If you’re impressed with Udemy or Skillshare and want to create your own learning site on WordPress, don’t worry. Learning Management System (LMS) plugins are what you’ve been looking for. A perfect LMS plugin provides everything online course management should include.
In this article, we will introduce to you the 5 top reliable and popular LMS plugins. We’ll also share with you online course experts’ troubles and how they deal with that.
- What’s an LMS Plugin?
- Why Should You Use LMS Plugins?
- 5 Best WordPress LMS Plugins
- Listen From the Experts
- Choose What’s Best For You
What Is an LMS Plugin?
Learning Management System plugins combine a wide range of several features supporting you in presenting a totally different learning experience. The tools assist you in creating training documents, managing courses, grading quizzes, accepting payment, and everything relating to online courses or eLearning.
LMS plugins facilitate a professional learning environment not only for course creators like you but also for online students. Besides delivering content, the plugins make sure students will have the best experience when participating and learning at your course.
Why Should You Use LMS Plugins?
When offering a training website, you need to consider carefully every aspect relating to online learning, including:
- Friendly learning site
- Student login and participant tracking
- Document and exercises sharing
- Video hostings
- Payment tracking
- Online discussion and online quizzes conducting
- And many more
Instead of spending hours or even days on manual admin activities, the LMS plugin comes as a rescue to simplify online learning management.
In addition, LMS plugins are used broadly in a lot of areas and have become an invaluable asset to enterprises and organizations of all sizes and types. Actually, it appears more often than you might think of. For example, you can find it useful for employee training, employee orientation, customer training, partner training, online courses selling, and so on.
5 Best LMS Plugins to Create Online Courses
There are more and more LMS plugins that support WordPress learning websites. The following 5 plugins are the most famous and gain more trust from customers than others.
Let’s take a look at them.
1. LearnDash
LearnDash is so far the most famous and best LMS plugin allowing you to deliver content, sell courses, reward learners, and promote engagement with ease.
This LMS plugin focuses on courses, monetization, administration, and tech.
For course management, it provides a powerful course builder, and different questions and messages customization. The plugin permits you to drip-feed your course content instead of publishing it all at once.
By giving question banks and syncing quizzes and assignments with manual grading, LearnDash makes it easier for you to keep track of learners’ activities.
The plugin offers plenty of monetizing options, from one-time purchases, subscriptions, to memberships, or even course licenses.
However, LearnDash doesn’t have a free version. The pricing for one single site license is about $159.
Still, it’s worth spending. Since the system facilitates you to create a professional learning site with the support of brilliant and effective features, you get your whole pack and a strong basic foundation to develop.
Grade: A+
2. LifterLMS
LifterLMS comes as another powerful LMS plugin for you to create and sell online courses on your WordPress site.
Trusted by over 10,000 WordPress sites, LifterLMS proves an all-in-one solution that every online learning site needs to have. The plugin works well with any coded WordPress theme, popular WordPress page builders, and other well-known plugins like Affiliate WP, Monster Insights, WP Fusion, or GamiPress, the Course Schedule and many more.
LifterLMS gains customer trust by providing a 30-day trial for only $1. Within a month, you can experience the plugin, as well as all the premium add-ons installed. This temporary website will let you learn more about how the plugin and its add-ons work, and make up your mind for further investment.
The most popular pricing plan, Universe Bundle, costs $299 which offers sufficient features for a simple learning site.
Grade: A
3. LearnPress
Loved by nearly 100,000 WordPress sites, LearnPress knows how to mark themself on the WordPress LMS plugins’ map. What makes it so popular?
Instead of setting up wizards just like other WordPress LMS plugins, LearnPress leaves the driving seat for you.
Lessons, assignments, quizzes, and questions creation becomes easier than you might have thought. With a friendly interface, you can make full curriculum layouts and edit or maintain them effortlessly. LearnPress also allows you to export content or import ones from other websites that also run LearnPress.
Besides a long list of free add-ons for extended features, there are also some paid add-ons and themes available for you to level up your E-learning site.
Even though you don’t have to pay for the plugin, you might need to spend a certain amount on other add-ons and support. Plus, not providing a setup wizard can take non-tech savvy a little more time and work.
Grade: A-
4. WP Courseware
This plugin is simple yet powerful and has supported WordPress users for a long time. The University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin have been using WP Courseware for their learning site.
WP Courseware includes a drag-and-drop interface helping the course creation easier than ever. Like most LMS plugins, it lets you create every aspect relating to courses such as documents, quizzes, and assignments.
More interesting, it’s compatible with your video hosting such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia so that you can engage your students with video courses effectively.
Rather than installing a third-party plugin for payments, WP Courseware already gives you some payment options from the core plugins.
WP Courseware stands out in the LMS plugin niche due to the ability to integrate well with a lot of popular plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or OptimizePress.
The Teacher plan which offers one year of support and updates with 2 WordPress Sites, starts at $129. So, if you are looking for something simple and straightforward with an affordable price, WP Courseware is your way to go.
Grade: B+
5. Sensei
The name of this plugin might confuse some of you because it’s not an English word. If you watch karate movies often enough, you might recognize “Sensei” is a Japanese word that describes a teacher in martial arts.
Developed by Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, the plugin understands what users are looking for. By far, this is the easiest solution you can use to navigate and create online learning courses without worrying about coding and integration.
However, Sensei only meets what users need at the basic level. In case you want to put more advanced features to your sites such as content drip, learners management tools, and certificates, you need to purchase additional add-ons.
Sensei lacks some essential features compared to LearnPress’s free version. To monetize your courses, you have to buy the WooCommerce add-ons for $129. But if you already have WooCommerce installed on your site, you can integrate your courses with it easily.
Grade: B
Listen from the Experts
All the plugins above do give you some protection for your courses such as content drip or content separation based on different learner types. However, those are not enough to protect your courses’ files once they are uploaded on the Internet.
As Allen Bolton, who uses one of the LMS plugins to build and sell his courses online has admitted: “We are in the eLearning business and have been looking for a way to protect content for a couple of years.” He’s tried several methods to lock his content from public access, but they didn’t turn out well.
Since you earn money from selling your courses, you must feel terrible if they’re accessed without your consent. Once you cannot control the accessibility of the content, you understand it would be the fastest way to knock down your business.
Protecting your course and any files on your WordPress site is never easy unless you know about Prevent Direct Access Gold.
Prevent Direct Access authorizes you to protect all files uploaded under the WordPress uploads directory. Anybody who has the original links to your protected files, or accesses them through search engines will be redirected to the 404 error page immediately.
Once you set a custom File Access Permission, even if your students share the links to other non-memberships users, they cannot see the content without your permission.
Allan proves he makes the right decision when saying that PDA Gold and its extension “have eased a big pain… we are very happy.”
Choose What’s Best for You
With a list of all the best WordPress LMS plugins that the article provides, you might find what you should install for your learning sites. And remember to create a security wall for your training materials with Prevent Direct Access Pro so that you can develop your online course best.
Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
