New online courses are a great excitement for your website visitors and students! Adding new courses are also a great task because it means you get to improve using the feedback you would have received from existing students.
These steps do not help you with “designing” new course slides. If your course materials are not yet ready, you can alway revisit this tutorial later on or you can submit the rough details of the course and let us create them for you. Go to Client Area > Add to my Website > Add Courses .
Creating your first online course
After playing around with and previewing the sample course you created, you’re ready to add a real online course to your site.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to LearnPress > Courses in the left sidebar.
Click on the Add New button at the top.
The next page looks almost identical to the old, non-Gutenberg WordPress editor for posts and pages, so it’s pretty straightforward for anyone who is familiar with WordPress.
1. Enter the name of your course, as well as a description for it. You can also create a course category if you plan on having multiple courses on a given topic.
2. Scroll down until you get to Curriculum, where you can add both sections and lessons to your online course.
Enter a name for your section.
You can think of sections as chapters or parts of your course. Lessons, on the other hand, are where you put all the content for each section.
Using the Select items button, you can connect quizzes and other lessons if you’d like.
3. Find the Course Settings below the Curriculum box. It contains 5 tabs:
- General
- Assessment
- Pricing
- Review Logs
- Author
4. General – In this tab, you can configure the following items:
- Duration
- Maximum number of students
- How many people have taken this course
- Enable whether you’ll let users re-take your course
- If the course is featured or not
- Optionally block lesson content upon course completion
- Set an external link to redirect users when they click the buy button
- Enable course item links if a user cannot view them
5. Assessment – Here you can set how you’d like to evaluate the students. You can choose from the following options:
- Evaluate via lessons
- Evaluate via results of the final quiz
- Evaluate via results of quizzes
- Evaluate via results of quizzes passed
- Evaluate via quizzes
In addition, you can set a percentage for quizzes passed or completed lessons in order for students to complete the course.
6. Pricing – Set the price for your course, and optionally a sale price too. To disable the sale price, simply leave it blank.
7. Review logs – In this tab, you can moderate any course reviews you’ve received.
8. Author – Enter the name of the course instructor here. Please note that you may need to create a WordPress user when adding a new instructor.
Adding lessons and quizzes
Now that you’ve taken care of the basic configuration, you’re ready to add some course content.
In the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard, go to LearnPress > Lessons.
Click the Add New button at the top of the next screen.
This page also looks a lot like the basic WordPress editor, and you can add all sorts of elements to your lesson, including text, images, video, audio and PDF documents. First, give your lesson a name.
Feel free to play around with the different lesson formats, and visually layout your lesson similar to how you would with a blog post. In most cases, the default Standard format will work fine for whatever you need.
Insert images, embedded videos, and other media items in between text and make sure the lesson flows nicely and is easy to read.
PRO TIP: Avoid large blocks of text, and keep paragraphs short (maximum 5 lines or so). Use an assortment of web-optimized images to break up text so that your content is easy to digest.
Default settings for most other items in the editor should be fine, but you want to make sure you uncheck the Preview Lesson checkbox. You would only leave it checked if you want people to be able to preview the lesson content without signing up for the course. This can be helpful for marketing purposes, but it depends on your specific strategy and needs.
Now that you’ve learned how to add lessons to your online course, let’s take a look at adding quizzes.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to LearnPress > Quizzes in the left sidebar.
Click the Add New button at the top of the next screen.
Next, give your quiz a name and enter any relevant instructions.
Then, you can add as many questions (and answers) as you’d like, with the option to choose from true/false or multiple choice formats.
Once you’ve added all of your quiz questions, you can specify General Settings for the quiz.
Here, you can set options for the following:
- Pagination Questions – Choose whether to display questions as an ordered list.
- Review Questions – Select whether students should be able to view questions again after completing the quiz.
- Show Correct Answer – Show the correct answer when reviewing questions.
- Duration – Set the duration of the quiz. Enter 0 to disable the duration completely.
- Minus Points – Specify how many (if any) points are deducted for each incorrect answer.
- Minus For Skip – Choose whether to deduct points for skipped questions.
- Passing Grade (%) – Enter a minimum percentage for a passing grade.
- Re-Take – Let students re-take the quiz or not.
- Show Check Answer – Show a button to let students check the answer while taking the quiz.
- Show Hint – Add a button to show students a hint or not.
Linking lessons and quizzes to the proper courses
Once you’ve created some lessons and/or quizzes, you’ll need to link them to the proper courses.
Go to LearnPress > Courses.
Scroll down until you get to the Curriculum section, then locate the Section where you want to add lessons and/or quizzes.
Click the Select items button.
Choose between the Lesson and Quiz tabs, then locate either the lesson or quiz you wish to add to your course. Finally, click the Add button.
Once you’ve added all lessons and/or quizzes to a given course, you can easily rearrange and organize them as you wish. Simply click the dots on the left of the item you wish to move, then drag it wherever you want.
Once you’ve added all lessons and quizzes to your course, make sure you hit the Update button to save all your changes.
New Courses and the Student Experience
Remember to advise your students (of any amended or updated course) of the new materials. Depending on their course progress, adding new course material can impact their passing grade.
