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 gonna take you
through the entire platform. Hi I'm Dave
from thatLTD.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 Themeum. 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 compared 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
gonna 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 gonna 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'll 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
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 gonna 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
alright. Now before we get to the
pricing I'm just gonna point out one
other thing 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 changelog 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 lock here you can see
they had an elf 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 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
plugin. When you're considering investing
as much money as a lifetime deal for
this plugin cost, 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 5th and
before that they've been updating you
know almost every two weeks for the last
three or four months and then early on
in the development it was you know
updates you know here it's two in one
day
so very very regular it looks like they
got it to a point where it had all the
major functionality built in and then
they've been slowly squashing bugs,
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 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're going to to do
that there are many options. The two
biggest players are gonna be LifterLMS
and LearnDash. Now both of those have free
apps. Actually I don't think LearnDash 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 a single site
is gonna cost you 400,
five-site pack is gonna be 600
and unlimited sites is a thousand
dollars. Now I will say it there have
been at some discount codes floating
around in the Internet, I'm not gonna
mention anything here in the video.
However I will find the best deal and
post it in the description below. Of
course that'll 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 take 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. Alright 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
free quite honestly I'm not sure I'm
willing to invest the thousand dollars. I
do have a LearnDash account that you know I renew and I've got
several clients' sites that I've built with
LearnDash. I'm very comfortable with
the online course creation process and
you know $1,000 is quite a few years of
LearnDash, so we're really gonna have to
see whether this is worthwhile. Alright
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
Themeum 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 backend 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 Edumax is to utilize this
really interesting feature inside of
Tutor LMS to allow you to build a 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 a 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 these little thumbnails
that really kind of seals the deal. It is
very you know Udemy in its style here
where we get the 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
just using the Guttenberg blocks to
build out the site or of course you can
just hard code things if you're an
animal. Alright let's get into it.
Here is the
backend 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 install 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 plugin 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 gonna go through
the back end of Stripe. You'll have to
follow along with WooCommerce to learn
how to do that. Alright let's get right
into it. Now usually when I use something
like LearnDash and I go to create a course
I would be in the backend 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
Tutor LMS 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 gonna 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 you
know 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 Gravatar 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 11 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
below 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. Alright I
named the course how to maximize your
LTD collection. I can 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 backend 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 brought that to be
handled in the backend. Of course I could
give this a course description alright I
went ahead and entered a description
here. I'm gonna 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 Tutor LMS 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 you know the normal 1080p
resolution whatever that might beat
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 gonna
do stuff like that and break things. Now
for video source some interesting
options we can either do HTML 5 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
gonna 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
you're gonna 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 you know just setting an
unlisted video if you're not worried
about piracy or you could use you know
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 VooPlayer
but when I used an embed code it did
work just fine. So let me go ahead and
grab a VooPlayer 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 a...oops 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 and what is the 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 LearnDash
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 Tutor LMS. I'll
show you the settings in a little bit.
Okay so let's give this topic unnamed.
Alright so I added a topic name I said
choosing worthwhile LTD 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 gonna hit add
topic here and you'll see that shows up
as kind of a main section right up here.
I have the option to add lessons or a
quiz to this, so let me go ahead and add
a few lessons. Alright I added a title,
I said Calculate the LTDs 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 such 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 I'm indifferent I
like I like both of them they both you
know 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. Alright so I just added some
lorem ipsum to the lesson now we can add
a featured image let me go ahead and
grab one for my library here. I've got a
couple 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 you
know 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 this site and I'll use
this media and we can see what a
download would look like. Now I can 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 you know have an image there
or you know it just kind of looks like
they typed in a strange X or something
on the on the interface but overall it
works just fine, so no problem there.
Alright let's go ahead and hit update
lesson now, I'm gonna 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 then something like LearnDash, for
one way right. There's ways that this is
a stronger product like this front-end
builder. However
no way for me to duplicate this lesson
at least in this view. I'm sure I could
get some kind of WordPress plug-in 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 learnt use LearnDash
before, any lessons you build are
separate. Essentially you 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 LearnDash
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
next that might be you know dependent on
your particular business. Let's say
you're teaching people software it's
kind of like I'm doing right now and you
know everybody's got a 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 alright give
me a second here I'm gonna add a couple
more lessons and I'll be right back.
Alright I'm back I went ahead and added a
total of three lessons and we'll go
ahead and take a look at that in 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 I'll
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 gonna need an internet connection
or you know something like that you'll
need to purchase some textbooks along
those lines. You could enter the target
audience and what what else you're going
to get
with the Downloads. Let's say you know
maybe some some checklist 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. Alright 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 you know 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 LearnDash
without adding in an additional feature.
Now one popular lifetime deal that does
something kind of similar to this would
be Beamer so that'd be you know 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 gonna go ahead and
enter a Update just so we can see what
it looks like on the front end. Alright
I've got an announcement entered in here
I'm just gonna 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, then oh 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
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, certainly not a deal
breaker, what we need to do is just get
to the home page of that course. So to do
so I'm gonna 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
gonna go over to Tutor LMS courses and
I'll be able to get the home page 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. Alright 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 a little
preview window up here where I can begin
to play that course introduction video.
Now this is pulling in the styling from
my VooPlayer 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 that customized
inside of VooPlayer. 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 alright. 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 lessons 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 check
mark. 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 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 backend right. Now it's using the
Tutor LMS as 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 read
you really want to get a custom look
you're probably gonna 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
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 gonna
necessarily display say like your
competitor's videos which I know has been
a concern with other built-in YouTube
embeddable things where it's like you
know when you pause it it'll show
competing products and then take
your prospect 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 you know 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
10 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 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 if 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
backend this time just to show you you
can build the course from the backend
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
so the idea here is if you had an
instructor that was going to be selling
in 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 gonna
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-y 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 gonna 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 Tutor LMS comes with a lot
of options for different types of
questions, we're not gonna have time to
look at every single one of them but I
think you'll kind of understand what
they are. Now if you've just seen my
Coassemble review, you 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. Alright let's go ahead and give
this quiz question a name. Alright 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. LearnDash 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 gonna 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 a hundred questions
on your quiz. Each question might be
worth one point if they're all equally
weighted and then you know your score
will be out of a hundred so you can wait
different questions for grading purposes.
With this option however it's not very
clear I'd like maybe a little
information icon right here. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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. Alright let's go
ahead and hit save and continue and our
quiz is essentially complete here. Now
I'd have noticed a bug with their quiz
builder that when I hit save and
continue
it saves but it doesn't actually
continue, it just hit...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 it's at 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
alright. There are some advanced
options over here which just allow you
to have the quiz automatically start. I'm
gonna 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 gonna 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 pagination 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 those three times, I
have three attempts remaining I need to
get a hundred percent to pass and
there's a 20-minute timer so all of the
vital information you want to see is
right here and here's that start button
I was talking about before I'm gonna go
ahead and hit start quiz and I hope I
pass.
Uh-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 finished
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 end alright. 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. Alright
let's go ahead and give this question a
name. Alright I've entered how do you
feel about stacking and then under a
question type I'm gonna 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 or 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
with the option to add an image for our
choice on the bottom. You also have
ordering which is it just gonna be let's
say you know put put these items in
order from 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 right 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 end. 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 gonna hit to start
quiz one more time. Uh-oh same thing
happened to me I click 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 gonna figure out how to get the quiz
to display. Alright I changed a few
things here which was probably bad
because I'm not gonna be able to figure
out exactly what the bug is if this does
work. But what I changed was the
number of attempts 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 gonna hit the start quiz button
here and fingers crossed that it works.
It does, alright, 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 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 up for this
second question here I ran into a little
bit of a bug. Now this is when I added
off-camera he says Sour Grapes was a
great deal and this was supposed to be a
true or false question. I didn't add any
answers because I figured true or false
they would show up but I do realize now
that I'd 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. I mean 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.
Alright 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
true 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
gonna go ahead and save that answer now
what if I can change these after the
fact I can't like maybe I wanted to
change this to be yep or nope you know
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. Alright I'm gonna hit
save and let's go back for a third time
to the front end and try out this quiz.
Alright 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 gonna choose the best LTD ever
and I submit my quiz. Alright so I
finished my quiz but very strangely when
I go into the backend here under quiz
attempts, nothing shows up. So my quiz
answers didn't actually get saved. Let me
go ahead and answer 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 backend. 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. Alright let's
try this again I'm gonna 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 a hundred percent 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 alright. Let's take
a look at how we can monetize our
courses. If you remember when I set up
this course I set 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 gonna go down
instead of free I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 CartFlows
to sell our online courses. Tutor LMS is
fully compatible with CartFlows 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 CartFlows paired
with Elementor where I 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 CartFlows. 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 gonna 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. Alright 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 gonna make it on sale for 297. Some
real internet marketing at 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 gonna
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 gonna go back
over to the course builder inside of
Tutor LMS. I'll go over to courses and
I'm gonna 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 our price
right because that is gonna 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 Tutor LMS 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
gonna 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
walkthrough on the Tutor LMS website in
order to learn how to do this so I'm not
gonna cover that in this video because I
don't know that everyone's gonna 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 gonna ask you
to login before you make a purchase. So
there are ways around this, however for
now we're just gonna go ahead and roll
with it. So instead let's go ahead and
create a new account. This is just gonna
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. So you know a really clunky
interface because now I have to click
not only Add to Cart but then once it's
out of the cart I have to go and view my
cart and then checkout so I definitely
would not recommend doing this. You
100%
to use something like CartFlows to just
be able to sell that product directly
with your WooCommerce product it's gonna
be a much better solution. So once again
if you want to see me make that video
where I set up CartFlows integrate a
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
alright. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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
the WooCommerce which in my opinion
unless you already own pre 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've just mentioned a
second ago. Tutor E-mail 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 that's
so that someone can't take level 2
before they complete level 1. 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. Alright 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 it 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, this lets you make your students
public so
that people can actually see
who are taking your courses. This is that
check box 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 the 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 of 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 a disable
default video player on the YouTube
video. So my assumption would be that
this by turning us 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 but I even
have the YouTube logo in the corner.
So that's what that option does alright.
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 gonna 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 a little you know 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 gonna
allow you to do is have a little bit of
a discussion or a Q&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&A section up here or 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 of
LearnDash. 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 alright. 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 Tutor LMS 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
10 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 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 isn't actually,
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 it's 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 gonna 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 publish
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 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 gonna 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 feed
adduction 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 you
have what are displayed
per page so that its defaults to 20.
Alright under withdrawals you can set up
some restrictions so let's say you don't
want someone to 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 ten dollars the fees
on that add up rather quickly so let's
say you're paying, you're selling a course
for ten dollars 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 gonna be a 30
cent transaction fee and then 2.9
percent so it's going to be roughly $1
worth of fees when you look at $5 and
you're taking $1 out of that. I mean
that's 20% of the fee...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. I think oh you're greedy
you're trying to make sure that I don't
ever get paid because you're gonna 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 you know
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 gonna
show you how to find that help document,
so I'm gonna go over to themeum.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/docs/configuring-guest-purchase
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 CartFlows 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
LearnDash has been around for five or six
years and as soon as Tutor LMS catches
up with that quiz builder, refines it
which you know quite frankly the
bugs that I was running into, they're
not massive they were just...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'll 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 LearnDash has had a really
pleasant user experience on the front
end. They added this focus mode and LearnDash
version 3.0 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 you know styling
options built right into the plug-in
itself, then wow they've caught up in
less than six months from March until
the middle of August. You know that
would be really really impressive so
I've definitely got my eye on 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
more favorable score than I would
otherwise because I'm taking into
consideration all that they've
accomplished. So far I've seen that
changelog 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 road map
so if you need something that works
right now go ahead get one of the big
dogs get LearnDash, try out LifterLMS, 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 I think this one might be
something worth grabbing and then you
know you've got that 30 days to see how
things get refined over the next month.
So I'm gonna 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 down in the comments as I
mentioned at the beginning of the video
I'm gonna be keeping track of any sort
of discount codes that I can offer to
you and putting them down below that
will also be a 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 gonna be hanging on to it. I'm not
gonna 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 CartFlows
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.
[Music]
