Crafting an LMS That’s Tailored to Your Company

**[00:00:00]** hello everyone my name is Armando Perez-Carreno and today we're talking about how to tailor an LMS to your particular company and LMS for those who don't know is a learning management system it is a system that you use to provide courses basically so if you provide training for your employees uh for employee on boarding for example or if you sell courses if you're a course creator or even a content creator you want to cell courses that you you use an learn an LMS for that as well and then also a it's it's it's a great tool because you can create a whole series of different experiences by using an LMS and a lot of people don't think about it this way but you could create a whole like Master Class Type experience using an LMS even though it's more of a video streaming service you can use something like D Dash to create something like that because it has the course lesson module structure so what I'm going to explain today is what you can do differently than just out of the box installing an LMS system like LearnDash or Lifter Etc so if you have a company and you are typically training your employees every time someone new comes in you have new hires you want them to go through a certain process you want them to know what the difference um procedures are in your company you want them to know what the values are you want them to understand everything and you don't have time to train everyone well ideally you have a learning management system implemented in your company such that anyone who comes in can take those courses directly and instead of just having a Vimeo account or a uh SharePoint with all the videos if you have a learning management system people can enroll you can enroll people into your courses basically even **[00:02:00]** employees and the difference here is that you can actually track what's going on so you can see how they're progressing which courses they've taken which lessons they're having issues with you can have quizzes so that they can show what they've been learning and then you can have certificates as well if that makes sense we'll talk about that in a little bit and also that you can well get notifications if something's not going well with some people Etc um you can have them retake certain things if they didn't get a certain grade Etc and this is just from the company perspective if you are doing training on boarding Etc there's also the other side where maybe you're a course creator or an educator right you want to provide training in the web space web design space web development you might be an expert in what you do and you might want to teach people maybe there's a very specific Niche that you work with in e-commerce or a very specific Market you want to show people how to to create that sort of thing that you know how to create you're already an expert on well you can record a course on it and then use an LMS to sell that course to people they can subscribe have you can have recurring billing if you want or a onetime fee and then they get access to the course and they can take those materials so it's a it's a great tool overall and it's growing a lot the industry is immense and just growing it really blew up during the covid of course because everyone was at home so the e-learning blew up a lot but it's still growing and and so it's very important to get into the space if you are a web developer designer freelancer agency Etc you might find that many clients are looking for this sort of approach so how do you get a learning management system into to your site if you're using Wordpress where if you're using Wordpress there's many different approaches one of them is using LearnDash we use that a lot there's others **[00:04:00]** like Lifter LMS and they they're similar amongst themselves in the sense that it's basically a plugin that you put on WordPress that gives you added functionality could you do this on your own yeah you could you could just set up a custom post type for courses one for lessons one for topics maybe one for quizzes and you're Off to the Races right but having a full featured LMS gives you the flexibility of already having everything created quiz creator for example which is is a pain to just get it out of the blue but you still have that freedom to enhance it which is what really I want to talk about today how you can take something that's packaged and tailor it to a company's brand or if you're a business how you can get someone to tailor it to your brand which is very important so I'm going to talk about a few issues that I typically see with the people that are using other systems or that maybe have implemented something like LearnDash but that it wasn't properly implemented we talk about that and then we're going to talk about some examples of how you can think outside the box to get an experience that makes sense for your particular users so again for anyone who's just joining we are talking about LMS uh Learning Management systems for your company if you are doing onboarding if you need to do any sort of compliance training where you get your employees they have to take some courses so that you fulfill compliance then this conversation might be interesting to you so let's dive into what issues I typically see when people are using a service that is not aligned with what they're trying to do or when they're using something that wasn't properly implemented to align with their brand the first is I get a lot of clients coming in that need an LMS **[00:06:00]** custom or bespoke elements but the end of the day doesn't have to be built from scratch that's what we're going to see today but their issue is that they're using something like teachable and it sort of locks them into a very specific way of doing things and if they want to get out of that or change that experience to align with their procedures it's a little hard sometimes and so many of them have hit a wall with services like these or even some Enterprise LMS offerings because it it just simply does not align with their specific needs so I'm going to show you what some examples of what I mean of actually getting out of the typical LMS experience while still getting all the added benefits of having an LMS which is tracking student progress right so I'll I'll I'll explain something very basic for example if you just want to get a course out there you're a course creator or you're an expert on something and you just you just want to sell right you want to get some point you want to build a community Etc you don't need necessarily to build something like what we're talking about today you might be better off using school right SK L school is a great platform because you have monthly fee but you set that up and then if you're taking payments on it it's like they're just basically charging you the credit card transaction they're not taking a big cut like udem me or some of these other services well and the platform is great and Q Community Etc so it's it's fantastic so if you're just someone who just wants to get course content out there whether it's free or paid but you don't really care about tracking what people are doing and seeing what what their progress is ETC then that is a great option that didn't exist before that it just works and it's very nice now if in your business's case you actually need more information you need to be able to hold your team's hands uh to say it in a way and and see how they're progressing **[00:08:00]** and see where they're having issues and have logs of course of what's Happening maybe for for compliance reasons Etc then having an LMS makes a little more sense and the great thing is you can do it on WordPress so let's talk about some of the issues that I've seen customers have when maybe they just they already had a platform maybe they somebody installed LearnDash for them maybe they found LearnDash on a Blog and they're like this looks good let me just install it they're that's okay right the problem that we have seen in those cases is that the UI it out of the box isn't the most intuitive so a lot of times their users will get lost they'll find the course page which might just show a bunch of lessons underneath and there's not there's no start lesson immediately right depending on how you set it up of course but that that's something I hear a lot they they come in and what they say is we have this there we have all the courses there all the course content all the lessons all the quizzes but our our employees or our students just don't understand it and they have a very hard time getting to actually use the platform and that happens a lot and so it really depends on who your audience is who's taking these courses and you have to see what they're used to and what they're expecting because if you're doing for example a um website that has educational material but more of uh like physical training or yoga Etc and I'll show you an example in a moment then the experience is a totally different one you want to have a type of playlist right of those courses or lessons you want to be able to to enjoy and consume that content maybe even from a TV not necessarily on on the computer and so it's a whole different experience even though you want the added features that the learning management system provides **[00:10:00]** and so there are times when you want to adjust that experience and just make it clear a a big one with LearnDash in my opinion is the course page itself is sort of a separate thing that sort of floats there and and then if you're using their no distractions mode it got better than what what they had before uh where now it has a sidebar with all the lessons and the content and you can just jump in to take the course but that is very disconnected from the course page in my opinion and the course page is meant to be sort of a description or a teaser or if you will a landing page where people can enroll but from all the clients that I work with they they're not using that as a sales page the course page turns out to be really nothing because they're selling the course via woocommerce or they're selling it another way or they're providing access based on a subscription or they're providing access based on SSO with their third party IDP um there's there's multiple ways people are getting enrolled so they don't necessarily ever think of the course page as as a place as an important place and so when they when students get there because they see the course in their available courses it's it's a weird experience because you just get there and then from there you still have to jump into the lesson and then the the UI changes completely so for some customers we found that it makes more sense to have the course page be actually the same sort of experience as the lesson Pages because that way you are in that sort of space and I'll show you an example in a moment so the whole point here is to show you what can be done if you start thinking outside the box and this is not exclusive to LMS so this could be any other thing that you're building on a WordPress site or any other site where you're getting additional tooling maybe from an add-on and you want to display it in a different way it is possible so if you're a business and somebody tells you no we cannot move just just just think outside the box a little bit even **[00:12:00]** if you are using a tool maybe there's a tool out there that does exactly what you need and it's at the right price and it's very robust and it has very good support then maybe it's worth to use worth it to use the tool but maybe the UI doesn't match what you want well that shouldn't necessarily completely stop you there are many instances where we've been working with clients and all the features are there for something they need or maybe they already had it but just the UI didn't make sense and so we can always build custom views to display the data that this thing is generating so just something to consider if you have any questions by the way during this conversation please just put them in the comments in YouTube LinkedIn uh Instagram X if you want and they should appear here and I'll be happy to answer them as well and if you're a member of our school Community school.com learn you'll also have access to a zoom link that we have active right here so you can ask your questions through there as well all right so I'm going to start sharing make it a little interesting here's something that has happened a lot let me share my screen okay so my Peak challenge great website it is a global movement dedicated to health happiness and giving back that's what teacher says right um it it is a great Community very large community it has a social network within the site it's built on WordPress but it it has social network within the site it has learning management system it has a ton of things within it and as you can see the experience even though it has something like learn Das behind the scenes if you look here you can see this it's more of the experience that you would expect from a video platform right and you could have done this uh just with having custom post types of course but again if you want to keep track of the progress and what people are doing to get to make the platform better then maybe having LMS actually makes **[00:14:00]** sense also it helps for your team if you have editors that are adding content Etc it helps to have something that's structured as an LMS so that people can make those adjustments as they grow so why is this different from a typical LMS well if I go to my dashboard here and I actually go into a course let me jump into uh maybe this one okay so as you can see here there is a video on the left and then you have a bunch of information on the right you have information about the coach you've got the level you've got a description of the course itself and then you have a playlist on the right and actually this wasn't a good example because this course just only has one so let's go into one that has more content maybe activate one yeah has a lot of content all right so we're going to go in here and as you can see you have the playlist here on the side so you can be watching the video and you can have a whole description of all the Reps and exercises Etc at the bottom and then on the side you see the ones that you've completed you can click on any of them and just jump to it and the experience is more of a video platform not something like a typical LMS that you would expect so you can create something like this still using something like LearnDash under the hood but you just use if you're using blocks for example you create custom blocks that generate the video player and that generate the mark complete button and the generate the playlist right so you can create these custom blocks just talking about the block system but you could be using any page builder you want and at at the end of the day as a developer you're just grabbing the data that's already there prepared by this tool in this case the LMS and you're that data is exposed so you can grab it and you can present it in another way which Mak makes more sense to that particular business so **[00:16:00]** that's where it really gets interesting and I think that's where the there's a real separation between someone who just creates websites or uses a page builder to just create websites to someone who tries to make their best to understand the business's needs and then adjusts for that so you're not limited to what the page builder allows you to do or you're not limited to what the plugin allows you to do but but instead you think in terms of what the company needs as a business and then you connect those puzzle pieces together to create an experience that adds a lot of more value so I'm going to jump into another very different example which is more tailored towards the training and certification space so if I go in here so for example for commlink they they have a certification for a certified flight coordinators the people who are on the ground in the com Center dispatching emergency helicopters or emergency Air Service and so very interesting uh market and so in this community it's very different because the experience for learning is more structured and should be managed in that way people should see that structure because it has certification and you have other constraints but you still don't have to fit into the box that something like LearnDash gives you you can provide a custom experience so if I go to my profile for example in here again it's a custom page for the profile for the person when they're logged in and we can see some items are just like a regular course s what you would expect with having course completion Etc that's that's what I was talking about where uh it's important to have some of these features that LMS systems provide because it it'll tell you how how much even to the person how much they've **[00:18:00]** completed when the last activity was Etc so it is it is very convenient to have that especially if you choose a a good tool so like I said LearnDash is very good the UI my opinion isn't the best but you can you can make it uh however you want um Lifter I've heard very very good things I haven't used it in particular but I'm going to be trying it soon to see if if if it aligns more with some of the things we do and there are others out there as well which I can't mention because I I don't have any uh specific experiences with so if you look at I'm going to show you two things here that are very interesting if you look at this little bar up here 20% complete four out of 20 courses this is a good example of something that is there in the database but that is not shown perhaps the way you need it okay oh and by the way uh Rodrigo is saying I used tutor LMS which has recently added AI Studio yes and a lot of these tools now have been adding their AI features which is a good point which allow you to when you're adding course material Etc it allows you to basically generate a course outline or actually generate the whole structure of the blueprint and then work with that or help you with content Etc yesterday I talked with a potential client uh they they were they're doing training in internal training and and they said they tried the AI feature of whatever tool they were using and it didn't didn't do what they were expecting but it's getting there right the AI is getting much better depending on how you implemented in the different tools it'll do well like again yesterday last night I was working on on automation on make.com and I used their AI tool just to see what if it generated exactly what I needed and I told it what I needed and it did that blueprint for the scenario close I mean it it did it similar to **[00:20:00]** what I would have done but this it chose the wrong modules uh maybe a search instead of a list item Etc and so it gets funky sometimes but it's it's getting close and AI really helps us with with u getting things done faster so if we look at this little bar here this is a very interesting one because for their certification people have to take 20 courses all right and it's good for for the user to to see where they are in that progress and so while there is a progress bar in a tool like LearnDash that gives you the progress for that particular course that you're taking considering its lessons topics quizes Etc there isn't one at a category level so what we did here is we created a custom block this one here that will you when you place it you tell it which category you want it to display and so you can say oh I want the certification category because they might have tens of or hundreds of products right so what this block will do is given uh category it will grab all the courses within that category and generate this bar and say what the percentage of completion is for that person for all the courses within that category so it's very practical because you can use it to reference different sections of your Learning Journey if you will so that's that's one thing right or this one the view certificate a little badge thing up here so that's another one it's not a thing that the tool does but you can create a custom block that checks oh did this person do these items complete these particular items and if so they should have this badge which is just a thing that we have based on the featured image and then if so then that means they already have a certificate so why not show it to them here and they can click and view their actual certificate so there's many things you could do where **[00:22:00]** you're you're making these custom blocks custom widgets to display information in a different way to make it align with with your brand so we saw we can have something like this totally different experience still using something like LearnDash behind the hood and then something like this where it's more of a structured learning experience right but again it's a custom UI in front of it but you're still in WordPress it you're just making these blocks that do this particular thing and and also it has the benefit that if you're using blocks then you can edit it visually later on if if you build them as blocks and so it's it's a great way to use what's out there and that maybe other people that you're hiring already understand how to use in the back end especially editors for example but at the same time provide a nicer or better experience in the frontend so I was talking about the course and so here for example if I go to aviation weather this is the course page and I'm already here in this experience so from here I can jump into a lesson or a quiz or a topic but if I if I'm at the course level if I click from here to one of the courses it takes me here so I'm already in this experience which is something that I I don't see in the regular experience and so uh this has helped a lot of our clients do something like this because it doesn't have two completely different experiences like the course page being its own thing and then having the no distractions experience over here which is completely different so there's a lot of little tweaks that you can do uh maybe some people like having the certificate here as well maybe they want the completion down here maybe they want the previous and next buttons like there's another thing we talked about yesterday as well with this other client they had the exact same issue as as one of our existing clients which was if you use something like LearnDash **[00:24:00]** sometimes since you can have uh courses lessons topics quizzes Etc when you're in a lesson for example the button that says next instead of just saying next which would take you to the next thing whatever it is it says next lesson but then you go to the next one and maybe it says next topic and then you click on the next one and maybe it says next Quiz but it's very confusing experience for the user because they don't they don't really care that they're going to a quiz or a lesson Etc they they probably just want to continue so having that the way it's labeled might be very confusing depending on what that market is and so we've had requests to change that many times and so there's ways to do it and this doesn't involve code in some instances depending on what how the platform is built but you can get it to just say next and previous to make it a lot simpler so there's ways to and again if you're a freelancer or an agency or um someone who's in this space and a client reaches out to you and they're saying well I have this learning management system and I we want to make it look better don't get overwhelmed uh don't don't just mark it off as something that oh no let's just build something else or let's build something from scratch not necessarily we've gotten clients that come in with an LMS already installed with thousands of lessons within courses and topics and it would be a nightmare to recreate everything but but they already have everything in the database and they're already using a tool that's robust so why don't we just skin it right why don't we change the interface and that's what we've done with a lot of these we we come in we duplicate the site and then we recreate we create another theme for it and then we create custom blocks for it and and we get this experience looking exactly as they needed because the database wasn't bad the core structure was okay it was just that it the way the UI is built in that specific LMS might be a little clunky but that's **[00:26:00]** not stopping you from having or providing an excellent experience for your users you can simply display it in a different way and I mean correct me if I'm wrong but I think that's one of the best things about WordPress that you have this flexibility of keeping the model right all the database and you have custom post types and you have taxonomies and you have the whole CMS an experience for people to modify things in the back end but then in the front end you can display them any way you want so you're not limited you could even take it further and create a headless WordPress if you wanted to which means you build a whole like a whole react based experience for example and you don't need to use the block editor or anything like that if you don't want to there's many many ways to do this I mean if if you're if you're trying to compare with other platforms like uh if you're doing e-commerce and you go and you see what Shopify plus is doing yeah Shopify plus is great but they're just using the back end and then the front end has to be a custom built interface right so you could do the same thing here if that's what your company needs but in most cases you'll probably be fine by using what WordPress has either their block based system which works great needs a little uh tweaks it's going it's coming along great but uh it's growing and or you could use something like bricks we were talking about Kevin Geary um a couple of days ago and it's there are page Builders are actually very good I here break is fantastic so if you want to use something like that that's fine too you can use that use the data that you already have in the system to make it better so you don't have to always recreate or redesign completely the structure of the site maybe it's just the front end that you're adjusting so I wanted to share that little bit there and the other thing I wanted to show which also came in as one of the questions I was talking with a client yesterday is can you **[00:28:00]** do more can you do Integrations with third-party tools while keeping what you're doing here I'll give you an example so if we go to this course there is a video very straightforward it's a video coming from Vimeo okay sometimes you use YouTube or or whatever I recommend if you're using if you have a closed platform use Vimeo or Wistia or anything like that because you'll have more control on where it can be embedded and you'll have access to messaging between the platforms Etc I'll explain what I mean in a second but that is a question that comes up often do you use Vimeo or do you use YouTube use Vimeo if you can or Wistia it's fantastic too or even Loom sometimes but Vio works great in in this case for for most scenarios because it has the player which you can theme as you can see we have the little logo here on the right but it also has an API a frontend API and the back end one too but we we'll get into that but the frontend API is great because it allows you to get messaging from the player which means you can do things like force completion of the video so for this example there's a very nice little block that we built that displays the video and it won't let you proceed until you watch it which tools like LearnDash already do however people can always just move forward unless you disable the play bar but then if you disable the play bar then you don't have the play button it's just inconvenient to disable the play bar or the or the timeline all together in my opinion because that's the the quickest hack right you just oh just get rid of the the tracking bar yeah you can but then what if they genuinely want to go back and then go forward again so what we did was create a little custom block block that will lock people from going any further than **[00:30:00]** they've ever gone so if I'm here and I try to go through three minutes it won't let me however if I'm watching and I've watched 10 minutes but then I want to go back I can and if I G to go forward I can go back up to those 10 minutes that I've already watched and so it's great because it keeps them engaged they have to actually watch it to be able to proceed to the next step but it still allows them that flexibility of moving back and forth which is something that you do want so it's sort of the best of voice World in my opinion and there there's many more things that you can do of course um remember Vio when you upload a video it gives you an automated transcript so you have that full transcript so if you wanted to you could actually have that link to be displayed within uh the content as it's playing right you can you can have that rolling with time stamps and all that good stuff so you can do a lot of little things with tools like Vimeo and so the other thing you can do is have it where it will hide or show elements on the screen based on what is happening in the player because of that messaging API you can receive messages from the video player and then do something with that so you can create a more enhanced experience if you will U just directly by interfacing with these tools and this applies to videos video players you could do there's some other clients that have like an external quiz service so learn Das for example has has quizzes they're okay for basic quizzes you'll you'll do fine the UI again building it isn't the best using them they're fine but uh building them it's a little clunky but it works but if you want to do more complex quizzes with a lot of crazy conditions and things like that then it they won't cut it but there are third party tools other websites even like exam Builder there's some like that that have all everything you can imagine that that a quiz or examination should be able to have it's very advanced stuff **[00:32:00]** uh very nice but it's another platform so can you integrate it in what you're doing yeah of course you can so you can have it where the lesson when you're building your lesson maybe you have an identifier of whatever quiz you have over there and so it'll show it to the user embedded on the page and again using messaging between the iframe and whatever you're using you can have it tell LearnDash that the person did actually completed the quiz or that they got this particular grade and they can proceed if they got this grade or not Etc so you can you can do a lot of things and you don't have to be constrained to what the platform does that's what I wanted to talk about just make it clear that if you're building an LMS for your company you you're going to do training on boarding for employees or you're going to be selling courses or certifications or anything online having an LMS is great but don't think that you are stuck to what the particular platform does so as long as you're doing using something like WordPress you have full flexibility to create any experience that you want just choose an underlying tool that makes sense based on the features so if LearnDash works for you or Lifter works for you great or tutor or Talent or whatever it's okay if it does what you needed to great now can you make it look how you want it to yes you can if you're a developer designer or you can get someone to do it I mean we could do it for you of course as well so that's what we're talking about today I hope this helps you in uh some way just learn about what is possible so if you are in the business of training if you're selling courses if you are uh providing certifications Etc um you can create something like this you can reach out to us via Twitter uh if you want LinkedIn and uh or if you're learning about this stuff if you want to see how to create these sorts of platforms then join our community school.com SK l.com learn you can join our word Community **[00:34:00]** there and we we have some courses as well where where you can learn that's free by the way so thank you everyone for joining us today and I'll see you in the next one