Online courses where you can do everything from learning a new language to develop a useful skill or a specific hobby are gaining popularity.
This type of instruction offers users several benefits, such as better access to qualified tutors and reduced costs. It also enables them to attend classes in the comfort of their own home.
If you are a teacher, tutor, or expert in an in-demand field or at a popular activity and are looking to take advantage of this e-learning revolution, developing an educational website is an excellent way for you to monetize your talents and knowledge.
WordPress, the free and open-source content management system, is a useful resource for doing this. It allows you to easily set up, customize, and manage a niche website, whether for personal or commercial use.
Themes and add-ons provide the necessary tools for building a smart, sophisticated, professional-looking site with an impressive range of functionality. They ensure the platform is able to effortlessly handle many of the various tasks involved in running this type of online business.
What is a Learning Management System (LMS)?
A Learning Management System is a software application that equips you with the necessary elements for delivering educational courses online. It also supports you in handling the various administrative aspects that go along with that.
For WordPress, plugins add features and functionality to your website. They are generally tailored towards a specific purpose. For example, some are aimed at setting up an online shop. These include aspects that facilitate running adverts and collecting money. Others, developed for property managers for instance, efficiently deal with bookings.
Learning Management System (LMS) plugins are naturally geared towards setting up and maintaining a suitable e-learning environment with lessons, quizzes, and discussion areas. They provide essential tools for constructing this kind of website, helping users navigate it and aiding you in the day-to-day running of it.
A well-designed LMS plugin will create stylish-looking pages and enable your students to quickly find and easily sign up for classes or courses. It will also allow instructors to track their students’ progress through the course, as well as assisting with collecting payments and handling subscriptions.
How can the MasterStudy LMS plugin help?
When thinking about which LMS plugin to opt for, you need to consider the kind of functionality you are looking for. There is a multitude of options available, all with various features and elements that may be of a greater or lesser benefit to your specific website.
Generally speaking, the free versions of the plugins will be a little more basic in what they offer. However, they should still provide the essential building blocks of the site. On the other hand, the ones you have to pay for will obviously be much more comprehensive. They will likely include more integration options and a greater scope for customization of the pages.
The MasterStudy LMS plugin by StylemixThemes is an excellent choice for anyone looking to build an education-focused site. Powered by WYSIWYG editor, the software, written in Javascript, is easily integrated and ensures rich text editing. The plugin’s key elements are built with Vue.js, which means both faster page loading and smoother transitions.
With MasterStudy LMS, it is simple and hassle-free to build, customize, and manage your online education site. This fully packed plugin has been explicitly designed with e-learning in mind. The straightforward setup and intuitive tools make it easy to navigate and to use, even for someone who is not all that familiar with WordPress.
There are two plugin options: the free one and the pro. When choosing one, you will need to look closely at what aspects each of them offers to ensure you end up with the tools best suited for the website you are looking to create.
What is included in the free version?
The MasterStudy LMS free plugin contains a surprising number of powerful features that can aid you in getting up and running as quickly as possible. Such end-to-end tools include elements for creating lessons, quizzes, profiles, subscriptions, and much more.
The plugin is also fully translation-ready, meaning that you can switch the content of the site to any language you want. This makes your courses accessible to students across the globe and so allows for more enrollments and greater overall earning potential.
Once your website is set up, potential customers will be able to find and view details of the courses on offer in a language that suits them. They will then be able to select the ones they want, pay for them or set them aside for later under the course wishlist, and begin learning all with just a few clicks of the mouse.
You can generate an unlimited number of engaging, interactive classes and courses for your students using the super convenient front-end, drag-and-drop course builder. These can include images, graphs, videos, and additional attachments. The curriculum can be developed step by step to build an overall excellent learning platform.
There are three different formatting options for your lessons: text, video, and slideshow. Using a mixture of these can facilitate the teaching of different skills and also helps make things varied and interesting for your students, keeping them coming back for more.
The ability to create quizzes gives you a way of keeping track of your students’ learning and progress. With MasterStudy LMS, you have the option of multiple-choice questions, match ones, multi-select, and even fill in the gap. So, there is something to suit every kind of topic.
The plugin also lets you randomize the questions, attach media files of different types, set up automated quiz results, enable students to retake the quizzes, and set timers for doing them. This means your content can be perfectly tailored to match both your needs and those of your students.
Extra features of the plugin that boost learning include community and messaging services. You can make course announcements, and your students can talk and share ideas or reach out to a teacher or instructor for additional help as needed. This is further supported by BuddyPress and BBPress integration.
These additional plugins can be used to set up a social networking platform with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, and messaging. They can also be used to add forums to your courses where enrolled students can then view content and post new topics as they wish. Students can also post comments and reviews of the classes they have taken.
MasterStudy additionally facilitates the setup of both teacher and student profiles that enable different access to the site as required. Here students can check course progress, continued paused lessons, view quiz scores, and purchase courses or membership plans.
Payment is also a breeze with the excellent plugin. eCommerce integration means your students can select and pay for their classes directly through the site. It also allows for an extensive range of payment options for greater flexibility that will undoubtedly appeal to your site users. The plugin supports payment via PayPal and Stripe.
You can additionally add features to your site such as membership and subscription plans, a one-time purchase option, and a shopping cart so your customers can easily keep track of the courses they wish to purchase. There is even an option to earn money through affiliate marketing by promoting other people’s products and courses.
The MasterStudy plugin also provides you with originally developed shortcodes meaning you can utilize different elements from the plugin with any of the WordPress themes. This allows for a more considerable amount of customization on your website.
Popular shortcodes include a search box for integrating a smart searching engine into your website, a course carousel or course grid for attractively presenting the available class options, and a featured teacher display with the instructor bio and image for a more personalized touch.
Although the plugin is designed to be as intuitive and user friendly as possible, you might still require a little support with getting things up and running. Especially if you are quite new to website development. To help with this and with talking you through any issues you may have, there are both guides and video tutorials that cover common questions.
What’s more, you also have the option of speaking with a company agent via live chat or email twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All this ensures that you feel confident and fully supported when using the MasterStudy LMS plugin for your e-learning platform.
What added benefits does the pro version offer?
The pro version takes things to the next level and for a very reasonable price indeed considering what you are getting. The cost is $39 for a single site, $69 for up to five websites, and $129 for up to twenty-five sites. This version of the plugin is an excellent option for entrepreneurs, professional trainers, and even universities.
Among other things, the pro plugin comes with an extended range of integration options. One of the most significant benefits of this is that it allows for live lesson streaming, where classes are conducted in real-time. Alongside this, Zoom meeting options let students chat with the instructors and ask questions about the courses.
The inclusion of Google Classrooms integration simplifies the process of creating, distributing, and grading assignments. This enables teachers to have greater control over their student’s learning and allows them to check performance and leave tips, notes, and comments on their student’s work.
In terms of managing content, this version of the plugin offers content drip. This means that certain restrictions can be placed on how and when the lessons are released to the student. For instance, access to the second lesson can be locked until the student has completed the first.
For tracking student progress, it adds in a grade book where student’s statistics can be viewed and analyzed. The instructor can check up on enrollment numbers, attendance figures, course completion rates, and whether students are passing the assigned quizzes. They can also reward points which can be redeemed against future courses.
To increase revenue, free trial courses are great for attracting potential new students and giving them a little taste of what to expect on a course. Group courses are good for offering out to companies and organizations who are looking for a number of their employees to undergo learning or improve upon a specific skill.
Course bundles are a further excellent feature of the plugin. They enable you to market similar courses together as a single package. In doing this, you can use advanced offers and discount rates to encourage customers to enroll in more courses than they otherwise might have.
The plugin is also affiliated with Udemy. This online learning platform, aimed at both professional adults and students, is an incredibly popular and globally recognized education website. With MasterStudy LMS, you can effortlessly import Udemy courses and receive commissions from each sale.
Finally, the pro version offers much more flexibility in terms of having co-instructors up on the site. You can easily assign a second teacher to courses to help manage the workload and responsibilities. The plugin also includes elements that aid in handling instructor payouts and distributing commissions to make your life that much easier.
Online classes are increasingly lucrative. There is a great deal of money to be made from offering the right kinds of courses in the right ways, and LMS plugins through WordPress can really help with this.
MasterStudy LMS contains vital tools that support you with managing an e-learning focused website. Everything from creating the classes to marketing courses, monitoring learning, and dealing with payments can all be effortlessly handled through the site itself. This frees you up to focus on the content of the lessons themselves.
Whether you choose to opt for the free or pro versions will depend on the type of courses you are looking to run, how much additional assistance you need and how much control you want to have over the entire process. Either one will save you a great deal of time, money, and effort with setting up your professional education website.
Does Masterstudy PRO plugin version includes Elementor integration?
Does Master Study itself do assignments, or does that feature require Google Classroom to do the job in lieu of Master Study?
I would like to see a Comparison of Free vs. Pro features like most websites offer.
Hello Lee,
Sorry about missing your comment. We have built in features for assignments. You do not need to use Google Classroom for any of our features.
The comparison is quite simple. All the add-ons are available in the Pro version and besides, it only costs 55 USD!