Online education and training have become essential for course creators, educators, and coaches. Delivering quality learning experiences and managing courses effectively can make or break your online teaching journey. While WordPress offers flexibility, finding the right tool to build and manage courses seamlessly can be a challenge. That’s where our WP Courseware review comes in.
Let’s explore how WP Courseware, a WordPress Learning Management System, can transform your site from just another platform into an engaging, interactive learning hub that students and instructors love.
An Introduction to WP Courseware
WP Courseware is designed to make online course creation effortless and accessible for all. With its intuitive course builder, you can create and manage your course from a single screen.
It shines when it comes to integrations, seamlessly connecting with popular WordPress membership and e-commerce plugins, as well as email marketing services. Additional integrations, such as GrassBlade, enable you to incorporate and host advanced content formats like HTML5, xAPI, cmi5, and SCORM directly into your course.
One of the standout features is that WP Courseware functions as an all-in-one solution. With built-in payment gateways, shopping cart checkout, and membership capabilities, you won’t need additional plugins. It’s truly a business-in-a-box for online educators.
In terms of value, as we’ll see later on in this review, WP Courseware is competitively priced. When compared to other popular LMS solutions, the extensive features included out of the box make it a standout choice.
Getting Familiar with WP Courseware
When it comes to your user experience as the course creator, WP Courseware shines by offering a straightforward and efficient platform that caters to both the average WordPress user and experienced web developers.
Whether you’re new to online course creation or a seasoned pro, I found its approach to be quite intuitive and easy to navigate, making the learning curve smoother than I expected. Creating, managing, and delivering online courses becomes a seamless and hassle-free process, empowering you to focus on what truly matters: providing high-quality content and engaging with your students.
The one-page course builder is the primary screen where you will do things like:
- Create the course outline
- Add course content like modules, units and quizzes
- Set up the payment options
- Manage email and onscreen notifications
- Add certificates and achievements
- Determine prerequisites for course entry
- Create course bundles
- Add an expiration date to the course
WP Courseware also includes a few shortcodes that allow you to display a course outline, enrollment button, and a course progress bar, making it easier to design your site the way you want.
How WP Courseware Can Enhance Student Engagement
WP Courseware offers a range of powerful features designed to enrich the learning experience and drive student success. Here’s how you can leverage its key features to keep your students motivated and engaged throughout their learning journey.
Certificates of Completion
Reward your students with certificates upon finishing a course to inspire motivation and foster a sense of achievement. WP Courseware provides three customizable certificate templates that you can tailor to align with your brand and course design.
Integrated Payment Gateways
WP Courseware simplifies payment collection by including PayPal Standard and Stripe as built-in gateways. These two popular systems hold a combined market share of 75%, ensuring you have access to reliable and widespread payment solutions that cover the majority of your users’ preferences.
Having these integrations built-in means you don’t need to rely on another third-party integration to start getting paid.
Membership Capabilities
The membership functionality ties directly to course enrollment, allowing you to secure pages and posts, making them accessible only to enrolled students. This ensures that exclusive content is protected and accessible solely to your learning community.
Quizzes, Surveys, and Gamification
The quiz and survey features in WP Courseware are comprehensive. Chose between blocking and non-blocking quizzes and leverage seven different question types. You can also add random questions and use tag-based question blocks for a more tailored experience for your students.
Surveys give you the option to receive valuable feedback and engage with your students throughout the course duration. This is key to optimizing your course’s success over time.
Taking it a step further, you can boost engagement with WP Courseware’s built-in gamification elements. Award points and badges for completed tasks and display a leaderboard to create a competitive yet motivating learning environment that keeps students involved and striving for progress.
Drip Content Functionality
Maintain your students’ interest and encourage information retention by using the drip content feature. You can release course content based on calendar dates or specific intervals after enrolment, helping your students to absorb material in manageable chunks and stay engaged over time.
Instructor Role Management
WP Courseware makes multi-instructor management seamless by allowing assigned instructors to fully control their courses. This supports a scalable and collaborative teaching model where each instructor on your site can independently manage their content and student interactions.
The one limitation here is that there can only be one instructor assigned to each course.
Course Notes for Students
Lastly, you can enhance the learning experience by enabling students to take and save notes within any course unit. Students can easily revisit their notes throughout the course, fostering better retention and understanding of the material.
These features collectively make WP Courseware a powerful tool for creating an interactive, effective, and motivating e-learning platform that will keep your students coming back.
How to Set Up an Online Course in 10 Steps
We’ve seen what WP Courseware offers you as the course creator as well as your students. Now let’s take a closer look at what it’s like to build out your platform.
Creating a new course requires minimal setup and configuration. Once you’ve purchased a WP Courseware license, installed the plugin, and activated it, there are only 8 steps to follow.
Creating a Course
Start by navigating to the course dashboard and clicking “Add New.” This initial step sets the foundation for the course-building process, giving you access to the intuitive one-page course builder that simplifies the setup from start to finish.
Whether you’re building a detailed training program or a simple workshop, this screen becomes your central hub where every element of your course comes to life.
The course screen provides an easy-to-navigate interface designed to streamline the course creation process. You don’t need extensive technical know-how to get started, just a clear plan for your content.
To kick things off, a compelling course title is essential as it’s the first thing potential students will see. In WP Courseware, the process of titling your course is straightforward: enter the name into the designated field.
Take a moment to craft a title that not only accurately represents the course content but also engages your target audience. Consider using keywords that resonate with what your students are searching for to enhance discoverability and attract more learners.
A clear, engaging title can set your course apart from others. It provides context and helps students quickly understand what they will gain from enrolling. WP Courseware allows you to edit this title at any time, giving you the flexibility to refine it as needed based on feedback or to better align with your brand’s messaging.
Adding Modules
Modules form the backbone of your course structure, organizing your content into cohesive sections. To add your first module, simply click the “Add Module” button, give it a descriptive title, and fill out the module’s details in the description box.
This initial setup is crucial for breaking down your course into manageable segments, allowing students to digest the material more effectively and progress logically through the content.
Each module can be thought of as a chapter in a book or a key lesson in a course. Including a clear title and description helps set the expectations for what students will learn, making navigation easier and more intuitive.
Expand the Module with Units
Once your module is in place, it’s time to add the core instructional content by creating units within the module. Expand the module you just created and click the “Add Unit” button.
Units are where the detailed lessons, resources, and multimedia content are added. Here, you can enter a title for each unit and populate it with course material, such as text, videos, images, or quizzes, to engage students and facilitate learning.
Each unit acts as a focused lesson or segment within the broader module. This segmentation helps students follow the course in a logical, step-by-step manner. The units can also be reordered or edited easily, providing flexibility to adjust content as you refine the course. This feature makes it simple to update or expand on topics as feedback is gathered or as new content becomes available.
Rinse and Repeat
Building a comprehensive course often requires repeating the process of adding modules and units until all the content is in place. This iterative approach allows you to lay out the entire curriculum, ensuring that each topic flows naturally into the next.
The flexibility of WP Courseware’s course builder means you can continually revisit and tweak modules and units to improve course quality over time. As you build, you can preview your course to see how it will appear to students, allowing you to make adjustments for an optimal user experience.
Give Your Course a Description
Providing a detailed course description is crucial for setting expectations and giving potential students insight into what the course entails. In the Course Settings area, you can add this description, outlining key learning objectives, target audience, and any prerequisites.
Remember that a well-crafted description can serve as a persuasive tool to attract more students, emphasizing the course’s value and unique offerings. It also plays a role in marketing, as it often appears on landing pages and promotional materials.
Chose a Payment Type or Make the Course Free
Monetization options are essential if you aim to generate revenue from your courses. WP Courseware simplifies this by offering built-in payment gateway integration with popular options like PayPal and Stripe.
In the Course Settings area, you can select whether the course will be paid or offered for free. This choice impacts your marketing strategy and how you present the course to your audience.
For paid courses, you can set pricing structures, create discount codes, and manage transactions. If you opt to offer the course for free, you can attract a wider range of learners and potentially upsell them to premium courses later.
Add a Certificate
Certificates of completion add value by recognizing students’ efforts and achievements. You have the option to include a certificate for students who finish your course. These certificates are fully customizable, allowing you to add branding elements such as logos, personalized text, and unique designs that align with your course theme.
Offering certificates can boost course completion rates, as they provide tangible recognition that motivates students to finish what they start. Whether learners are using the certificate for professional purposes or personal milestones, this added feature can make your course more attractive and increase overall satisfaction.
That’s It, Click Publish
After completing the steps above, your course is ready to go live. Click the “Publish” button and your course becomes available to your students. This final step is both exciting and crucial, as it marks the culmination of your hard work and planning.
Once published, students can start enrolling and interacting with the content you’ve created. Going forward, any changes or updates to the course can be made post-publication. This ensures that you have the flexibility to refine your course based on student feedback or to add new content over time.
With your course now live, you can focus on engaging with your students and providing them with an excellent learning experience.
There’s a lot more you can configure, such as quizzes, onscreen messages, emails, achievements, prerequisites, bundles, course expiration and so on. The one-page-course-builder makes it super easy to add as many of those elements to your course as you see fit.
The Student Experience
Course Outline
The Student Account page comes complete with a course outline for all courses they are enrolled into. There is an optional shortcode for course outlines incase you want to build out your own page. Students can view their progress, quiz grades and overall grade.
Achievements
The Student Account page also displays students awards and points they’ve received by completing units, quizzes, modules and courses.
Course Units
The course units are where the course content lives. Students can progress through units sequentially or openly, depending on how you have configured the course. Once the student consumes the content they can click the “Mark as Completed” button at the bottom.
Quizzes
Quizzes are the perfect vehicle to encourage student engagement. Students can have the option to retake depending on how you’ve configured the quiz. You can also award students points and badges for quiz completion as well.
Certificates
Upon completing the course your students can be rewarded with the downloadable PDF certificate you would have designed for them as a confirmation of their achievement.
Real User Feedback on WP Courseware
WP Courseware has gained some great reviews from its users with many focused on its ease of use and robust features. Many users particularly appreciate the intuitive interface, allowing them to quickly get started with creating and selling their online courses.
You can take a look at the reviews on Capterra which gives them an overall rating of 4.5/5 stars.
Additionally, the customer support provided by the WP Courseware team is frequently mentioned, with users highlighting timely responses and helpful guidance. Overall, users have found WP Courseware to be a reliable and user-friendly platform on which they can build their e-learning businesses.
WP Courseware’s Pricing and Value
WP Courseware offers 3 different pricing options with the only difference being how many WordPress websites you will need to install it on. Each option gives you the full feature-set, making the buying process simple and straightforward.
Each license is good for one year and includes support and updates:
- 2 Site License (Teacher) – $159 / Year
- 10 Site License (Professor – Most Popular) – $199 / Year
- 25 Site License (Guru) – $279 / Year
When considering that you can charge students for your courses, these prices are more than affordable and provide you with a ton of value in return.
WP Courseware’s Support and Resources
WP Courseware has several avenues for accessing support. The fast and quickest way to get support is to access the WP Courseware Knowledge Base. There is also a YouTube channel where you will find tutorials and tips.
If you can’t find your answer there, you can always submit a support request through the Fly Plugins Member Portal. Their team promises to reply in less than 24 hours, except for weekends, which is very fair.
Final Thoughts on WP Courseware
When considering a WordPress LMS solution, WP Courseware stands out as a great choice for educators, course creators, and businesses seeking a robust and user-friendly platform.
With its intuitive interface, and comprehensive features such as drip content scheduling, grade book management, quiz builder, membership and flexible payment options, WP Courseware offers a robust yet simple solution for creating engaging and impactful online courses.
WP Courseware was engineered to be accessible to both novice users and experienced web developers, empowering you to effortlessly build, manage, and deliver high-quality courses that drive student success and engagement.
As their team stats, choosing WP Courseware is like purchasing an e-learning business-in-a-box. You have practically everything you need in one simple solution.
