5 Steps to Create an Online Course with WordPress — RadiusTheme

Have you ever taken any courses online? If it was a quality one, it must’ve offered incredible flexibility and seamlessness that made the experience enjoyable. You, too, can learn how to create an online course with WordPress with all the idiosyncratic elements of an excellent course.

Not only is it a profitable venture, but it also lets you share your specialized expertise in your particular field with other people. Surprisingly, you don’t need much, especially with WordPress. You only need a small investment and no technical experience or knowledge in writing web code.

Whatever the niche you want to instruct people on, you only need to follow a few steps to creating your own course. This guide is here to provide those steps.

Step 1: Set up Your WordPress Website

WordPress is a clear winner when it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS) for your website. It powers more than one-third of the entire world’s websites. People prefer it because it has so many themes, plugins, and add-ons that make it easy to use, even for web coding novices. Additionally, they boost the functionality of your website at little to no cost. Here is how you’ll create your learning management system (LMS) with WordPress.

Choose a Domain Name

A domain name is a name that will appear in the links to your website and its pages. People will need to remember it as your site gains popularity. Therefore, choose a name that is brief and easy to recall.

Choose the extension that ends your domain name. You can go with .com or.org, for instance, or you can choose an extension that restricts your website to a particular country, such as .au for Australia. However, that restriction implies that only people in that country can easily find and enjoy your content.

You should then register your domain name with a domain registrar, or your host. The best domain registrars include GoDaddy and Namecheap.

Choose a Host and Hosting Plan

It would help if you were careful not to rush your selection of a web host. It would be best if you settled for one with the best plan possibilities, support, and uptime. Some of the host providers you should consider are Sitegroud, A2 Hosting, and HostGator.

You have to pay a small fee for these services, but some of the plans are very enticing. Some plans will even give you a preinstalled WordPress version. Other services include the provision of automatic backup and restoration services for your site. These services mean that your host would restore your website with all its plugins, add-ons, pages, formatting, and content if anything were to happen to your site. The hosting plans with WordPress installations already have speed and security performance optimizations.

Step 2: Use LearnPress to Create Your Course

What You Get With LearnPress

LearnPress is the best plugin for the creation of online courses, and it works seamlessly with Eikra. This plugin allows you to do it smoothly if you want to manage your learning management system as multiple sites.

LearnPress is responsible for helping you create courses easily with an excellent user interface that has all the options you need. This plugin gives you all the tools you need to do if you want to create an entire curriculum, edit, and maintain it. What’s more, if you have a course on one website, the LearnPress Import/Export addon enables you to import or export the course to a different one.

You can sell courses you create with the plugin quickly since it supports multiple billing methods, such as PayPal, WooCommerce, and Stripe, among others. However, the plugin grants priority to a few payment methods, including Authorize.net, 2Checkout, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, Dwolla, Braintree, Samurai by FreeFighters, and WePay. LearnPress also supports commissions for the various payment methods that it supports. Furthermore, your learners can also make group payments if they want.

Since LearnPress supports BuddyPress, you can communicate with your students and instructors on a WordPress forum. This correspondence makes learning more interactive, engaging, and fun. Furthermore, with students expressing their views and giving feedback, you can improve your curriculum to enhance delivery and effectiveness.

LearnPress comes with many extra addons that offer additional features so that your learning management system can be more wholesome. One of these addons is the LearnPress Wishlist that allows your students to add the courses they fancy to a wishlist. The LearnPress Course Review allows the enrolled students to leave reviews for the courses they’re taking; these reviews can go into your testimonials to get the attention of prospective students.

The plugin facilitates the creation, editing, and management of events. Your instructors can share the grades they give the students straightforwardly with the students. LearnPress allows them to allocate badges of merit to the students who perform exceptionally. You can even showcase students’ ranks on the website if you want. If some students fail a test, the instructor can reset a quiz manually for a retake examination. Creating quizzes from random questions is super-easy with the LearnPress Question Bank.

LearnPress allows you to hold lessons where learners or instructors can make presentations. Each lesson has attachment restrictions, which the instructor can set. When students enroll in a particular lesson, you can view them all easily. LearnPress has a “No Distraction” mode, which comes in handy when holding quizzes and lessons. Your learners can leave reports and feedback for questions, quizzes, and lessons in which they need clarification or have comments. If you (the site admin) wants to communicate with an instructor, you can comfortably send them a private message.

The LearnPress Fill in Blank addon enables your website to support questions that ask your learners to fill in blank spaces with appropriate responses. LearnPress comes out of the box with ready translations for English, French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, and Dutch. However, you can translate it into any other language you want since it is fully translatable.

Step 3: Two way of using LearnPress

Firstly, entails going to your WordPress dashboard and searching for the plugin before installing it and configuring it to your site. You will still have a few difficulties creating, customizing, and using your website.

To solve these difficulties, you can take out; install a top-quality education WordPress theme, such as Eikra, that comes with a pre-installation of LearnPress. Furthermore, Eikra allows you to customize and use your site more straightforwardly

Eikra Education Wordprss Theme

Eikra saves you the trouble of having to create pages from scratch. It comes with 12 beautiful single and multi-page homepage demos. They are perfect for stellar landing pages that make your site even more stunning. The clean layout gives your users and visitors easy access to your site and your call-to-action buttons.

Eikra also grants you access to many more elements with countless variations so that the pages you end up with are attractive and unique. The theme offers you choices from 7 header styles, which can take more than 20 variations. You can customize these dynamic headers to reflect your brand as you also include various elements to make them more functional. What’s more, Eikra also provides 4 top bar layouts for a more exceptional look.

To make your platform holistic, Eikra also gives you 3 course layouts with which you can display your courses uniquely and with details. Instead of merely having the instructors’ names to your courses on your course pages, you can have dedicated pages with 3 layout options. When students are pleased with your services and want to leave reviews, you can take advantage of that by displaying their comments in the testimonial page. This page comes with 2 layout possibilities. If you created your site as a comprehensive institution, you’d need to showcase institutional events; Eikra offers you 2 event layouts. If you have research to display, you can utilize the 3 research layouts that come with the theme.

Apart from the pages, Eikra has a lot more to offer your website. Rather than clicking on elements for options to add them to your pages, you can drag and drop them onto the sections you want. Eikra manages this by having the most famous drag & drop page builder on WordPress, WPBakery Page Builder. This premium addition saves you up to $45 and makes your page building experience more seamless. Additionally, Eikra offers a robust premium slider, Layer Slider, at no extra cost. This $22 slider allows you to display your courses, images, and any other stuff captivatingly on your pages.

If you want to make changes to your website, you can rely on the Child Theme that comes with Eikra to secure your site. You can edit your website while retaining its previous versions and mitigating its susceptibility to hacking and viruses. The powerful Admin Panel by Redux gives you the easiest access to your entire site too. You can enjoy an unmatchable experience with the Live Customizer and Theme Options that allow you to customize your website extensively as you view live previews of your work. The detailed documentation that Eikra provides helps you out if you encounter difficulties using the theme. Additionally, friendly and dedicated support is available online for 15 hours daily.

Every respectable institution has a color with which its brand is associated. Likewise, you can choose a color for your brand from the unlimited color combinations that come with Eikra. With access to the Google Web Fonts, you can also write pages in elegant, professional, and readable fonts of your choice. If you want to have a website that offers access to people using different languages, you can make it a multilanguage platform. Eikra is WPML translation ready with pot files included. It even supports RTL languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Don’t worry about the accessibility of your site by your visitors and users; Eikra is mobile-friendly, fully responsive, and supports all modern browsers. The first two qualities enable your website to display beautiful versions of your site on all sizes of devices, from handheld to big desktop screens. Eikra is also Retina ready so that your visitors can view stunning images on your education website from high-resolution devices.

Find the LearnPress section on your dashboard and click on it before setting up your details. You can include your currency information — the currencies that you accept on your site. Rather than create your pages, Eikra offers all the pages that an LMS website could need. All you have to do is customize their contents to match your — and your brand’s — needs.

You can use the “payment” tab to choose whether you want to receive money directly from your site. This choice prompts a shopping cart on your pages with which users can quickly buy your courses. You can then add the details of the account you want to receive the money. You can key in the PayPal email. You can then activate the emails that go to your students and teachers.

Finally, you can choose to install a sample course, create a new one, visit your site, or go back to your dashboard. Installing a sample course gives you an idea of what the courses you publish will look like. If you went for a stellar education WordPress theme, such as Eikra, you could see live previews of your customization work as you do it.

Step 4: Create an Actual Course

To create a course, go back to your WordPress dashboard, find the LearnPress item, and select courses under it. The next window allows you to select all the details of your course. A setup wizard will appear to help you create the course.

The next part will be the type of currency you want to use. You can select the currency position and the details in which the figures will appear.

LearnPress will then lead you through the choice of course, profile, checkout, and instructor pages. If you’re using Eikra, this part will be a piece of cake.

Next, you’ll choose the PayPal details that’ll enable you to accept payment.

The next section will require you to choose whether to receive emails from your site. You can choose to receive emails or disable the choice later in LearnPress settings too.

You can explore further options after setting up the basic framework of your learning management system. You can choose the name of the course you want to offer, as well as a description of it. If you’re going to offer several courses, some of which will be related, you will want to create categories for your courses.

You will find a curriculum section, from which you can add lessons and sections for your course. You will then see a course settings section with several options. Under the general section, you should select the maximum number of students you want in the course. You should also indicate the length of time for which you want the course to run.

Under the assessment tab, you will need to indicate the mode of student evaluation. For instance, do you want to base your students’ grades on their quiz performances or lesson performances? You will also find a pricing section, where you should indicate the price of the particular cost.

The next tab will be for review logs, which allow you to manage the reviews for the particular cost. These go a long way in convincing visitors on your site to enroll in one of your courses. Finally, the author tab needs you to indicate who the teacher of a particular course will be.

Step 5: Add Quizzes and Lessons

On the LearnPress item on your WordPress dashboard, choose the lessons option. Here, you can provide an audio, video, document, or text media for your lesson. Varying the lesson formats keeps your lessons lively and versatile, and your learners eager and excited. You can even incorporate several media types into one lesson. For instance, a text lesson could have images and documents in between. When you’re through with creating your lesson, click the publish button.

You can then create a new quiz for your lessons. You can add the name of the quiz and the instructions to accompany it, before adding questions with whatever answering method you want. You can offer multiple choices or yes/no and true/false kinds of questions.

In the last sections, you should let your students know what the passing grade for a particular lesson and quiz is.

Step 6: Link the Quizzes and Lessons to the Appropriate Courses

From the LearnPress item on the WordPress dashboard, select the courses option. You can add lessons and quizzes from here, but if you have already created them, you just need to click on the edit item button to find them.

You can then check the live preview to see how your pages look, and go to the frontend of your courses and see if they are correctly configured.

Final Thoughts

Creating online courses could be a profitable venture, especially when people have to stay most of the time indoors or have daily commitments, such as work. They can enroll in your courses when they can. You can utilize the features that come with your theme of choice and add plugins to improve your access to more functionalities. Following this simple set of instructions, you knowhow to create an online course with WordPress.

Originally published at https://www.radiustheme.com on April 14, 2021.