e-Learning is revolutionizing the learning sector.
It’s a convenient and cost-effective approach, both for students and teachers. With learning management systems, like LearnDash, that have been built on WordPress, e-learning websites have become pretty simple to create.
As a learning administrator, WordPress shields you from technical complexities of running a website, and LearnDash provides you a formidable platform to deliver your course content and manage students. Owing to LearnDash’s popularity, WordPress developers are coming up with LearnDash extensions to further support the teaching process.
ACM: One More Arrow in LearnDash’s Quiver
The Advanced Course Manager plugin for LearnDash (ACM for short) has been built to address one particular course author dilemma – course creation.
While coming up with engaging course content is a challenge in itself, uploading and presenting it is more of an overhead for tutors. ACM overcomes this particular headache by simplifying the entire course creation and management process.
A Detailed Look at ACM
The Advanced Course Manager comes packed with functionality to make course creation ever so easy. You’ve got:
Hierarchical Course View
Opposed to LearnDash’s disparate views of Courses, Lessons, Topics, and Quizzes, ACM offers a glimpse of the entire course structure in a hierarchical order. Lesson order can be changed too with a simple drag and drop option.
Better Student-Teacher Communication Tools
ACM provides a messaging functionality to facilitate student-teacher interaction, but with settings that keep the admin in charge. A conversation tab keeps track of all interactions between course author and student.
Course Resume Option
Students can resume lessons from where they last completed or from the last page visited. Quite convenient when connectivity drops off.
Simplified Student Management
ACM eases student management as well, with one click options to enroll students, allow/block access to course content and delete student progress.
Course Referral Module
Marketing your course made easy! After all, your students can be your best proponents. ACM provides you the option to add referral links in the course summary for students to be able to easy refer the course to others.
The Icing on the ACM Cake
By far the most awesome feature provided by ACM has to be the Visual Course Builder!
With LearnDash course creation happens as follows:
- You create a new course
- You create a lesson and add it to the created course
- You create a topic and add it to the created lesson
- You create a quiz and add it to the course/lesson
- Repeat the above three steps till course content is created
Well, the Visual Course Builder changes all of that. It presents you with a graphical interface that captures the entire course structure.
You can add/remove lessons, topics, quizzes, or choose to edit them using options on a single panel, instead of having to head to each individual section explicitly.
If you’ve got course creation woes, you know it’s because navigation is a pain! ACM along with the Visual Course Builder cuts course creation time drastically!
Wrapping Up
LearnDash, albeit being a super-easy to use a system, misses out on the convenience front, ever-so-slightly if we might say so!
But worry not! Plugins like Advanced Course Manager have got you covered. Priced at $49 for a single site license at $59 for a two-site license, this plugin is a steal! Not only does it simplify course management, but it also speeds up course creation too. You’ve got:
- better course overview,
- improved student-teacher communication,
- quick enrollment options,
- graphical course creation option…. and more
It’s the right kind of productivity boost you need, wouldn’t you agree? We’d like to hear your thoughts, so let’s get this conversation started!
