Owners of e-learning websites face a multitude of challenges, but they often overlook the essential concern – attracting and motivating students to enroll in courses. Instead, they tend to fixate on other issues like course content development, student progress monitoring, and ways of increasing student engagement. Of course, all of these are important topics, but without students, none of them matter.
The primary way educational sites attract and gain student enrollments is by creating an extensive, diverse offering of courses. This difficult, time-consuming work is made much easier if multiple teachers can create, teach, maintain, and sell their courses on site.
The Instructor Role plugin for LearnDash, developed by WisdmLabs, makes this possible. This plugin allows instructors to perform all necessary functions, like on the popular educational sites Lynda, Coursera and Udemy, without granting them administrative access to areas of your website.
The plugin will allow others to create their own courses on your LearnDash site (see best LearnDash addons) without having access to WordPress multisite network or administrative settings.
Instructor Role for LearnDash is a plugin that lets the administrator add multiple instructors on an existing LearnDash course website. Instructors can conduct, manage, sell, and create their own courses. However, they cant access the back-end of the website as it retains admin-only access. Plugin makes easier to manage increasing number of students.
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Instructor Role Plugin for LearnDash Review
The Instructor Role plugin for LearnDash makes easier management of the educational site. It allows you, the administrator, to delegate authority to instructors for tasks like new course creation, student management, and answering of student questions.
This frees you from individual class management tasks so that you can devote more time to other parts of growing website. Instructors using this plugin can help you by:
- Quickly creating numerous unique new courses, especially fitting their knowledge base;
- Performing everyday course management functions;
- Being responsible for student course evaluations;
- Providing students with personalized feedback;
- Speed up necessary communication with students.
When you add the Instructor Role plugin to your LearnDash site, a new “instructor” role is created on your LMS (learning management system). Instructors are permitted to create courses and content for their own classes, like lessons, quizzes, tests, and other content, but can’t view or alter the course materials of any other instructor.
For their own courses, instructors can view and approve assignments turned-in by their students, but cannot do these things with students in another instructor’s class. WISDM Instructor plugin for LearnDash has a personalized instructor control panel that helps teachers track student progress in all their created courses.
By enabling Admin customizer in Instructor Role settings, you can customize how the control panel will look. In Admin Customizer, you have four options.
Under Template Management, you can choose the default template or one of three available: Eloquent, Earthly, and Lavender. Under the General Management tab, you have settings for admin menu header, title font, and favicon settings (see how to create favicon for WordPress).
In the Visibility Management tab, you can manage whether to enable the admin theme layouts for admin, instructor, and/or all users. Custom CSS tab provides the option for custom CSS styling to the admin theme layouts.
Now an instructor can get all the basic information about his courses, students, earnings, course reports, etc. in a glance from the instructor overview page.
Using this panel, which displays student progress in the form of a pie chart, teachers can access student reports and information. This multi instructor LearnDash plugin makes setting up and managing multiple courses much easier and less time-consuming. If you are looking for reporting and analysis tool beyond basic reports, check Reports for LearnDash addon.
“Instructors” are permitted to:
- Produce, regulate, and sell their own courses.
- Add content only to their courses, like PDF files, clips, documents, and other course materials.
- Produce, administer, and score only the assignments and tests of students in their classes.
- View reports and statistics for their particular courses only.
- Download their class material to other devices.
- View sales reports for their courses.
“Instructors” are prohibited from:
- Gaining entry into the back-end of the main website, where the dashboard, site statistics, and other parts of the core website are located.
- Accessing anything related to another instructor’s course.
- Accessing information about the students in another instructor’s class.
Ultimately, these permissions and limitations protect the core website from your contributors while allowing them total freedom to develop, manage, and sell their own courses. It gives content creators the freedom they need to create, but not enough to harm your site.
What Features Instructor Role For LearnDash Plugin Offers?
Here are some of the many features that LearnDash Instructor Role plugin provides:
1. Delegates course development tasks to teachers, labeled as “instructors” – enables instructors to develop courses and course content, lessons, quizzes, and certificates automatically or after your approval using a unique dashboard.
2. Course management – assigns course duties to instructors, give certain pre-existing courses to new instructors, and allow others to manage the courses they developed.
3. Limited instructor capabilities – make your core website more secure by limiting instructors’ ability to alter LearnDash’s main settings and prevents them from viewing or interfering with the courses of other instructors.
4. Commission module – allows the administrator to set the commission rate per sold course, for each instructor, and automatically calculates total commissions earned per course sold.
5. Complete administrative control – you have total control over course development, management, and student evaluation with the option to approve changes before being published.
6. Integration with Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) and WooCommerce – instructors can easily sell their courses using these popular WordPress plugins.
7. Create and assign an unlimited number of instructors – create and assign an unlimited number of “instructors” to manage more students or develop new courses.
8. Student course reports – instructors can easily keep track of student educational progress and improve learning using course-specific reports.
9. Immediate email notifications – notifies instructors via email instantly when students complete quizzes and other assignments.
10. Email students directly – through the admin panel, quickly and conveniently inform your students of relevant information or comment on their assignments.
11. Exporting support – instructors can export their course data into a CSV file.
How Instructor Role Plugin Works?
First, make sure you have purchased LearnDash and have it installed and activated. LearnDash needs to be bought from the official LearnDash website. After acquiring and installing the LearnDash, buy the Instructor Role plugin from the official Wisdmlabs website.
Once it is installed, access the “Users” menu from your site admin dashboard and either create new users or edit old ones. Next, assign each one of these users the “Instructor” role.
From then on, whenever an “instructor” logs onto your website, they will be able to start creating courses. If you desire greater control over what instructors can publish, you can check the “Save as Draft” option.
Simply by ticking the “Save as Draft” box, those with the “admin” role can prevent “instructors” from automatically publishing their created courses. You will then be able to personally evaluate each created course and publish only those you approve.
You can also set commission rates per course sold. Afterward, the system will keep a running total of all instructors’ earned commissions. However, since the plugin doesn’t handle payments, you will need another tool to manage that function.
The multi instructor LearnDash plugin, which provides each user with a personalized dashboard, makes it easy for teachers without WordPress experience to use your site conveniently. Also, since the Instructor Role plugin integrates with EDD and WooCommerce, you can easily set sales prices and sell courses.
Plugin ultimately allows you to delegate course content creation, course management, and selling tasks to instructors. This frees you, the administrator, from having to become involved in these activities, which will give you much more time to devote to other work.
Instructor Role Plugin Pricing
WISDM Instructor Role Plugin for LearnDash license is $79/year, or you can get a lifetime license for $199. If you are dissatisfied and want to request a refund, there is fifteen days money-back guarantee for new purchases or renewals.
You can also purchase the Learners Power Pack plan, which consists of Instructor Role plugin, LearnDash Content Cloner addon, Ratings, Reviews and Feedback addon, and the Quiz Reporting Extension.
->With the Ratings, Reviews and Feedback addon, teachers gain access to multiple useful tools and functions. This add-on includes:
- Rating System – Attract prospective student attention by displaying course ratings on the review page. Of course, instructors can pick and choose which ratings they will show there.
- Review System – Allows students to post reviews of courses, which can enhance the reputations of instructors and rapidly increase enrollments. It also gives access to useful student feedback that can be used to improve courses further.
- Feedback System – Get genuine feedback from students and tweak your course accordingly. You can customize the feedback template, send auto-feedback emails, and use feedback forms.
- Restrict Feedback – Allow feedback to be posted only by those students who’ve completed the course.
- Conditional Settings – Use conditional settings to accept reviews. For example, let students submit reviews only on the course or quiz completion.
- Customize Email Templates – Customize emails sent to reflect the styling of your brand and website content.
->The Quiz Reporting Extension allows instructors or administrators to create and evaluate quiz responses, at either the quiz or student levels.
->The Content Cloner addon allows users to clone and edit existing courses. It enables them to replicate course structures and merely modify individual titles and elements to create new classes.
Also, with this addon, instructors can edit courses and course content in bulk. This is an essential time-saving tool for teachers who already have many classes to manage.
Instructor Role Plugin For LearnDash Review Conclusion
LearnDash is a convenient and straightforward learning management system that allows users to create courses quickly. However, administrators operating it need to be familiar with the complexities of the WordPress backend before they can effectively use LearnDash.
Instructors using the WordPress backend isn’t much of a problem for smaller e-learning sites. However, it is for a larger multi-instructor site. In these bigger enterprises, many new instructors are continually being added to the system.
Moreover, these instructors have to be given backend access so that they can create and manage their courses. Some may not know how to use the WordPress backend and will get confused. Others that know how to use it could endanger the security of your main website.
The simple solution to this problem is the Instructor Role plugin for LearnDash, which permits teachers to create courses without giving them access to the backend of the website.
Another beauty of the Instructor Role plugin is how it facilitates a delegation of responsibilities, that maximizes the efficiency and productivity of the growing e-learning website.
It frees administrators from involvement in common everyday course tasks, allowing them to focus on more difficult administrative issues while letting instructors design courses based on their own particular expertise.
The Instructor Role plugin is, therefore, an essential solution. Site managers can quickly and safely add new course providers. In doing so, with relatively little effort, they can exponentially expand their site’s course offerings to meet market demand.
If you need a good LearnDash specific theme, then eLumine, Social Learner, Academy Pro, Astra theme (check Astra theme review), etc. are great choices. If LearnDash is not the right plugin for your needs, then check my Tutor LMS review to see if this alternative suits you better.
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