Introduction to LearnDash: the “Courses” Menu
Today I’m starting a series introducing LearnDash for beginners, walking through the plugin’s native options and sharing advanced tips so you can get more out of it.
Today we’ll cover the “Courses” menu.
Once LearnDash is installed, in its menu, after “Setup”, you’ll find “Courses”, followed by “Lessons” and “Topics”.
What is the “Courses” menu in LearnDash?
The “Courses” menu is where you create courses. Each course includes lessons, topics, quizzes, questionnaires, and settings you can customize as you like.
When you click to add a new course, you’re taken to the creation page, usually a Gutenberg page with some options specific to courses. While we’re at it, if you’re used to using the Classic Editor in WordPress, it’s better to switch to the native Gutenberg editor, since it integrates better with LearnDash and other plugins. Even if you’re using another builder, like Elementor, for many things you’ll do better with Gutenberg blocks.
Let’s go through the course menu, as shown in the image above.
Dashboard
This is the dashboard for the course being created, and it gives you a general overview of the course, which is great over time.
You can check:
- Number of enrolled students
- Number of students who completed the course
- Completion rate (%)
- Number of lessons
- Number of topics
- Number of quizzes
- Number of certificates issued
- Average completion time (with addons or reports)
- Individual student progress
- Last access to the course
- Average quiz score
- Total quiz attempts
- Revenue generated (when integrated with WooCommerce, Stripe, etc.)
The great thing is that this data can be used elsewhere. You can export it to view it in a custom dashboard, for example. Let’s say you have 10 courses and want a dashboard where you can see sales data for each one: with a bit of coding, that’s totally achievable.
If you want to see even more data about your course, plugins like ProPanel or Tin Canny Reporting for LearnDash can help.
Course Page
This is where you add the “cover” of your course. It’s the course’s homepage, and you can add relevant information about it. I recommend not writing a generic description, but also thinking about the sales angle of the course.
So, depending on the course, consider including:
- Who the instructor(s) are
- Learning outcomes
- The course structure (all the modules), since LearnDash usually shows this on the front end, but if you hide it from students who aren’t enrolled yet, it’s helpful for them to know what subjects are covered
- How module unlocking works
- How to navigate the course
- Whether the course includes features like gamification, essays, webinars, community access, prize unlocks, assessments, etc.
- Certificates
- Estimated duration
- Support information
- Frequently asked questions
- Materials and resources
To display all of this in an organized way, with an accordion splitting up some text, images, etc., you can easily build your course page with Gutenberg and, if needed, add complementary addons.
Builder
The Builder menu is where you build the structure of your course.
Here, you can add lessons, which I like to call modules. Inside a lesson or module, you can add topics, which are “classes” in a way, and quizzes, after each class or at the end of a group of classes. Each lesson, topic, or quiz you add creates its own page, which you can access individually to configure as you like. Just navigate through the LearnDash menu, or, right there in the builder, when adding a lesson, click the blue pencil icon next to the lesson title to go to that lesson’s page.
You can also add section headings to keep everything well organized.
This page is very important for building your course, editing information more quickly, and getting an overview of the classes students will go through.
Extend Access
This feature lets you extend a course’s time limit for specific students, without changing the course’s global settings.
For example, if you run a school and a course can be completed in a maximum of two months, after which there’s a final exam, if a student runs into a problem and needs more time to finish the course, you can individually give them more time. This option is widely used by course support teams.
Settings
Here are the settings for this specific course you’re editing. Let’s go through each one.
Enrollment Mode
Here you set the enrollment type. You can leave it as “Open”, meaning anyone who accesses the course, even without being logged in, can access it.
- Free: the course is free, but the student must be registered on the site to enroll.
- Buy now: for paid courses, where the person pays once and gets access to the course. When you select “Buy now”, a box appears to add the course price and an “Enrollment URL”.
This Course Enrollment URL field tends to cause confusion because LearnDash’s description of it isn’t very clear.
In practice, it defines where the user gets sent after clicking to enroll in or buy the course.
Example 1: LearnDash with native payment (PayPal/Stripe)
You set:
- Enrollment Mode: Buy Now
- Price: $49
If you leave the field empty, LearnDash will normally use its default checkout flow. But you can fill it in with a URL.
That way, when the student clicks “Enroll Now” or “Buy Now”, they’ll be redirected to that URL.
If you don’t fill in a URL, after buying the course the student will be redirected to the course itself. If you use WooCommerce, WooCommerce controls the purchase flow, for example: “Course → Product → Cart → Checkout → Thank you → Course”.
Recurring
This is for recurring payments, meaning the student pays a certain amount on a recurring cycle, usually monthly, though it can be different.
You’ll notice there’s a trial period option, where you can, for example, charge $0 for 7 days to give the student access to the course. Naturally, for these options it’s a good idea to have some limitations in place, such as drip content.
Closed
This setting keeps the course closed, meaning a student can only access it if manually added, or by joining a group that has access to this course, and so on.
Display and Content Options
Course Materials: if enabled, you can provide materials such as links, group access (via links or codes), PDFs, playlists, and more. You can add whatever you want in the editor. Keep in mind this applies at the course level; materials can also be added to individual lessons, if you want each lesson to have its own downloadable PDF, for example.
Challenge Exam: imagine you have a French course split into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. You create a challenge exam, and if the student scores at least 75%, they can skip the beginner module, meaning the intermediate module is automatically unlocked for them. If they don’t pass, they need to take the course normally.
Course Content: here you choose whether all modules and lessons are shown. If you choose to show them, you may not need to list the modules in the course description, as mentioned earlier in this post. If you’d like, for example, to let site visitors watch a free lesson to get a feel for the course, similar to Udemy courses, you can duplicate a lesson and make it public so students can preview it and get to know the course.
Custom Pagination: this controls how your course’s lesson table is displayed. For example:
Module 1 Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3 Module 2 Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 ...
With a total of 100 lessons, the student would see everything at once.
Example with pagination
You set: Custom Pagination = 10
The content will then be split into pages:
Page 1 Lesson 1–10 Page 2 Lesson 11–20 Page 3 Lesson 21–30 ...
The same applies to the course navigation widget.
So this is an option to better organize the course view. If your course has a lot of material, it’s a good idea to split the modules and lessons up to keep things organized.
Course Completion Page: here you select the page students are redirected to after completing this course. You can customize this page however you like.
Requirements for Enrollment: this option is useful when you want students to meet a prerequisite before starting the course, such as having completed another course or reached a certain score in another course. For example, let’s say this course is “History 1”, which covers general history, and you have another, more in-depth course on the French Revolution. To take that more detailed course, the student needs to have completed the general history course first.
Course Access Expiration: here you can schedule when this course starts and ends. Great for schools, corporate training, and similar uses. You can also set a maximum number of students allowed to enroll.
Course Certificate: LearnDash has its own menu for creating certificates, and you can create one for this course and add it here. You can also require an exact number of points completed in the course to earn the certificate.
Course Progression: LearnDash offers two types of course progression: linear, where the student has to follow each step gradually, and free form, where they can start on module 3, for example, then move to module 5, and so on. The right choice depends a lot on the type of course you’re offering. Free form can work well for courses where you have students at different levels, some of whom are buying access specifically to reach more advanced modules. On the other hand, if you want the content to unlock gradually as the student progresses, linear is the way to go.
Course Students: in this box you have control over the students registered on your site and in the course. You can remove and add students here.
Course Grid Settings
Short Description: here you can add a short description of your course, which will appear in the site’s course grid. For example, when you want to display a box with information about this course on a page, this is the short description that will show up.
Duration: the course duration in hours.
Enable Video Preview: this option is also for the grid. If you add the course box to a page, instead of showing the chosen course cover, a preview of the selected video will appear once this checkbox is enabled.
Custom Button Text: the phrase or word that will appear for this course in the course grid. You can customize it as you like, such as “Learn more” or “History course”, etc.
Custom Ribbon Text: the ribbon text highlights the course. You can use callouts such as: discount, promotion, new, last spots, etc.
Groups
The last option in the course page menu is “Groups”. Groups are configured in a separate menu, but here you can assign an entire group to your course.
Practical example: let’s say you’re a high school teacher, and each semester a new class comes in while another graduates from your course. You create groups like “Students-2026-1” and “Students-2026-2”, add the respective students to each group, and then add or remove them from the course at the group level.
This is very useful for schools, since teachers can manage these student groups more easily, and a group of students can belong to other courses too, making it easier to manage.
With all that said…
If you’re looking for a LearnDash developer to build your course, please contact us!
