The WordPress system is characterized by extraordinary growth and development. Day after day, many templates and plugins appear that allow users to create websites and electronic applications that meet their needs, without the need to use a lot of complex programming codes.
In this article, we will explain to you in a 100% practical and applied way how to create a platform for selling educational courses online, such as the famous Udemy platform, with the aim of selling courses and training courses to all students interested in them around the world, and customizing payment methods for purchasing courses and other options that help you own an educational website. Professional, with a step-by-step explanation of my application.
What do you need to create a platform for selling courses?
To create an educational website, the basic requirements you will need are the following:
- Purchase hosting and domain from one of the companies specialized in this field
- Installing WordPress on the hosting and preparing it.
- Install one of the appropriate templates that suits your aspirations in building the educational platform
- Install the Learnpress plugin , which specializes in creating a training course system in WordPress.
Steps to create an educational platform
We mentioned in the previous paragraph the four basic requirements for creating an educational website to display and sell training courses to students from anywhere in the world in a comprehensive manner, and now we will install the add-on that we will use in creating the educational website specialized in selling courses, which is the learn press add-on .
The Learn Press add-on is considered one of the great additions for creating educational websites specialized in displaying and selling training courses. It comes in a free version that contains many features, and it also comes in a paid version with higher features. Now we will install the plugin by logging into the WordPress control panel and going to: Plugins << Add New , and we will type the name of the plugin in the plugin search box:
We will click on install and activate the add-on as shown in the previous image. Or: Read how to install a WordPress plugin correctly.
After installing and activating the plugin on a site, a set of tools for the plugin will appear in front of you inside the WordPress control panel under the (LearnPress) tab, through which you can control the addition of educational courses and various lessons and control the settings and appearance of the plugin as follows:
- Courses : From this tab, you can access the courses editing page, from which you can add a new course to your site, modify current courses, or you can delete some published courses.
- Lessons : From this tab, you can access the page for editing various educational lessons, and you can add a new lesson, modify existing lessons, or delete some lessons as well.
- Tests : From this tab, you can access the page to control the various tests related to the courses available to you, where you can create a new test, modify some tests, or delete them.
- Questions : In this part, you can add questions within each of the courses offered on your site
- Requests : In this tab, you can view requests to join courses by students interested in them. You can accept or reject requests to join, or exclude some students from the courses.
- Statistics : Within this tab, you will find all the statistics for the educational courses available on your site, where you will find the number of current requests for courses, the number of enrolled students, and other statistics.
- Add-ons : In this tab, you can install more add-ons related to the learnpress add-on, as there are many add-ons available that help you launch more modifications to your educational site.
- Settings : From within the settings page, you can adjust many settings on your site, such as payment and purchasing settings for courses, etc.
Then, after discovering the tools for the addition, we will begin the practical explanation of adding educational courses to your site and creating lessons within them, as well as tests and other options that will help you finally launch the platform professionally.
1-Creating educational courses
First, you can create a new course on your site. Go to the “ Courses ” tab, then click on “ Add New ” to open the Add a Training Course page. You will find that the Add a Training Course page has some basic settings as follows:
(1) Writing the main course title
(2) Writing the description of the training course
(3) Adding a classification to the new training course. You can classify the courses on your site into many categories if you have a variety of educational courses.
Also, within the same page for adding the training course, if you scroll to the bottom, you will find a box dedicated to adding lesson titles within the training course. You can enter the lesson titles that you want:
Also within the same Add Course page, when you scroll to the bottom, you will find some additional settings that you can customize to the course you are creating. For example, you will find the “General” tab, which contains the following options:
From within the “ General ” tab, you can customize the time and duration of the training course, and you can also specify the maximum number of students allowed to join if you only want a specific number of students to participate in the educational course.
In the “ Grade ” tab, you will find some settings for the result that the student obtains after completing the educational course:
You can also see some options that you can choose from to determine the method by which the student’s success rate is calculated. For example, you can choose that the student’s grade be calculated according to the grades he obtained from the tests he passed after each lesson, or you can specify that the grade be calculated According to the result he obtains from the final exam only, regardless of his grades in the sub-tests related to the lessons.
You can also determine the success rate in the sub-tests after each lesson, which if the student achieves, he can move on to the next lesson.
In the pricing tab , you can price the educational course, where you can specify the price of the training course, and also in the Sale price box, you can set a discount price to be set as the course price at the time of the discount.
After completing the basic settings for the educational course, you can click on the “ Publish ” button to have the training course page published on your site:
After publishing, you can click on the “ View Course ” button, which will open the course page on your site after you publish it:
You can also see in the image above the form of the training course page on your site, which shows the data that we entered on the training course editing page, which is the course title and its description, the course lesson titles, as well as the course price, and the “Buy this material” button automatically appears, which We will then customize it to properly configure the purchasing process for on-site training courses.
2- Adding lesson content within the added educational courses
In the previous step, we learned how to add educational courses and create their own lesson titles. The lessons in the previous step were titles only, and now we want to write and add the content of the lessons that we previously allocated to the course editing page.
To add lesson content, you will enter the “ Lessons ” tab, which will open for you the page for editing and adding lessons to the various educational courses:
As you can see in the image above, the various lessons editing page, where you will find all the lessons that were created within the educational courses. Next to each lesson, you will find the name of the educational course to which this lesson belongs.
To edit any lesson and add its own content, you can click on the “Edit” option for the desired lesson
When you enter the lesson editing page, you will find some options through which you can add and customize the desired lesson as follows:
- You will write the lesson title as you want it to appear to students
- You will add the entire content of the lesson, and the content may be a textual explanation only, or you can add illustrative images, and you can also add educational videos, and as you can see, this part is the most important part that you can add to the entire content of the lesson.
- You can specify the duration of the lesson or leave it blank
- You can activate the “ Lesson Preview ” option. When you activate the preview for one of the lessons, the student will be able to review the lesson content without having to register in the training course.
Thus, you can access the editing page for the rest of the lessons within the various educational courses that you previously created, and complete the specific settings for them and publish them, so that they can be included and their content added to the educational course page on the site:
Note : If you deactivate the “Lesson Preview” option, a notification will appear for students who are not registered in the lessons that the lesson content cannot be browsed until they log in and register for the training course.
3. Add student assessment tests within educational courses
In the previous steps, we learned how to add educational courses within the site, as well as create lessons and add their content within each educational course. If we want to add performance evaluation tests after each lesson in the educational course, we can do this easily, as we will explain now.
To create a new test within an educational course, you can go to the “Tests” tab and click on the “Add a new test” button. To add the test, specify the test title and test content as follows:
When you scroll your mouse to the bottom of the page for adding a new test, you will find the section for adding questions to the new test, where you can add the questions you want and choose the question type to be (true or false), (multiple choice), or other types of questions, as you In this part, enter the correct answers for each question:
Now when you have created the tests you want within the educational course, you can add tests within the educational course with ease, as you enter the educational course editing page and add any number of tests that you created to the course in the following way:
Now the test will appear on the course page and in the location you specified previously:
4. Add, edit, and control questions
You can also add and modify questions from within the Edit Selection page. You can also add and modify them from within the “Questions” tab, which when you enter, you will find all the questions that you created previously, and you can enter any question to modify it. You can also add any new question and customize it within any of the previously created tests:
5. Create a main list on the site for available educational courses
One of the important things within educational websites is to have a main menu available to navigate between different educational courses, which students can easily browse and learn about all the available training courses.
To create a main list of educational course names, you must first create all educational courses, then go to the WordPress control panel, then “Appearance,” then “Lists” and create a new main list. You will notice the presence of a “Courses” item from which you can drag courses and add them to the list. Home with ease:
After adding the training courses you want to add, click the “Save List” button. Now go to the site to find the new main menu, which contains the names and links of the various educational courses on your site:
You can also view the Courses page, which contains all the educational courses available on your entire site, and you can access the Courses page easily via the quick link from within the WordPress control panel:
6. Add add-ons to your educational website
In the add-ons tab within the learnpress add-on administration panel, you can add add-ons that help you add more options to your site and control them, where you can install the add-on for the add-on. For example, there is a Course Wishlist add-on that is used to create a “favorite courses” system, where It helps the student to add some educational courses to his “favorites” list so that he can easily refer to them later.
You can install the plugin from within the WordPress control panel and go to the “Appearance” tab, then Add-ons, then Add New, and type the name of the plugin to appear in front of you:
Click on the install and activate the add-on button, then when you enter any of the educational course pages available on your site, you will find the Add to Wishlist button next to each course on your site, where the student can click on it to add the course to his favorite list, which he can access at any time and browse the courses. Easily his favorite.
7. Set payment methods and purchase courses
By default, the learn press add-on allows activating the method of purchasing courses using PayPal , even if the student does not have an account on the PayPal website, he can make payment with his card through the PayPal payment gateway.
If you want to activate different payment options, you can do so by installing other add-ons specialized in installing payment gateways on the site, and then activating the payment option to purchase educational courses. You can enter the “Settings” tab, in which you will find on the left of the screen the PayPal option. When you click on it, it will appear. PayPal payment activation page:
You will notice that on the payment settings page, you can put your email address on the PayPal website, through which you will receive payments from students when they purchase educational courses from your site.
Now, when a student subscribes to paid courses, he will see the option to pay via PayPal:
In the end, as you noticed, creating an educational website for training courses is no longer difficult by relying on WordPress and one of the plugins specialized in the matter. If you are about to launch your educational website for training courses, you must take care to provide an accurate and attractive description of the educational courses on your website to encourage students to join. You can also provide them with part of the course, consisting of a video or two, to clarify the content of the training course and the things they are expected to learn, in order to increase students’ enthusiasm for the course. Join your various educational courses
