In this post, you’ll find my LearnDash Cloud review and you will learn step-by-step how to create courses. My goal here is to shorten your learning curve!
You will know what exactly Learndash offers and how the pricing plans compare for the WordPress LMS plugin by Learndash and the cloud solution.
Are you finally ready to take the next step in your business and you are thinking of creating an online course? Or maybe you want a side hustle and you have something you are passionate about. If so, why not teach others about your knowledge while making money at the same time by making online courses?
In our day and age, online learning is in very high demand. Traditional educational institutions lose their positions and status with more people choosing to get practical skills from online courses.
With that said, let me guide you through the first step of online courses: finding a platform where you can share or post your online course. In this post, I will talk about my review of LearnDash Cloud and if you should use it as a platform for your online course.
Contents
What Is LearnDash Cloud?
Firstly, LearnDash is a trusted WordPress learning management system (LMS) that is used by a number of companies (small and well-known), universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide for creating and selling their online courses.
If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, the good news is for LearnDash you won’t need to learn yet another platform, you can simply create your course in the WordPress interface.
With just a few clicks within a few minutes, you can already create, publish, and sell courses, track user progress, give out certificates, award points & badges, create a community, and so much more!
What do I like about LearnDash Cloud?
- It’s an all-in-one solution that includes hosting for your course, beautiful premium templates, and customization tools and all of it works on WordPress.
- All of this comes at a very affordable LearnDash pricing and a monthly fee of $29. You can choose to pay $24/mo, which is $299 when billed annually. It is a really good price compared to many other online course software products!
- You don’t have to worry about domain and stressful tasks like daily maintenance. You can focus on selling your courses and LearnDash will take care of other activities.
- Get all the features that a course creator might need, even very advanced features such as drag-and-drop course builder, advanced quizzing, challenge exams, certificate builder, coupons, and more!
Should you use LearnDash cloud or LearnDash plugin?
Now, you probably noticed there is an option to use just the Learndash Plugin which has a yearly fee of $199 for 1 website. So, how do you choose what will work best for you – the plugin or Learndash Cloud option?
The decision depends on your specific needs and your experience with building WordPress sites.
LearnDash Cloud offers a fully managed hosting solution that takes care of all the technical aspects of setting up and maintaining your LMS website.
It helps you create your WordPress website with just a few clicks, managing your domain, hosting, and website updates.
On the other hand, the LearnDash plugin is a self-hosted solution that allows you to install the plugin on your own website.
This requires you to handle the technical aspects of setting up and maintaining your website yourself.
Ultimately, both options offer the same features and capabilities in terms of online courses, it’s just a matter of whether you want LearnDash to handle the technical aspects of your LMS website or if you want to handle them yourself.
Otherwise, if you are a beginner in course making and just want to focus on making the course content and not much with the technical aspects, then I do recommend LearnDash Cloud.
How to Create an Online Course – Step-by-Step LearnDash Cloud Tutorial
Are you ready to start making your own LearnDash course? In this section, I will teach you how to get started with LearnDash and how to create your online course with the features that you need – step by step.
Step #1. Choose the Topic of your Course
I assume since you want to start on course creation, you are an expert in a certain industry and are willing to share your knowledge or experience with others.
The only thing I think it’s important to tell you here is that you shouldn’t get stuck on competitor research and shouldn’t think if there are many courses on your topic already, you are too late to create yours.
On the contrary, if you see a lot of courses in your niche, that means there is demand and people need this information.
You are different than other experts, and your teaching style is unique, so you shouldn’t give up on your course even if you find similar courses on the market.
Just be yourself and you’ll find a lot of people in our globalized world who will identify better with you and will want to learn from you.
Step #2. Make the Course Outline
Usually, a course structure looks something like this:
Introduction (Welcome video) – it’s a short video that will help students understand how to navigate through your course.
Then you have modules and under each module you have lessons.
Module 1
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Lesson 1
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Lesson 2
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Lesson 3
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Lesson 4
Module 2
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Lesson 1
-
Lesson 2
-
Lesson 3
Module 3… and so on.
Step #3. Choose the Format of the Lessons
In most cases these days people expect video lessons and tutorials inside a course. When a course consists of only text and PDFs, it makes the course similar to an eBook and as you can imagine, eBooks are usually in a lower price range than online courses.
So usually what you want to do is make your main content in the video format but add complimentary materials in PDF and text.
If you are worried about recording video, for many course topics it can be something very low-key where all you need is your laptop with a decent microphone attached and a web camera or you could even stick to the camera you already have in your laptop.
You see, for many online courses these days you’ll simply create presentation slides and share them while showing your face in a small window. And for other courses, you might need to share your screen and recording while explaining what you do.
Step #4. Setup your Course Platform
Now that you have a high-level understanding of your first steps, you will now have to set up your course using LearnDash Cloud.
It’s an all-in-one solution that includes hosting for your course, other features and integrations including beautiful premium templates, and customization tools that all work on WordPress!
Here are some LearnDash features that will improve your learning environment:
- Drag & Drop Course Builder
- Course creation wizard
- Advanced Quizzing
- Focus mode
- Challenge Exams
- Certificate Builder
- Coupons
- and so much more!
Setup your first course with LearnDash: Tutorial
After buying a payment plan from LearnDash and confirming your account, you will be able to see your My Account page.
In there, you will be able to see your site or blog. Click the Visit Admin button to go to the WordPress login page. And then go back to the LearnDash Page and click Show Site Creds.
LearnDash will automatically generate a username and password for you.
You will then be redirected to a page where you can write your username and password. Click next after writing the needed information and you will be able to set your site name, logo, and all the necessary details you need.
Next, you will then choose the type and number of courses you want to create.
After that, you will choose your payment method either with Stripe or Woocommerce. LearnDash Integrates with PayPal as well.
After all the technicalities are done, you will be redirected to your LearnDash Course builder where you can start designing your site with a starter template. You will be presented with various ready-made templates to make the process easier.
You will also be given the option to customize your fonts and other design aspects.
It is also good to know that LearnDash Cloud includes access to Kadence theme page builder which is known to have a very easy and beautiful drag-and-drop WordPress theme collection.
Now, to create your first course, click LearnDash LMS button on the left side of your dashboard, then you will see there Courses.
One of the features of LearnDash that I really like is the Create from Video Playlist which is an easy and fast way to create a course, especially good for free courses to collect email leads. You can just add a URL from your video playlist and it allows you to create a course from your Youtube playlist.
Here’s how your course outline should look like once you click on the course you just created and click on Builder. You can separate the lessons of your course by Module or by sections by clicking the New Section Heading option at the bottom of the page.
To create a course from scratch, just click Add New at the top part of your dashboard and it will start the course creation process.
You can then add new lessons, modules, and sections on the Course Builder page.
If you look at the Settings page, you can change how your students or viewers can get access to the course, the payment options, course certificates, and more.
My overall LearnDash Cloud Review: Is it worth it?
LearnDash gives users who do not have any experience in course creation a chance to create their own courses very easily. And because of this and the endless helpful features the platform brings, LearnDash is definitely worth it.
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.