Transcription
What’s up? Ltd Addicts there is a new learning management system on the block and it’s called Tutor LMS. Now this is a WordPress based online course builder that will allow you to build courses, monetize them and of course establish yourself as an authority in your niche. But how does it work? Is it worth the money?
Well, stay tuned, I’m going to take you through the entire platform. Hi, I’m Dave from that Ltd Life where I review software tools with lifetime offers. If you’re new around here, make sure you hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell so you get notified when new reviews are posted. Let’s get right to it. Here is tutor.
LMS. This is directly from the manufacturer. This is a deal from themium. They make several WordPress plugins as well as other WordPress themes as you might gather from their company name. Now here is their sales page.
As I’m scrolling through it I noticed a few things about the sales page that’s rather interesting. Of course they compare their free version, which is called Basic to their Pro version which is what we’ll be looking at in this review. However, many of the features in Basic are included in Pro or vice versa I should say. So you’re really only losing a few amount of features, although they might be vital to you. But the good news here is you can download the free version, try it out and kind of get a feel for the LMS to see whether it would work for your business.
So basically what we’re looking at here in terms of the differences is under quiz creation there’s some options missing from the free version and that’s going to be things like short answer quizzes, matching of different kinds of images and things like that. As well as ordering quizzes now there are also some advanced functionalities and this is maybe where the deal breaker comes in for some people. You’re not going to get any templates or excuse me, any certificates, any reporting or course prerequisites. Now of course that would mean that you have say, two courses and someone needs to take level one before they can access level two. With the Pro version you’d be able to block people from enrolling freely between the courses and make sure that they’ve completed one level before they get to the next.
Then some other things that might be vital to you such as course preview which is essentially the ability to mark a few lessons from your course as freely available so that people can get a feel for what the course is like. Udemy is a platform that does that all the time and I know a lot of people really love that because then rather than just watching a sales video you can get a little bit of a taste for what the course is actually like. Then there’s also the monetization options. Now you can sell courses with their free version you don’t need to buy the Pro version to sell courses, but if you would like to use Paid Memberships Pro, which is a premium plug in, or if you want to use WooCommerce subscriptions, you will need to buy the Pro version. There is one other killer feature that I skipped over here and that is their front end course builder.
Now, this is really cool and I’m going to show it to you a little bit later in this review, but for me, that is an awesome feature that I would definitely like to have available and so that is only included in the Pro version. All right. Now, before we get to the pricing, I’m just going to point out one other thing that I thought was interesting. On their sales page. Of course, we got the normal sales spiel here and I’ll save you from that.
But here’s what I thought was interesting, is they actually have the change log right on their sales page. Now, this is a really interesting move and I kind of appreciate it. So this is a brand new product. If I go to the bottom of the sales page excuse me. Of the change log here, you can see they had an alpha version out in February of 2019 and then 1.0 came out in March.
Since then they’ve been iterating very quickly. And you can see each of the changes by clicking on the disclosure triangle here, although it is kind of zooming me around there. That’s a little better. So you can see each of the changes by clicking on the disclosure triangle. So you can see how much time and effort they’re putting into developing this plug in.
When you’re considering investing as much money as a lifetime deal for this plug in costs, it’s really good to know that the developers are active. You can see the last update was just a little over a week ago on August 5, and before that they’ve been updating almost every two weeks for the last three or four months. And then early on in the development it was updates. Here it’s two in one day. So very, very regular.
It looks like they got it to a point where it had all of the major functionality built in and then they’ve been slowly squashing bugs and adding new features as you would hope to see a developer doing. So they’ve got some stiff competition, right. Because the major players in this field, if you don’t go with software as a service like a Teachable or a Kajabi interface, and you’re wanting to host on your own platform, which is really what I recommend, I recommend running your online courses from a host that you control, right. It’s better to own in this case than it is to lease on someone else’s platform. And that’s an entirely different subject.
But I’ll state my position there if you are going to do that. There are many options. The two biggest players are going to be Lifter LMS and Learn Dash. Now, both of those have free option. Actually, I don’t think Learn Dash has a free option, but both of those have pretty reasonable pricing for their annual subscriptions.
And Lifter has a really flexible free version. So there is some stiff competition in the market here. And you can see that their pricing is not exactly cheap. It’s not AppSumo style pricing. So these aren’t even the Ltds.
These are the annual prices. So for one site, you’re looking at $149 a year. Five sites you’re looking at $200 a year, and unlimited sites, you’re looking at $300 a year. Now, if I flip this little toggle switch here, single site is going to cost you $400. A five site pack is going to be 600, and unlimited sites is $1,000.
Now, I will say there have been some discount codes floating around on the Internet. I’m not going to mention anything here in the video. However, I will find the best deal and post it in the description below. Of course, that will also be next to our referral link. So if in the end you really like this platform, after I go through it and you want to click that link, it’ll kick us back a little bit of dough here at the channel, help us keep the lights on.
And I’m definitely going to find the best promo codes whenever they’re available, and I’ll make sure that that stays up to date in the YouTube video. All right, so they do have a nice 30 day refund policy here, and it says 24 hours notice to reply. So that’s really good. I’ve actually spoken to the founder of this company. In fact, he was generous enough to supply me with a pro version just to test it out for this review.
So I did not get a lifetime deal for free. But I want to be transparent that I did get a temporary license here so that I can test it out and show you guys, because I’m not quite honestly, I’m not sure I’m willing to invest the $1,000. I do have a Learn Dash account that I renew and have got several clients sites that I’ve built with Learn Dash. I’m very comfortable with the online course creation process, and $1,000 is quite a few years of Learn, so we’re really going to have to see whether this is worthwhile. All right, enough chat.
Let’s get right to it. Here is the back end of a stock WordPress website. Now, I’m running the Astra theme. I should mention that Theme actually has started creating their own LMS theme for WordPress. I’m not really sure what that will entail, but I assume it’s some additional CSS to style the elements inside of tutor that is not available yet.
However, they do have an additional product. Let me show you it before we look at the back end of my WordPress site here. So they have this Edumax theme and I’ve not actually taken a look at that, but I’ll just show you the preview. What they’re trying to do with EdgeMax is to utilize this really interesting feature inside of Tutor LMS to allow you to build an online course marketplace very similar to Udemy, where you’d be able to have instructors sign up, create their own courses, and then pay them a commission when they earn a sale. So if you’re looking to kind of outsource this entire thing and really run a business where you get the best instructors together, looks like this is one of the only options that I’ve seen out there to do something like this.
So pretty cool idea. This is the preview of the theme. You can see it is very especially little thumbnails that really kind of seals the deal. It is very Udemy in its style. Here where we get the star ratings and you can see the prices and everything.
So the theme looks nice. However, I’m not really a fan of themes that add styling to websites. I think that’s kind of an older way to think about WordPress. We usually style our pages with something like a page builder or just using the gutenberg blocks to build out the site. Or of course, you can just hard code things if you’re an animal.
All right, let’s get into it. Here is the back end of this WordPress website. As I mentioned before, I am running astra here. I’ll just show you that I’ve got the Astra theme installed and activated. And then if we go under plugins, I’ll show you the installed plugins to be totally transparent here.
So we got breeze. That is just a caching plugin. I’ll actually disable that right now so we don’t have any issues with caching. Then we’ve got the free Tutor LMS plugin. There is the tutor LMS Pro plug in.
And then I’m also running WooCommerce, which looks like it needs to update. And then I’ve got Stripe enabled so that I can accept payments for my online courses. So you’ll want to grab WooCommerce and probably Stripe or PayPal’s Gateway so that you can accept online payments. If you’re following along with this video and you want to try to recreate what I’m doing, I’m using Stripe just because it was the simplest to set up. But I’m not going to go through the back end of Stripe.
You’ll have to follow along with WooCommerce to learn how to do that. All right, let’s get right into it. Now, usually when I use something like Learn and I go to create a course, I would be in the back end of WordPress and then I would go up to courses here and of course I could hit Add New and build one out. Now. I could do that in tutorlms.
However, they’ve got this really beautiful front end interface that makes building website or building online courses kind of much easier. In my opinion. So I’m going to go over here to the main front end. You can see this is a totally blank WordPress site. I’m not fibbing I didn’t install any sort of template or anything.
So it’s really nothing too easy on the eyes. However, when I installed Tutor LMS, it automatically creates a dashboard page, which I’ll show you what that looks like. So here we go. We got my little avatar up here that’s coming in from Gravitar, as well as the courses that I’m enrolled in. How many courses have been completed, how many students there are.
Looks like I’ve got eleven total courses. That’s because I’ve been doing some testing here. But essentially, this is what your students would see. And if you’re running more of that Udemy marketplace, the teachers would also see something like this. So they could see how many students they have, how many courses they’ve taught, and so on and so forth.
Now, from this screen, you can see there’s also an Add a New Course button. So I can just click on that because I’m an instructor. Now, your students wouldn’t obviously be able to click on this, but because I’m an instructor, I can click on that and begin to create an online course right in the front end of my WordPress website. So this is great. If you’re having additional instructors load their own courses.
They don’t have to learn WordPress. They can do it right from the front end. So let me go ahead and give this course a title. All right. I named the course how to Maximize Your Ltd Collection.
I could assign this to a category if I wanted. Now, there is one caveat here in that you can’t create a course category on the front end that has to be done in the back end, which I guess in retrospect makes sense because if you’re having other people create courses, you probably don’t want them to be able to establish their own taxonomies, right? You want that to be handled in the back edd. Of course, I could give this a course description. All right, I went ahead and entered a description here.
I’m going to leave the course categories blank for now and I’m also going to leave this course at Free. However, once we get everything set up, I’ll go ahead and switch it over to Paid so you can see how the transactions work. Now, there is some categorization here that comes with tutorlms in terms of setting the difficulty level. So we have beginner, intermediate and expert. And you can also set it to be all levels.
Let’s go ahead and upload a course image here. I just grabbed one of the thumbnails for my channel. Now, it does say that this should be 700 by 430 pixels. This is not I think it’s the normal 1080p resolution, whatever that might be, 920 by 1080, something like that, right. So we’ll see how it handles that in terms of uploading the wrong size image.
It’s good to kind of push the limits here because eventually I’m going to do stuff like that and break things. Now for video source, some interesting options. We can either do HTML Five, which would be uploading it right to your WordPress media library. You can do an external URL or you can link up to YouTube or Vimeo or use an embed code. So an external URL.
I tried this actually, with vooPlayer. I’m going to mention vooPlayer here because one, I think it is the best hosting platform for your videos if you’re doing a paid online course simply because it has HLS encryption. So that if people try to download your movies or your videos off of your website, they are going to be able to, but they won’t be able to play them back. It’ll just be a blank screen because that HLS encryption protects the files from being played without the key, which they need to get from the player on the front end. So that said, you can use YouTube in terms of just setting an unlisted video if you’re not worried about piracy.
Or you could use Wistia or something like that and just use the external URL. Now as I was saying about vooPlayer here, the external URL is not currently working with Voooplayer, but when I used an embed code, it did work just fine. So let me go ahead and grab a Voop player embed code and I’ll show you that. Okay, so I’ve got an embed code copied to my clipboard. I’ll go under the video source options here and choose not an external URL.
I’ll choose an embed code. By the way, I’m uploading the course intro video. That’s what I’m doing here. If you’re curious, like, why am I adding a video right away? This would be say like the sales video or something that just welcomes somebody to the course, lets them know what to expect when they enroll in the course.
So there we go. I’ve got my course intro video uploaded. Now the next section is where you actually start to build your course. Now whenever you’re doing something like this with an online course, you really want to understand the hierarchy. What is it expecting you to do?
So in the case of Tutor LMS, we have Topics and then we also have lessons inside of those topics. So for me I would prefer to call Topics Modules because that’s just how I’ve taken online courses, to think of the main category as a module. And then we have several lessons inside of the modules. So here it’s called topics. I haven’t actually found a way to change this, although I’m sure there’s some kind of customization you could just do within the code.
I do know that Learn Dash has even weirder nomenclature, but it makes it very easy to change those. There’s actually a spot in the settings. I haven’t found that in Tutorlms. I’ll show you the settings in a little bit. Okay, so let’s give this topic a name.
All right, so I added a topic name. I said Choosing Worthwhile LCD Offers and the summary is in this section. I’ll teach you what to look for when choosing an Ltd to invest in. Now I’m going to hit Add topic here and you’ll see that shows up as kind of a main section right up here. And I have the option to add lessons or a quiz to this.
So let me go ahead and add a few lessons. All right, I added a title. I said, calculate the Ltd’s possible ROI. And then you have a standard WordPress builder here where you can just enter in the text for the lesson as you normally would. Now there is the ability to switch this over from the stock editor to the newer Gutenberg style block builder.
By default it is set to the WordPress editor, but it’s a simple switch in the settings. So just know that that is there if you are a Gutenberg fan and you want to switch over. Actually, indifferent, I like both of them. The editor feels at home to me. So I’ll just leave it here for now and let’s go ahead and add some copy to this lesson.
All right, so I just added some Lorem Ipsum to the lesson. Now we can add a featured image. Let me go ahead and grab one from my library here. I’ve got a couple of guys shaking hands. That looks fine.
Then we can do the same sort of video source. So last time I chose to use a vooPlayer embed. This time I’ll grab a file off of YouTube just to show you the different look. So I chose YouTube as the video source and then I’ll go ahead and paste in the URL right here. We can enter a video runtime.
You can also upload an attachment. So I’m just going to grab this PDF. I’ve already got uploaded to the site and I’ll use this media and we can see what a download would look like. Now I could also add an additional attachment, right? So we’re not limited to one attachment.
You can see here I’ve added both a this is what I use for the featured image, but you could set it up as a download as well. And if you decide you don’t want to have them both up there, you could easily remove one by just clicking on the X. The styling here is not very finished looking in my opinion. It would be nicer to have an image there or it just kind of looks like they typed in a strange X or something on the interface, but overall it works just fine. So no problem there.
All right, let’s go ahead and hit Update lesson. Now I’m going to go ahead and add a couple more lessons here so we can see a module with a few lessons inside but I just want to point out something that it makes this a little bit weaker of a product than something like Learn Dash for one way, right? There’s ways that this is a stronger product, like this front end builder. However, there’s no way for me to duplicate this lesson, at least in this view. I’m sure I could get some kind of WordPress plugin to allow me to do that.
But there’s no easy duplication button and there’s no way to reuse this lesson inside of a different course. If you’ve ever used Learn Dash before, any lessons you build are separate. Essentially, they just have like a big bucket full of lessons. And when you go to build a course, you assemble the course based on the lessons that you’ve already created. I really like that approach.
It’s very unique to Learn Dash, but it would just simply mean that if you wanted to reuse some modules, you’d have to do some copy and pasting. Now, in reality, how often are you actually reusing lessons from one course to another that might be dependent on your particular business? Let’s say you’re teaching people software kind of like I’m doing right now, and everybody’s got to set up WordPress for the first time. So you want to include that module. Maybe that makes sense.
Then it would save you a lot of time to be able to just reproduce that or have that bucket of lessons and just dump everything in with a new lesson. I don’t think most online courses are necessarily going to have that functionality, but it’s just worth noting that that is a difference. All right, give me a second here. I’m going to add a couple more lessons and I’ll be right back. All right, I’m back.
I went ahead and added a total of three lessons, and we’ll go ahead and take a look at it on the front end in a second. However, before we do that, before we hit this Publish course button, I just want to go through the remainder of the options here. Now, I will add that it’s very easy. I could just create a new topic and then go through this process again where I’d add lessons and we also go through the quiz builder, which we’ll do in a little bit. We can add new instructors.
Now, I’m the only instructor added to this WordPress installation right now, but I could add a new instructor by clicking this Add More Instructors button. There’s additional data down here. If I want to give an estimate for how long the course will take, let’s say it’s going to be 3 hours and 30 minutes. I could add some benefits to the course. Here the requirements if I wanted just to note to people like, hey, you’re going to need an Internet connection or something like that.
You’ll need to purchase some textbooks along those lines, you could enter the target audience and what else you’re going to get with the downloads. Let’s say maybe some checklists or whatever is included here. This will just be used to sell the course and kind of show the features and benefits along the side. So let me go ahead and fill this out real quickly. All right, I’ve got some content in here so we can see what it looks like on the front end.
Now down below here, you can also add announcements. This is really cool. You’ve probably taken a course at Udemy or something like that, and you’ve gotten an announcement from the instructor. It says, hey, I just updated module three, or I just added a new Facebook group. Go check it out.
You’ve all seen things like that on Udemy. However, I’ve never had a way to do that inside of something like learn dash without adding in an additional feature. Now one popular lifetime deal that does something kind of similar to this would be beamer. So that would be adding a notification bell and be up in the corner or something like that. Or you can have a little pop up come from the corner to show you that.
Hey, there’s a new update to this online course. Well, this lets you add updates right inside of that dashboard that I showed you before. So I’m going to go ahead and enter a update just so we can see what it looks like on the front end. All right, I’ve got an announcement entered in here. I’m just going to hit this add announcement button and there we go.
It has now been added, so let’s go ahead and publish this course. Now, I can either hit the button up here, or I could hit it down here. We could also have the option to preview the course, but because I’m kind of excited to get going, let’s go ahead and hit publish course. Great. Now I’m back at the dashboard, and you can see I have a published course.
Now, there’s no one enrolled in this course right now, but I can see it on my dashboard. One little thing about this, I would like to be able to click and go to that course to be able to see it online for some reason in the dashboard as an instructor. Anyway, I am not able to do that once I’m enrolled in the course, I can. Now if I go to my courses, you’d think you’d see it there because I’m the instructor, but it doesn’t show up there either. And if I go to enrolled courses while I’m not enrolled in the course yet, so I can’t do that.
So I think this is maybe just a little bit underdeveloped, in my opinion. It’s certainly not a deal breaker. What we need to do is just get to the home adpage of that course. So to do so, I’m going to go back into the WordPress back end. Now obviously, if you are getting ready to sell your course, you’d create a link for this and that wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
And I’ll show you what the process would be like for creating a sales page as well. But for now, I’m just going to go over to Tutor LMS Courses and I’ll be able to get the homepage for that right here where I can either click Preview or I can just click right on this and it’ll allow me to open up the URL. All right, so here is the front end of the course. Now remember, we’ve done no styling here, so it doesn’t necessarily look beautiful. However, it’s not too bad, right?
It’s not as ugly as some of these online course builders are right out of the box. So we’ve got our star rating up at the top. Now obviously, there’s no ratings for this course. You see the course title, the specs that I entered in before, we can see what will I learn? In fact, it looks very much like a style sheet didn’t load on a Udemy page in terms of like this is almost identical to that interface you see on Udemy.
You’ve got the little preview window up here where I can begin to play that course introduction video. Now this is pulling in the styling from my Vuplayer account. I’ve got a player set up with this blue bar at the bottom. So that’s why you’re seeing that big button. That’s all things I customized inside of Vu player.
Now we have the Enroll button, which I’ll be clicking in a second. You can also see the requirements and the target audience which I entered on the back end of the course. All right, so without further ado, let’s enroll. In this course, I’ll hit the Enroll Now button and then I’m given the option to go ahead and start the course. So here is the course user interface.
I’ve got the module or the topic at the top, and then the sub blessings or the lessons inside right here. And I could mark them off if I was complete with them. I could hit complete lesson right here and it would give it a little checkmark. I can scroll through the different lessons. Now this is just a text lesson.
And then on this one, I ended up including just an image along with some bullets just to kind of show you what text would look like. Now, these colors and everything are things that you can style either with custom CSS. Or I’ll show you in the back end. Right now it’s using the tutor LMS’s CSS. So you could turn that off and then customize things using your themes built in customizer.
So there are options to make this look decent without writing CSS. But if you really, really want to get a custom look, you’re probably going to need to get somebody who knows how to write really clean CSS and to be able to customize this to look exactly like you. Like, let me go back to this first lesson here, which I actually added the video to. So this was a YouTube video just to remember that. So the YouTube video plays with without the YouTube player, although you can still see up here at the top that it does link to YouTube.
And when I pause it, it’s showing other videos from the same channel, right? So it’s not going to necessarily display, say, your competitors videos, which I know has been a concern with other built in YouTube embedded things where it’s like when you pause it, it’ll show competing products and then take your prospects off of the page. So it’s not going to do that. However, if I scroll down a little further here, we’ll see the attachments and really that’s all that we’re looking to get here is that information. I can minimize this to get a full screen view.
Let’s see how it looks in mobile, shall we? I’ll right click here and go to inspect and turn on Chrome’s built in emulation of mobile phones. You can see right now it’s set to an iPhone ten. And I’ve got the menu open right here. This is what the lesson would look like.
Plays up at the top and then you can see the attachments down at the bottom. So it’s completely usable right out of the box. In fact, I think it actually looks a little bit better on a small screen where the design doesn’t really come into play quite as strong. I do like that there are separate hamburger menus where I can navigate the site as well as inside of the course. Now there is a special mode in the settings which I can actually turn off the header altogether as well as the footer.
So if you wanted to avoid having distractions, that is totally something that’s easy to switch on and I’ll show you in a little bit. Okay, so that’s pretty much what the courses look like right out of the box without doing any sort of styling. Let’s go ahead and leave this mobile emulation and let’s go back to the course builder. I’m actually going to go into the back end this time just to show you you can build the course from the back end and it works just fine. Not quite as pretty.
I want to go ahead and add a quiz. However, I should point out something that this is currently marked as pending. Now that’s because I built the course in the front end. So the idea here is if you had an instructor that was going to be selling a course on your website, you might want to inspect it before it goes live in case it includes something that is profane or inappropriate for your audience. So this is a setting, you can turn it off if you trust your instructors to only publish appropriate material.
But by default it is set to pending. So that this course that I just built on the front end would not necessarily automatically go live to potential customers. So to turn this on, I’ll just do a quick edit here and go ahead and hit publish. Now this course will be live and I can actually begin to sell it, which we’ll look at right after we add a quiz to our course. So I’m going to go down inside of the course editor here.
Very similar options to what we saw on the front end. However, it just looks a little bit more WordPress, right? So let’s go under the course builder. I’ll open up my topic right here and let’s add a new quiz. Of course you’re going to need to title your quiz.
You can enter a description, then you’ll hit Save and next now under the next section here, we’re actually going to begin to add our questions. Now, tutorlms comes with a lot of options for different types of questions. We’re not going to have time to look at every single one of them, but I think you’ll kind of understand what they are. Now, if you have just seen my co assemble review, you’ll remember that creating quiz questions inside of that was very confusing to me. So hopefully the tutor experience goes a little bit smoother.
If not, maybe I’m the problem. All right, let’s go ahead and give this quiz question a name. All right, I entered what is the best Ltd ever? Now, under question type, I don’t want that to be a true or false question. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense, but I could do a single choice.
Now, there are two options here which might be confusing. Single choice would mean you have multiple answers with a single choice. Multiple choice would mean you have multiple answers with multiple correct choices. Learned ash does something similar. So that’s how I know how that works.
I think it’s confusing way to put it, but I suppose in retrospect there’s not a very clear way to summarize that. So I’m going to choose single choice here and I will say answer is required. Now it says mark for this question. Some confusing naming here in terms of well, I know that the company that develops this might not be native English speakers. And maybe mark for this question is something that is proper English, but not in America.
We don’t really say mark for this question. I think what this means is how many points is this question worth? Right? So let’s say you have 100 questions on your quiz. Each question might be worth one point if they’re all equally weighted and then your score will be out of 100.
So you can wait different questions for grading purposes with this option, however, it’s not very clear. I would like maybe a little information icon right here where I could hover over and it tells me what this means because I think it’s kind of confusing. You can show marks which I assume means that you’re going to alert the person taking the quiz how valuable the question is. So that is something you can turn on and off. You can also describe the question in further detail if you need.
And I’ve just entered this is the quiz description so that we can locate it later when we’re on the front end. Now I’m going to enter some answers here so you’ll note that you can add an image and then you can display the answer as text only, image only, or image and text. I’m going to save this answer without an image. I’ll go ahead and add another option here and let’s do one more. Great.
So I’ve got three answers here and I need to mark one that’s correct. And let’s go ahead and choose stencil. I’m a sucker. I love stencil. All right, let’s go ahead and hit Save and continue.
And our quiz is essentially complete here. Now, I have noticed a bug with their quiz builder that when I hit Save and continue, it saves, but it doesn’t actually continue. You can see that it does the save icon here, but it doesn’t actually continue. So what I found to work best is if I go back and then I can go over to the settings and make any necessary changes. Now this is where you can set up things like how many times people can retake the quiz or if there is a timer in terms of like maybe you only want to give them 20 minutes to complete the quiz.
You’d be able to do that inside of this. So I’ll set an option here to do 20, not seconds. That’s too short, 20 minutes. And I can also hide that if I’d like or I can choose to display it for this sake. I’ll turn it on so we can see what it looks like.
And let’s add how about the ability to take this quiz three times and set a passing grade for 100% since there’s only one quiz. Now, this option here where it says max questions allowed to answer. This is the amount of questions available for students to answer and questions will come randomly from all available questions. Belongs to boot with a quiz. So some kind of hard to understand English here.
Broken english, essentially. I believe what this is saying is let’s say you have 50 questions on your quiz. You could have it only display 25 questions. So that maybe you’re trying to discourage cheating or something like that or just kind of mix things up for your students so they’re not always getting the same questions each time they take the quiz. For now, I’ll just leave it blank and go ahead and hit save.
All right, there are some advanced options over here which just allow you to have the quiz automatically start. I’m going to leave this off for now. You’ll see, it just gives you an option to press a button to begin the quiz. I think that’s important if you’re going to be timing people, give them notice that the quiz is going to begin. You can also change the question layout from the set question to a single question or have some different pagenation options, pagination options.
And we can also hide the question numbers or give a limit to the number of characters allowed in a short answer. So I’m going to leave these all at the default. I’ll hit Save one more time here and close this out. Great. Now, our quiz should be available on the front end.
So I’m actually going to go back out to this URL and check it out. All right, here we are again on the front end of our course. I’ll go ahead and hit this button right here to begin the quiz. You can see it tells me some statistics that I’m allowed to try this three times. I have three attempts remaining.
I need to get 100% to pass, and there’s a 20 minutes timer. So all of the vital information you’d want to see is right here. And here’s. That Start button I was talking about before. I’m going to go ahead and hit Start Quiz, and I hope I pass.
Oh, so there’s been a bit of a bug here with this quiz. I hit Start Quiz and then it didn’t actually pop open a question. And then when I hit Finish Quiz, it just gave me this zero. Now, I have actually run into this issue before when I created a quiz with only one question. I think it might be and this is just me guessing I think there might be a bug with the Quiz Builder if there’s less than two questions.
So let me test this by just going back into the Quiz Builder, adding a second question, and seeing if I get a different result on the front edd. All right, so I’m going to add that additional question. I figured this would be a good time to show you some of the other quiz questions that are inside of Tutor LMS. As I mentioned, there’s quite a few different ones. All right, let’s go ahead and give this question a name.
All right, I’ve entered how do you feel about stacking? And then under question type, I’m going to go ahead and make this one an open ended essay. Now, before I click away, let’s look at some of the other options we could have. Fill in the blank questions, short answers. Or there are multiple ways to create matching type of questions where you can do just a plain matching, an image matching, or an image answering, which is, I guess, not a matching type of question, but you’d be using images to answer the questions.
Kind of like we saw up here where we had the option to add an image for our choice. Down the bottom, you also have ordering, which is just going to be, let’s say, put these items in order from least to most or something like that, right? Okay. So I’ve gone ahead and chose open ended question. I don’t need to add anything else because it’s just asking people to write a little essay here for me.
And I’ll go ahead and hit save. Okay. Now, I can see there are two questions added to this quiz. Let’s see if it performs any better for me on the front. Edd okay.
Here is that same screen. Again. You can see I already have one attempt, but the quiz never actually popped open. So I’m going to hit start quiz one more time. Same thing happened to me.
I clicked the button, and it just kind of jumped away to another screen. So I’m definitely running into some issues with their quiz builder. I do want to show you what this looks like, so I’m going to figure out how to get the quiz to display. All right. I changed a few things here, which was probably bad because I’m not going to be able to figure out exactly what the bug is if this does work.
But what I changed was the number of temps that were available because I had maxed myself out. I don’t think that was the bug. I also added a third question, and then I made sure that after I saved the quiz, I also hit the save button inside of the quiz builder, thinking maybe that had something to do with it. So I’m going to hit the Start Quiz button here, and fingers crossed it it works. It does.
All right. So it popped open. I think it might be the fact that I had fewer than three questions, so just keep that in mind if you do run it into that problem. Now, it’s weird that it’s starting with the second question first, so there must be some kind of randomization going on of the questions. I don’t know why that popped up.
Let me go ahead and answer these. Now, for the second question here, I ran into a little bit of a bug. Now, this is when I added off camera, it says Sour grapes was a great deal, and this was supposed to be a true or false question. I didn’t edd any answers because I figured true or false, they would show up. But I do realize now that I also didn’t mark one as true or false.
So let me go back into the back end and see if there was an option I missed for this. It would be nice if they notified me, hey, you need to choose a correct answer for this before we publish the quiz. It seems like that would be a reliable thing to do. All right. I’m inside of the editor for that quiz question, and it looks like I was supposed to add some answers here.
When I hit add answers, it just pops up two or false, which is funny. Why not just save that as the default? But it wants me to choose which one is correct, so I’m going to go ahead and save that answer. Now, I wonder if I can change these after the fact. I can’t.
Maybe I wanted to change this to be yep or no, just to be a little bit more playful with the words, but I can’t do that. So it looks like it’s stuck to true or false. Now, the obvious way to get around that is just to create a single answer type of question here, single choice, and then you could write whatever you like for the answers. All right, I’m going to hit save and let’s go back for a third time to the front end and try out this quiz. All right, here I am again.
When I clicked on the quiz, it just popped me right back into the quiz. However, it didn’t save the answer that I already gave for this one. So let me go ahead and complete this three question quiz and I’ll be right back.
Now, here is that true and false question. I do have the answers here. Let me go ahead and choose that. And I’m going to choose the best Ltd ever and submit my quiz. All right, so I finished my quiz, but very strangely, when I go into the back edd here under quiz attempts, nothing shows up.
So my quiz answers didn’t actually get saved. Let me go ahead and enter this just one more time and see if I can get this to show up as a quiz attempt. Now, what’s odd to me is that it’s showing the quiz attempts down here. However, they’re not saving in the back end so far. I really like the course building applications for Tutor LMS.
The quiz builder itself seems to have quite a few bugs, kind of from beginning to end. All right, let’s try this again. I’m going to hit start quiz and go through the process.
So I completed the quiz again and I noticed something that’s happening in that it’s only giving me two correct answers out of three. And if you remember, I set the quiz needing 100% to pass. Now, I got both of the multiple choice questions right, so the other one was the essay question. You’d think that would be graded by the teacher, right, rather than assuming that it’s wrong. However, there’s no real way for me to even see that question, because if I go into the dashboard and let’s do that real quick.
If I go into the dashboard and go under quiz attempts, I’m not seeing any quiz attempts show up here. So definitely something screwy going on with the quiz builder. Hopefully they can get that sorted out quickly. All right, let’s take a look at how we can monetize our courses. If you remember, when I set up this course, I said it to be available for free, but if we want to start charging people for our information, we’ll need to change that.
So I’m inside of the course editor here, and I’m just going to go down. Instead of free, I’m going to choose a paid course. Now, what I need to do next is assuming you went ahead in the beginning and installed WooCommerce, like I mentioned that I had, I need to create a product for the course. So let me show you how to do that. I’ve actually done that already, so I’m going to go ahead and update this so it’s saved as a paid course, and then I’ll go under WooCommerce and choose products.
Now, I’ve got this Ltd course that I’ve already created, but this is essentially just any old product inside of WooCommerce. In fact, I’ll just delete this and go through the process with you one more time. So I’m going to hit products, add new, and I’ll give this product a name and I’ll call it Maximize Your Ltd ROI. I could give this a product description if I like here. However, that’s not really necessary since we have a dedicated course page and we can also build a full I should mention that we can build a full sales page and use something like Cart Flows to sell our online courses.
Tutor LMS is fully compatible with Cart Flows as well as WP Fusion, which is really important to me. If I were to be building and selling an online course, the process that I would use is Cart Flows paired with Elementor, where I’d build a custom sales page for the online course. Then I would tie that into WP Fusion so that I could use it for additional membership restriction. That’s a little bit an option. You don’t have to do that.
Tutor LMS will restrict access to material inside of your course. But if I had any additional materials that I wanted to grant access to, I would use WP Fusion for that as well as connecting up to my email service provider. So if those things sound interesting to you, let me know. I’d be happy to make a dedicated video on how to create a course sales page using WP Fusion and Elementor Pro along with Cart Flows. Now, those are three products that are not Ltds, but seeing as they might pair in with Tutor LMS, I’m sure a lot of you are going to have questions about that.
So I’d be happy to make that video. Just leave me a comment down below if that’s something you’re interested in. All right, so moving on here, we’re creating our product. You can see I’ve given it a title. Let’s go ahead and give it a price.
I’ll call this 497, and I’m going to make it on sale for 297. Some real Internet marketing prices there. And you probably want to do at least a product image. So I’ll go over here, set the product image, and I’m just going to grab this one right here since it’s a square and that’ll work pretty good for a product image, let’s go ahead and publish this. Now we’re going to go back over to the course builder inside of Tutor LMS.
I’ll go over to courses and I’m going to hit edit here. And there’s one additional option that we need to choose. So we’ve already set this to paid. You notice there’s no option for a price, right? Because that is going to be pulled in from WooCommerce here.
So I’ll go ahead and choose the product that I just set up and as soon as I update this now, the course will be available for sale using the payment processor that is tied to WooCommerce. And it’ll basically just be selling this product. And as soon as someone buys it, they’ll get enrolled into the tutorlms course. It’s a pretty smooth integration. I really like how easy they made it to create a sales process here.
So I went ahead and opened up the course window inside of an incognito window so you can see what it would look like. Now, it’s certainly not very beautiful in my opinion. I definitely would want to style this a little bit more. In fact, what I would do if I were selling a high ticket course like this one is I would make a dedicated sales page and I wouldn’t use this at all. But you can see that this shows all of the vital information.
You can see the original price along with the sale price, and I can add it to the cart here. And if I do that, it’s going to ask me to log in. Now there is the option to check out as a guest and there’s an entire FAQ or kind of walk through the Tutor LMS website in order to learn how to do this. So I’m not going to COVID that in this video because I don’t know that everyone’s going to want to. But essentially the idea is when you go to a checkout, you often register in the checkout process.
But the way WooCommerce works by default is it’s going to ask you to log in before you make a purchase. So there are ways around this. However, for now, we’re just going to go ahead and roll with it. So instead, let’s go ahead and create a new account. This is just going to be a standard kind of enrollment form here.
I’ll enter my name and information and let’s hit register. So now it kicked me into a dashboard where I’m outside of that sales process. So you definitely want to turn on the ability to have someone check out as a guest because now I’m completely out of the sales sequence. I’d have to go find all of the courses in order to be able to purchase one. So I’m back at the course page.
I’m logged in as that new student. You can see what I’m buying right here. It’s got the course added to my cart and it shows me what I’ll learn. And basically I just need to go ahead and view my cart to check out a really clunky interface because now I have to click not only Add to Cart, but then once it’s added to Cart, I have to go and view my cart and then check out. So I definitely would not recommend doing this.
You 100% want to use something like Cart Flows to just be able to sell that product directly with your WooCommerce product. It’s going to be a much better solution. So once again, if you want to see me make that video where I set up Cart Flows, integrates an elementor page to go through the process, I’m happy to do that. But I want to hear in the comments down below that that is something you definitely want to see. All right, so let’s move along.
Let’s look at some of the other settings that come with Tutor LMS. Now there are some add ons. So these add ons are going to allow you to do things like create certificates or do some of that course preview like I mentioned in the intro, where you’ll be able to allow certain lessons to be available for free. Now, I’m not going to go through all of these add ons because that would make this video multiple hours long, but we can describe them for you. So I did mention that paid memberships pro if you don’t want to use WooCommerce, which in my opinion, unless you already own Paid Memberships Pro, it’s probably not worthwhile just use the WooCommerce integration.
It works great. We have assignments so you can add assignments for your students. You can create certificates so that when someone completes a course, they get emailed, a PDF. We can do course attachments. This will allow you to add even more attachments and private files inside of your course.
You can do this course preview, which I just mentioned a second ago. Tutor Emails allows you to send out emails. Like, let’s say when someone completes a module, you can send them an email. So that’s a nice little integration. You can have multiple instructors in one course that is available.
Tutor Prerequisites again, that is so I mentioned it in the Intro so that someone can’t take level Two before they complete level One, the reporting feature, which allows you to check how people are doing inside of their courses and then the subscriptions. So all of these add ons are included with the Pro license. You don’t get any of these with the free version. So if you need any of these features, that’s when you need to think about making a purchase rather than relying on the free version. All right, let’s look at the settings that come with Tutor LMS.
So the dashboard page, you can create your own custom dashboard if you don’t like the one that comes with and then you just choose that from this option here so that tutor knows where your student dashboard is. Then we have a public profile which lets you make your students public so that people can actually see who are taking your courses. This is that checkbox I mentioned before about the Tutor LMS CSS. So if you don’t want to use their styling, you want to add your own, you would simply turn this off. Same thing for JavaScript.
They have some scripts that they run. You can turn that off as well. Course visibility allows your courses only to be seen by people who are logged in. So that might be worthwhile if you’re setting up more of that kind of custom landing page option I mentioned before, you might not want people to go to that kind of Udemy style page. I’ll say that the Udemy section or that kind of styling that works really well if you’re doing a marketplace with multiple instructors.
However, if you’re selling a few high priced courses on your website, then you probably don’t want people to go through it like they’re on Udemy, right? You want to give them a little bit more of an elegant experience. So it just depends on what your goals are. So, of course visibility, it’s probably something I would turn on so that it’s shown only to logged in people erase upon installation. That’s just going to clean up any remnants.
Tutor LMS if you delete the plug in Spotlight mode, this allows you to turn off the header and footer. I mentioned that that was a possibility inside of the course. And then we have some options here for how the YouTube player and the Vimeo player are displayed. It just says, Disable default video player on the YouTube video. So my assumption would be that this, by turning this on, it would remove that YouTube styling that we saw and probably show you more of the common YouTube player.
Let me go ahead and actually test that out. So I’ve turned off that setting and I’m inside of the course. And you can see here it looks much more just like YouTube, right? We even have the YouTube logo in the corner. So that’s what that option does.
All right, let’s move over to the next section here, which is the course settings. This allows you to turn on Gutenberg, like I mentioned, that you can do. You can also display the instructor info so inside of your users tab. Let’s go ahead and check out all my users here. I can actually go ahead and enter, say, a little bio here.
So it’s going to say my tutor Fields. I could give myself a title, Digital Marketing Instructor. And then my profile, Bio, all of that information would show up here where it says Display Instructor info on the course page. So you’d see my picture and then maybe my background there. If you’re doing the Udemy style teaching, that’s probably what you.
Want to do. If you’re not, you can leave that unchecked question and answer. What this is going to allow you to do is have a little bit of a discussion or a Q and A section right inside the course. This is actually pretty cool. Let me turn this on and show it to you.
Let’s get back inside the course here. And now you can see I’ve got this little Q and A section up here where if I had a question as I was going through the course, I could write one and then the instructor would be able to write back to me. I think this is a really cool feature. They don’t have this inside a learn dash. There are extra plugins you can get to add discussion where you can engage with other people.
But to build this right in is pretty smart. I think this is a nice move. All right, let’s check out the options for lessons themselves. This is just to change the permalink, so if I don’t want to call the lessons lessons, I could do that. There’s not an option to change the topics you notice that is not a section up here.
So if you’re listening, tutorlms developers, let me change it and call it Modules because I don’t like the name topics one bit. Under Quizzes, I can set the default limits here. So let’s say I wanted all the quizzes to have a default of 60 minutes, or I wanted to have a default of ten attempts. I can do that. There’s also some interesting options here for what happens when your time limit expires.
So you can either have the answers automatically submitted that they’ve created so far, or you can just have it expire and then if they didn’t hit submit before the end of the timer, it goes away. You can also add in a grace period so that people have a little bit more time than the timer actually indicates. So it depends on your strictness there. Now let’s take a look at the instructors options. So this is where we can turn on that course marketplace, where we allow people to sign up and create their own courses and begin to monetize them.
There is an instructor registration page which is created when you install the plugin, much like the dashboard was. Let me go ahead and show you what this looks like. So right up here it says Instructor Registration. The other page that is created is this student registration. We kind of saw that before when I went through the registration form to actually show you the cart process.
But let me click on the instructor registration. I’m already an instructor. So I’m actually just going to grab this URL and I’ll open it up in an incognito window and we’ll paste that in. Get this in the shot there. And it looks very much like that student registration page we saw previously.
However, it would create a different role inside of WordPress, it would obviously make me an instructor. Now, going back to the settings here, this is that option to publish courses. Remember when I published my course, it went to pending because I built it on the front end. If I check this, it allows me to publish the courses without any sort of approval. Now, as far as I know, there’s not any sort of granular way to do this.
So it would be nice if maybe you had really successful instructors that you knew, you trusted them to publish it. And whereas other people, maybe they hadn’t created a course yet, they need to get those approved. That’s kind of a common thing, actually. Maybe first comment or first two comments someone leaves on a website have to get manually approved and then afterwards they’re free to comment as much as they like. So in terms of creating courses, you probably don’t want to just give people free rein to do that.
Then this option down here says become an instructor button. That will simply add an option on someone’s student dashboard to allow them to sign up as an instructor. So it’s just kind of a little bit of an advertisement. Say, hey, you can make some money if you have some information to share. Why don’t you create a course yourself?
And you click that and people have the ability to sign up as an instructor. Just a few more options left to look at here. Let’s move over to students where we’re going to set the student registration page and we can choose whether or not we want to show their reviews on their profile. Remember, we can make that profile public or not, and we can also show whether we want to display completed courses that they’ve already taken on that profile page. Now here is the earnings section.
This is where we set up the commission that will pay our instructors for our marketplace. So by default, it’s set to an 80 20 split where the administrators are taking 20% and the instructors are getting 80%. I think that’s a very generous split there. And then you can also have a fee deduction so that maybe you an 80 20 split with a certain minimum or something like that. Then there is this show statement per page that just shows how many commissions are earned or how many students have paid them and what are displayed per page.
So it’s defaults to 20. All right. Under withdrawals, you can set up some restrictions. So let’s say you don’t want someone to do a transaction unless they’ve got $50 or $80. Looks like it’s the default here.
This is actually it makes a lot of sense because if you’re paying, let’s say you’re selling courses for five or $10, the fees on that add up rather quickly. So let’s say you’re selling the course for $10 and you split it 50 50 with your teacher. So the teacher is getting five and you need to pay them out to PayPal. Well, that’s going to be a 30 cent transaction fee and then 2.9%. So it’s going to be roughly a dollar worth of fees.
When you look at $5 and you’re taking $1 out of that, I mean, that’s 20% of the fleeq of the price is going straight over to PayPal. So it actually makes sense. And it’s in the teacher’s best interest to have a withdrawal amount. Sometimes people don’t think that, oh, you’re greedy, you’re trying to make sure that I don’t ever get paid because you’re going to set that too high. Well, no, there actually is a rhyme and reason to why we want to have a minimum withdrawal amount.
You can choose to do a PayPal transfer, which is what I expect most people to do, or you can set up a bank transfer or an e check here. I’ve never actually dealt with any of that. I’ve always just used PayPal, so I’m not sure exactly how those would work. There is some very basic style options over here. In this option we can set a primary color, a hover color, a text color, and a lighter color.
You’ve seen red kind of throughout the course, like the social icons and things like that. Those were in red. This could be called accent color. That might be a more accurate term for this. It might be a little bit of an English translation issue there.
Then Monetization, you can basically, if you don’t want to sell your courses, you can disable Monetization. And once you turn on your payment processor, that’s when you’ll see this other field show up over here. So because I’m using WooCommerce, I have the options for WooCommerce. If I had Easy Digital Downloads installed, which is not free, but it’s a great platform, then I would have the option to edit my Easy Digital Downloads over here. But because I’m using WooCommerce, I will go over here.
And this essentially just is related to that guest checkout process. I don’t think it’s very complicated to set this up, but you’ll definitely want to go over to their support section and learn how to do this. So I’m going to show you how to find that help document. So I’m going to go over to themium.com and click under Support and I’ll go to documentations. Then I’ll choose Tutor LMS.
And then it says Configure guest purchase. So here it is. It’s just themeum.com slash docs slash configuring guestpurchases. That’s a heck of a URL. Okay, so here are the settings that you need to go through.
It’s not terribly long. It looks like it’s about four or five different steps, but one of the steps includes going into your settings. Here it is. And then checking this box. So pretty important if you’re actually going to be using that process to allow people to check out, regardless if you’re using cart flows or not.
So I’m pretty impressed with tutor. LMS. Now, you might be surprised to hear me say that, given the quiz builder experience that I went through in this video, but here is the reason why. Remember, this product was in Alpha in February and it went to 1.0 in March. Learn Dash has been around for five or six years, and as soon as Tutor LMS catches up with that quiz builder, it refines it, which, quite frankly, the bugs that I was running into are not massive.
It was broken, right? I mean, there’s something inside of the code that just needs to be refined a little bit, and then it will be functioning perfectly. It’s not right now, but it doesn’t seem like that is anything huge. It’s only been in the last few months that Learned has had a really pleasant user experience. On the front end, they added this Focus Mode and Learn version 30, which brought it into visual parity with something like Teachable.
Now, if Tutor LMS is able to release a WordPress theme or maybe an add on pack is really what I’d rather see some kind of styling options built right into the plug in itself, then, wow, they’ve caught up in less than six months from March until middle of August. That would be really impressive. So I’ve definitely got my eye. Tutor LMS. I think it is quite a remarkable feat that they’re as good as they are in as little of time as they’ve had to catch up to these platforms.
So because of that, I’m going to give this one maybe a more favorable score than I would otherwise, because I’m taking into consideration all that they’ve accomplished so far. I’ve seen that change log to see how much they’re working on the product, and it really gives me faith that it will continue to develop. However, never buy on a roadmap. So if you need something that works right now, go ahead, get one of the big dogs. Get Learned, try out Lifter LMS, see which one works best for you.
But if you are in the process of creating your course and you’re not ready to publish, I think this one might be something worth grabbing. And then you’ve got that 30 days to see how things get refined over the next month. So I’m going to give this one a very solid 8.2 out of ten. Now, if this review has been helpful to you and you’re looking to pick up this deal, make sure you check out in the comments. As I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I’m going to be keeping track of any sort of discount codes that I can offer to you and putting them down.
Below that will also be our referral link. So if the review has been helpful and you click that, we’ll see a little bit of a kickback over here at the channel. And I do want to disclose once again that I did receive a complimentary trial version of the Pro software here. I’m not going to be hanging on to it. I’m not going to be using it for any commercial purposes other than creating this Instructional Review Tutorial type of video.
So if this video has been helpful to you, make sure you click the like button so I know you appreciate the content and leave me a comment down below. Do you want to see that Cart Flows video where I integrate cartflows along with tutor? LMS I’d be happy to do that for you guys. I’ll see you in the next review.
