How To Create an e-Learning Platform With WordPress

In the past few years, we all have been witnessing how e-learning platforms have been on a steady rise especially at the time of COVID19 pandemic. One of a survey conducted by Coursera showed that online courses provide more practical knowledge and develop day-to-day skills more effectively than traditional education systems.

Who would have ever imagined that millions of people all across the globe, would have the privilege to take part in any course they like. At such affordable prices, the courses are being taught by subject matter experts, talented, knowledgeable people from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

So, are you planning to launch your online teaching platform? Do you wish to spread the knowledge around the world by selling your courses online? But the question remains, HOW? This is where the demand for e-learning websites arises. Ever wondered how to create an online learning website like coursera, udemy, etc.? Creating an elearning website is not impossible these days.

WordPress is the first choice when it comes to building a website among all content management systems. With its offerings like the support, themes collection, and the level of customization options, it’s easy to start a site in just a few steps.

Here in this blog we walk you through the basic process and steps involved to create a website from scratch WordPress. Well, let’s find out.

Step 1: Purchase your Domain Name

Before you start building your site, you need to purchase a domain. With hundreds of domain providers available on the internet you can choose any of it based on the pricing. Some common sites for purchasing domains include Bigrock, Godaddy, HostGator.

A domain name is like your brand name only which will represent your business. While selecting your domain, always make sure the domain is short, easy to remember and a bit unique in it’s own way. And more importantly, it should hint what your business does. Once you’ve purchased your domain, move onto the next step.

Step 2: Look for a Web Hosting Provider

So now you have your domain, you need a web hosting provider to take care of your website factors such as the support, scalability, security and all the support you need. While selecting a plan for domain hosting, carefully choose your plan based on the storage and the bandwidth you’ll need. BlueHost, HostGator, Hostinger are few of the common sites being used for web hosting purposes.

Step 3: Set Up WordPress

Now you have the domain and hosting done, you need to install and setup your wordpress. WordPress is well-known for its ease of installation. WordPress Installation & setup is a very simple process and takes less than ten minutes to complete. 

After setting up the wordpress, you can start building your website. To begin with, you need to select a theme that suits your needs of an online learning environment. Make sure to select a theme which looks simple and is more user friendly. Some popular e-learning themes include, Skillfully, Learning System, EducationPress, SmartOWL, etc..

After you’ve finalized your theme, you can install and activate your theme. Once done, you can start customizing your theme to showcase the unique look and feel of your brand.

Step 4: Choose a Learning Management System (LMS)

Once your website is ready, you’d definitely want a system that manages your courses, conducts onlines tests & quizzes, some practicing, grading & all the other paperwork as available on the sites like Udemy, Coursera.

Learning Management System (LMS) plugins allow you to create and run online courses like Udemy with WordPress. They provide you with end-to-end services with all the tools and features you need to manage your elearning website.

Few familiar WordPress LMS plugins include – MemberPress, LearnDash, LifterLMS, Teachable, LearnPress,etc.. You can check them out once and select the one that suffices your needs.

Step 5: Video Hosting

While creating an online course, you also need a platform to store or host your premium video content securely. Hosting your content on a secure platform is important when you want to have control over who actually has access to your content and so that it doesn’t get pirated. 

VdoCipher is a premium video hosting platform that specializes in securely distributing your video content to your subscribers. VdoCipher provides video streaming solutions for education & media businesses to help them serve content on their site/app in the most secure and smooth manner. A combination of Hollywood standard DRMs, viewer-specific watermarking & licensing technologies ensures that videos can’t be downloaded or shared illegally from your platform.

You can simply use VdoCipher by visiting www.vdocipher.com, signup with your email w/o any card details required. VdoCipher offers you a free 30-day trial window. After completing your purchase, you can upload your video content securely to your VdoCipher dashboard. 

Key features like DRM encryption, dynamic watermarking help you secure your content. Also, you can track your video analytics with their Video analytics feature. And the best part is you can perform bulk upload of videos via desktop, Dropbox or shared URL. Multiple encoding profiles & qualities are available which helps in streaming for every device and every internet speed.  

Thus, people planning to have an affordable video hosting solution also get to enjoy these key features to get the most out of their video content. VdoCipher serves clients across 30+ countries. Signup now and start selling your videos. 

Step 6: Pricing & Payment

One of the decisions you need to take when building an eLearning environment is whether your content will be freely accessible to anyone or require subscription, i.e. whether it will be free to join or paid.

You’ve invested lots of time and energy creating your courses, and you’d definitely want to see a return of investment and probably some profit as well. This is where the need of integrating/implementing a payment gateway arises. Your website needs to have a payment gateway setup to capture a payment from a user. Again, with wordpress that can be done within minutes by just installing & activating a plugin to get you ready to earn some bucks!

Few common Payment Gateway Plugins You Can Use With WordPress are Stripe, PayU, PayPal, QuickPay, etc..

Conclusion:

With this blog, we hope by now you must have an idea about how to create an elearning site with WordPress. And we have seen it’s not very challenging, especially by making use of plugins and themes which are pre-made for your convenience.

The hard work is required from your end for planning & creation of course material, after that with WordPress you can get the course itself online and available to your students in no time.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab a domain and start teaching!