What is LearnDash used for?

updated on 2 December 2021

So you’re wondering what is LearnDash and how it can be used? This is actually a tool not that well known. And there are a few reasons for that.

To keep it simple, LearnDash is a WordPress plugin used to create online courses of your own. One or multiple courses, lessons, topics, quizzes, certificates. It’s a complete tool to manage and create a teaching environment for people who want to learn something new.

In other terms, this is what we call an LMS. LMS stands for Learning Management System.

LMS Learning Management System

A Learning Management System is a suite of tools that allows you to create a complete Online Course.

The LMS is an online tool. It provides access to both students and teachers (and if needed third parties). They can both contribute to that environment to achieve their respective goals.

The teacher can create courses, lessons, topics, and quizzes. They can also evaluate students, create classes to help a group of students in the same session timeline. And finally, deliver certificates as a recognition of course completion.

The student can sign up for one or many courses. They need to complete goals. These goals can be reading all lessons, watching videos, and of course answering quizzes and filling a free essay. There are many ways to assess a student’s work within a Learning Management System like LearnDash.

Teachers and Students in an LMS:

  • Teachers can create courses, evaluate students, deliver certificates
  • Students can sign up for courses, complete lessons, and answer quizzes or essays.

Create custom courses with no code

One of the great power of LearnDash and so many LMS nowadays is their ability to create courses without knowing how to code. LearnDash is a WordPress plugin. You can install it just like any other plugin.

Then, a complete infrastructure and automatically set up for you. You simply need to create your courses.

A course is traditionnally structured as follow :

  • Main Course page (the landing page)
  • 1 or more Lessons
  • 1 or more Topics in each lesson
  • Quizzes and assessments as needed.

Example of LearnDash use

LearnDash can be used for all kinds of training, online courses, workshops.

The flexibility to create a course is huge. A course can be just a few pages or hundreds of them. It can be evaluated or a simple training without assessment. It can deliver an official certificate once the student completes the full course.

You can sell this course (thanks to WooCommerce), or make them free. The course can be open to all or asking for a subscription.

There are literally hundreds of options to create a tailor-made course and experience. So example can be virtually infinite.

Who’s using LearnDash

If you are a photographer, you can sell your own course online about photography. You host it on your regular WordPress website, and that’s it!

Big universities or corporation can also use LearnDash to manage their internal trainings and track the students (or employees) performance.

LearnDash can be used in a lot of different context and environment while being easy to learn and use by developer, administrator, teachers and students.