the setup notification on the Plugins page after you installed it.
Click the ‘Quick Setup’ button to start configuring the plugin.
It will take you to the Welcome to LearnPress page.
Click ‘Run Setup Wizard’. All the steps are not mandatory to continue the plugin setup. So you can skip some steps and configure later when you need to.
Next is static page creation. You can create pages like Courses, Profile, Checkout, Become a Teacher, and Terms Conditions. If the pages haven’t been created click the ‘Create New’ button for pages or select the link given above to create all pages at once.
The next page will be the payment configuration page. LearnPress by default supports the PayPal payment method. If you want to use the PayPal payment method then provide the PayPal emails and choose the currency where the courses will be available.
For other payment gateways, you need to purchase premium add-ons from ThimPress.
That’s it you have completed setting up the LearnPress plugin. The Finish tab will provide buttons like ‘Install demo course’, ‘View Documentation’, ‘Create a new course’, and ‘Back to Dashboard’.
Click any one button to take you to the next action. Select ‘Install demo course’. This will install a sample course on your website. It’ll look like this on the front end of the website.
You can see tabs like Overview, Curriculum, Instructor, and FAQs.
How to create a course in LearnPress
Now you can start to create courses in LearnPress. Visit LearnPress → Courses from the left sidebar of the WordPress dashboard. Click ‘Add New’ beside the Courses.
Enter the Course name, and provide the description. Add categories and tags for the course to group similar courses on the topic.
In the curriculum area, you can add sections and lessons for the course. First, enter the name of the section. You can consider sections as chapters or parts of the course. Also, you can add quizzes inside the section.
Use the ‘Select items’ button at the end of the section to insert existing lessons and quizzes.
Below the curriculum section, you can find the Course Settings. It includes tabs like General, Pricing, Extra Information, Assessment, and Author.
To configure this, refer to the official LearnPress documentation here.
How to Add Lessons and Quizzes
After the course creation, the next thing you have to create is lessons and quizzes. You can add lessons and quizzes separately. Let’s see how to add Lessons in LearnPress first.
Move to ‘LearnPress → Lessons’. Click ‘Add New’ to create a new lesson. Start to create a lesson by adding a lesson name. Similar to blog post creation in WordPress, it’s easy to create lessons. You can add elements like text, images, video, pdf documents, etc.,
Once you add the content make sure the lesson is easily readable which will improve the reader experience. Leave the format to standard as default that will work fine.
In Lesson settings, set the lesson duration and enable the Preview option if you want to let the students view the lesson without taking the course.
Now let’s see how to add quizzes.
Visit Quizzes from the LearnPress menu. Click ‘Add New’ to create a new quiz. Start to add a quiz name and enter other instructions. You can add many questions in the Questions section with the options to choose the questions as True Or False, MultiChoice, Single Choice, and Fill In Blanks.
Once you add the questions, next configure the Quiz Settings. In Quiz Settings, configure the below options:
- Duration: Set the duration for the quiz. Otherwise set 0 to disable the limit.
- Passing Grade: Provide a minimum percentage for the passing grade.
- Instant Check: Enable the option to allow students to review their answers promptly while solving the quiz.
- Negative Marking: Use this feature to deduct the points for wrong answers
- Minus for skip: Choose to deduct points for the skipped questions
- Retake: Set the number value to allow users to retake the quiz
- Pagination: Provide a number value to display the given number of questions on a single page
- Review: Enable to allow students to review this quiz after they complete it.
- Show the correct answer: Choose this option to view the correct answers for the questions while reviewing the quiz.
How to add lessons and quizzes to the courses
You need to connect your lessons and quizzes to the appropriate courses after creating them. For that, visit the Courses page in LearnPress. Navigate to the Curriculum. Inside the section, we usually add lessons and quizzes. At the end of each section, there will be a button called ‘Select items’. Click on it to add already existing lessons and quizzes to the section of the Course.
It will open a small window. On the Lesson tab, select the lessons to add to the course, and on the Quiz tab, select one or multiple quizzes. Click the Add button to insert them into the courses.
Once adding all the lessons and quizzes to the course, click the Update button to save the changes.
Import Export LearnPress LMS website data with CSV Importer
CSV Importer or WP Ultimate CSV Importer is the data importer and exporter plugin for WordPress. To help build your LearnPress website quickly, the plugin will import Courses, Lessons, Quizzes, Questions, and Orders. Now take a look at how to import and export data from the LearnPress plugin.
How to import LearnPress Courses, Lessons, Quizzes, Orders, & Questions
To get started, install both plugins in your WordPress. LearnPress data import export compatibility is added in CSV Importer Free & Pro version. You can download CSV Importer Free here. Get the CSV Importer Premium plugin here. It lets you send Courses, Lessons, Quizzes, Orders, and Questions data to WordPress via CSV or XML files. So prepare the file before import. Visit the plugin page in your WP dashboard. Upload the prepared CSV/XML file. Choose the post type from the dropdown. Post type is lp_course, lp_lesson, lp_quiz, lp_question, or lp_order. Select anyone from the dropdown based on your import.
On the next page, map the CSV headers with WordPress fields. The below screenshot is an example of mapping Course fields.
Afterward, enable the media handling to import or download external images to media.
At last, click the Import button.
Your CSV/XML data will be imported to the LearnPress plugin. You can view the result either by clicking the ‘View Logs’ button shown inside the CSV Importer plugin page or confirm the result directly by checking the pages under the LearnPress menu. For more detailed steps, learn our documentation for importing.
Tip: To get the sample CSV or XML file, create a new course/lesson/.. manually in LearnPress and try exporting them as CSV/XML with the CSV Importer plugin.
How to export data in CSV/XML
Get your LearnPress, Courses, Lessons, Quizzes, Orders, and Questions data backup without any trouble in the form of CSV/XML or other supported file formats. Navigate to Ultimate CSV Importer Free/Pro and select the Export tab.
From the modules list, choose ‘Custom Post’ and from the beside dropdown select the module you want to export. It can be lp_course, lp_lesson, lp_quiz, lp_question or lp_order.
Enter the export file name and apply filters if you need them. Refer to CSV Importer export feature documentation for detailed information.
Click Export and then click Download.
The file will be downloaded to your local computer. Open the downloaded file to verify the result. For instance, you can open and verify the records in a CSV file using any text editor.
Takeaway
LearnPress allows you to build a full-featured LMS site. CSV Importer, in contrast, eases the process by letting you import the content in the CSV/XML file(import in bulk) into the website. Hope this guide is useful for you. Ultimate CSV Importer supports many popular plugins to ease the data import process for WordPress. Check the CSV Importer plugin product page to know more details. Send us an email with any questions or comments you may have about CSV Importer at [email protected].