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Whether it’s learning how to swing a golf club properly or take your web design skills to the next level, online courses have become a popular way for people to advanced in life and their careers without spending too much money. In addition, online learning allows you to do something cool, like invest in cryptocurrency or learn German, all while sitting at home. These video course websites are known to make a considerable amount of money, especially when focused on one niche. If you’re interested in putting your own knowledge online, in the form of online courses, your best bet is to choose from one of the popular WordPress LMS plugins.

An LMS, or learning management system, combines a wide range of features to present a class setting without having the students come into a physical classroom. It all depends on the WordPress LMS plugin you go with, but in general, the tools allow you to create classes, share coursework, enroll students, and evaluate the students with quizzes.

We like WordPress LMS plugins for schools and universities, along with for-profit organizations that want to teach customers how to complete a task or gain further knowledge on a topic. For instance, WP101 is a popular online classroom for teaching folks the basics of WordPress. Lynda.com and Udemy are known for their wide range of topics, while you can also find websites dedicated to just one or two topics.

What’s more is that if you start selling your video courses and materials, you might be able to market them for companies to use for training materials. Our WP101 example before has a wonderful package of beginner WordPress videos that developers could share with newbie clients.

What Are You Looking for in These WordPress LMS Plugins?

We’ve already talked a bit about what a learning management system does, but what features should you be eyeing when researching the plugins?

Let’s explore some of the basic requirements, along with the extras that turn your learning website into something special:

• Course building, with tools for uploading different file types like videos, PDFs, links and other content. It’s important to have a solid course page builder. This way, you plug in your course content to a template and hit the Publish button.
• Course progress information to display to your students how well they are doing. This is important to keep users motivated and to act as a bit of a reward.
• Student enrollment and management for seeing how many people are in your courses and to collect payments based on memberships.
• Content dripping for slowly revealing some of the course materials as students progress.
• Quizzes and tests for students to evaluate how much they’ve absorbed the material. Many schools use quizzes as a way to determine who is qualified for a class, but it’s also a great way to establish benchmarks for when the next portion of content is dripped into the course.
• BuddyPress and bbPress integrations for users to generate student profiles and interact with other students and teachers through chats and forums.
• Financial marketing tools – These come in the form of affiliate programs, commission systems, and coupons. The goal is to convince more people to sign up for your courses by giving out incentives and building word of mouth.
• Automated emails for enhancing the incentives by giving students a more tangible way to see that they’re progressing.
• Excellent payment gateway support to add flexibility to your research process. You often find that one payment gateway might have lower fees or may not be offered in your region.
• Gamification and certificates – These are incentives that pop up whenever a certain activity is completed or when a course is finished. Badges and certificates are often much better than email confirmations, since people can print them out or simply feel good about themselves when something is unlocked.
• Homework options that make the submission and grading process easy. It’s not that hard to send out assignments on most platforms, but are students able to send back assignments without any problems?

The Best WordPress LMS Plugins in 2019

It’s prudent to go through the feature list we outlined above and mark down the elements that are most important to your new course website. If you don’t need some of them, maybe you can save some money by opting for a simpler WordPress LMS plugin as opposed to a full suite. On the other hand, you don’t want to be lacking the right tools once you begin accepting enrollments.

As for the best WordPress LMS plugins, here’s a quick list to get you started:

1. LearnDash
2. Lifter LMS
3. LearnPress
4. CoursePress Pro
5. Sensei
6. WP Courseware
7. Good LMS
8. Namaste! LMS
9. MasterStudy LMS

Feel free to click on those links and learn a little about each one. However, we highly recommend reading further to explore the uses for each WordPress LMS plugin and what features stand out the most.

1. LearnDash

LearnDash is used by many Fortune 500 companies and major universities because of its overall speed, feature set, and impressive online course design. the majority of the must-have features we talked about previously in this article are covered by LearnDash, so I would consider this as a full suite with tools for content dripping, selling courses, rewarding learners, and activating triggers based on actions.

The pricing is set on an annual basis, so it’s fairly affordable in the short term. For instance, you pay $159 for the first year to support one website with all the features available in LearnDash. For a 10-site license that price jumps to $189 per year, with 25-site support sitting at $329. One downside to LearnDash is that there’s no free trial. However, the good news is that you can cancel within 30 days if you don’t like it.

We’ll talk about the key features below, but they are organized into four categories: courses, monetization, administration, and technical. It’s also worth noting that LearnDash is mobile compatible for learning on the go. Also, the customer support is provided by industry leading experts through a sophisticated ticketing system.

The Key Features in This WordPress LMS Plugin

• Includes an option to create multi-tier courses where you break up the courses into more advanced experiences. For example, you may want to have quizzes and different lessons along the way.
• Offers tools for drip feeding your content based on a schedule. You can also add lesson timers to ensure that everyone spends a certain amount of time on each lesson.
• There’s no need to integrate with a forum plugin, since dynamic forums are already built into LearnDash.
• LearnDash shows a gradebook to your students along with course points for whenever a user completes a certain part of the course. This pairs nicely with the certificates and badges.
• Market your courses with several monetization tools like a shopping cart, memberships, subscriptions, course bundles, and course licenses.
• LearnDash has automated email notifications and detailed reporting.
• Allows for user profiles and group management–this is perfect for any group work you would like to assign.
• LearnDash has support for most media types like videos, audio, images, Adobe Captivate files, and Google Docs.
• It’s also multisite enable, just in case you’d like to run LearnDash on a network.
• Let users create their own courses on your WordPress site using the premium Front-End Cour