How to set up a virtual course platform with Sensei?

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It goes without saying that today, and especially in the world of digital marketing, it is more than recommended (if not necessary) to be continuously recycling and forming.

Perhaps you know online learning platforms, where you can sign up for different courses of all kinds, either by paying a monthly fee (with access to all courses) or by purchasing courses individually (the ones that interest you the most).

If you have ever wondered at what are you goodand if you have also wondered if you would be able to share your knowledge with any user on the Internet (and charge or not for it), you’re in luck, because this article is going to come in handy.

With the plugin that I am going to analyze in this article, you will be able to create, in a fairly simple and intuitive way, your own online course platform, where users with a simple Internet connection will be able to access all your lessons and contact you through of your platform.

You decide if you want to offer your knowledge altruistically and for free, or if you prefer to make a profit and sell courses to a specific niche.

Either option is achievable with the Sensei plugin (created by the same people as ).

I have to say at this point that, as always, the creators of the plugin have not contacted me. I have decided to do an analysis of it, because is one of my LMS plugins (Learning Management System) favoritesand I do not receive any type of incentive or commission for speaking positively about it.

I think it will be very helpful for you and other readers of the blog, and I am convinced that this article will encourage you to try it and generate your own opinion.

Plugin is what matters

Before continuing, I wanted to mention that the possibilities with this plugin they are very bigand for all kinds of user levels.

In this article I will focus in the plugin itselfand in the things you can do with it with its options default.

However, I will mention above what extensions you can use, and what you can sell the courses with. But I reiterate that this article focuses on how to create a course platform.

Advantages of using Sensei

Sensei comes in the form of a plugin and has been developed (as I mentioned above) by the creators of the well-known WooCommerce.

This is good and it’s bad at once.

It’s good because Behind this plugin is a great team of developers and support. A quality product, with great possibilities, extensions and templates for its use.

Forks bad because It’s not free (although it does have one you can play with). Its license to use costs between 129 and 279 dollars per year, depending on how many websites you need it for (although in my opinion, having a price is good, because it means that the plugin is very professional and constantly maintained).

Among other advantages, the plugin will allow you to create content (via custom post types) in a simple and intuitive way, with a very dynamic user registration integration, the possibility of charging for your courses, as well as having a course platform with the appearance you want, along with detailed student and teacher statistics.

On the other hand you can include extensions to the plugin and grow your community or online academy in a realistic and scalable way.

Install the plugin and activate it

This step surely you already have more than known. Although it cannot be repeated.

As it is a paid plugin, the first thing is to purchase the plugin on the WooCommerce platform.

Once registered and installed on your website using the method you like best, you activate and configure it in a simple way thanks, among other things, to its initial wizard.

initial wizard

The usability of the plugin is very well taken care of and, just like WooCommerce when you install it, this Sensei plugin comes with an initial wizard that will create the required pages on your system and it will remind you that you can download the language pack that corresponds to the language of your WordPress installation (that is, that There is a Spanish version although as always, badly translated or with some elements in English).

Of course, remember to change the default name of the pages, as well as their slugsince they come in English.

Use of shortcodes

If you visit the pages that the plugin has created for you, you will see that there are a number of shortcode in them. You don’t have to touch anything here.

Just remember that the content of all the courses you create will appear on those pages thanks to those shortcodes.

New Sensei custom types

When activating the plugin, you will see that some extra options appear in your.

sensei

Here you can change options for all your lessons and courses. It is like a “Virtual Secretary” where you manage statistics, students, messages and settings in general. We see it below.

courses

This is the first of three custom post type (I insist on writing it in English because it will be more useful when moving around with different WordPress plugins in the future).

It is nothing more than personalized content (such as pages and posts) but, in this case, in which you can create the courses you want.

Remember that a course includes several lessons separated (if you want) by modules.

lessons

They are all the individual classes that make up a module (if you use them) or a course (if you do not use modules). This is where you can put all the content relevant to each lesson (images, PDFs, videos, etc).

I recommend, from experience, not to make the lessons very very long (between 7 and 10 minutes).

And no, don’t look at me like that, I know that some of my videos are even 40 minutes long… but this isn’t a lesson, it’s a super analysis! 😛

Questions

If you like to check if your students have understood the content of your lessons, you can have them respond to a series of questions about what you have talked about.

By proxy, you can even make it necessary to answer questions (or most of them) correctly, and if they don’t, they can’t move on to the next lesson.

Sensei’s Options

We start with the matter itself, which is the content of the plugin. Below you can see everything that I am going to tell you now in a video analysis, but I would like you to take a look at each of the sections of the plugin so that you do not miss anything.

Analysis

Here you can have a overview of the students, courses and lessons you have.

You will be able to see how many lessons, courses and total students you have, the courses that each one has completed, the average grade for each student, as well as the overall average grade.

qualifying

When a student fills out a test, the questions you have to correct manually (for example open questions) will end here.

As a teacher, here you can grade them and send the results to the student.

Student Management

For each course, here you can manage the students. This section allows you to see which students have completed the selected course (with dates and all), as well as add new students and/or mark certain courses as completed.

Messages

This section speaks for itself (sorry for the bad joke). It’s kind of message center of the teacher with all the students who write to him.

If you are going to have more than one teacher and you create a user for each of them on your website, you have to assign them the role of professor (teacher) so they can create courses, lessons, and questions and respond to messages sent to them by students in their courses.

Data update

From time to time Sensei is updated with new features and this is where you can manage all of them (turn them on and off).

Settings

We go a little deeper in this section because it is where you will be able to manage the options of all your courses and classes, as well as automated email configurations, language and student profile.

General

Basically here you can control how your courses are displayed to people who are not registered on your website, whether or not they can send messages to teachers, change the default pages and other settings related to Sensei’s style sheets.

It all sounds very confusing, but in the video I see them one by one.

courses

here you can tell to the plugin how a course is considered completed, author display options, and course image size and pagination options.

lessons

More options for lessons in this case. They are very similar to those of the courses (images, showing the author or not, allowing comments, etc.) and we are going to see them one by one in the video.

Email notifications

This part is very interesting because it allows you to activate or deactivate different options for sending emails (for example, the email that is sent when a student registers for a course).

It also gives you the option to configure the aesthetics of these emails.

If for any reason you need to edit the content of these emails, you will have to “pull the code” a bit, since at first glance there are no options for an easy configuration for this purpose.

Student profiles

Here you can decide if the profiles of the students of your courses are public or not. That is, if they are visible to people outside of your platform.

If you use any extension of badges or medals of completed courses, perhaps it is interesting to use this option to generate community and chop the students among themselves.

It also allows you to show, or not, which courses the student is taking at that moment.

Idiom

A simple option, where you can download the language pack corresponding to the language in which your control panel is.

As for the settings themselves, I have to highlight that as you add options and plugins extra for your Sensei plugin, more options will appear or disappear in the settings panel.

The options of the courses, lessons and questions, being custom post typesthey are very similar to what you are used to seeing in the creation of articles or pages.

course options

all courses

Here you can see at a glance all the courses that your platform has, separated by categories, date, teacher and with the option to order their modules (if you use them).

Add new

When it comes to adding a new course, the options are quite intuitive. You can:

• Define the title of the course.
• Add a description (here is what the course consists of, etc. Something attractive to make people sign up).
• Add or create categories for the course.
• Add an excerpt that briefly describes the course (like the description, but on two lines).
• Add a video.
• Create and/or select the modules that make up the course.
• Create and/or select the lessons that make up the course.
• You can select the teacher of the course.
• Turn course announcements (notifications) on or off.
• Define whether to take this course, the student must have taken another course before, as a prerequisite.
• You can highlight the course, to make it look better on the…