Our client Virtual CME, LLC is a medical education company based out of the US and wanted to sell courses based on Radiology through their website. Their preferred LMS was LearnDash and they wanted it customized to suit their needs. Their primary LearnDash customization needs were Multiple Certificate Generation on completion of course, Custom Navigation Sidebar for courses, Survey Form at the end of the course and Login area for their 3D workstation.
LearnDash Customizations for a Medical Education Company
We customized LearnDash LMS for Virtual CME, a medical education company based in the US to allow them to generate multiple certificates for their courses, offer a more personalized and customized course navigation and other LearnDash customizations tailored to their business needs.
Client Background & Requirements
How did we provide solution?
We proposed a solution that involved using WP Job Manager with WooCommerce Subscriptions, and WC Paid Listing Add-on. We provided the solution as follows –
Multiple Certificates Generation on Course Completion
By default, LearnDash allows us to associate one certificate to a course. However, our client wanted us to customize it in a way that 2 certificates can be associated with a single course. We customized LearnDash settings using LearnDash action hooks and added a select field that would retrieve certificate templates present on the site. Later, we added an extra button on My Account page next to the original certificate button which when clicked on AJAX request dynamically fetches the second certificate template and generates the second certificate on the fly.
Custom Navigation Sidebar for Courses
LearnDash by default offers a simple navigation to access the course content. However, our client wasn’t happy with it as it would hide the topics / lessons in the course by default unless you clicked and won’t show the entire course content in a single go and even if it did it would become too long and was difficult to navigate. They wanted a Course Navigation bar that would be more like in a textbook like Chapter – Topics format.
So, we created a custom navigation bar that would show topics / lessons under Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and so on. We added a custom field on the backend that would enable the instructors to choose topics under these chapters. We also added a functionality that when a topic / lesson is completed by the student, then the bullet next to that topic / lesson would turn to green color (from black color) indicating that topic has been completed.
Mandatory Survey Form at the end of the course
One problem our client was facing is that they needed all students who take the courses to fill a survey form at the end of the course. But many students would skip that step probably because it was optional. And once course completion certificates were made available to them, no one was interested to go back to site and fill the form.
So, we created the survey form using Gravity forms and added the form’s shortcode under a topic and we customized it in a way that only after a student makes a successful form submission for the survey form, that topic would get automatically marked as completed and eventually that would trigger the course to be completed and only then the certificate would be accessible to students for download. This ensured that all students who take the course fill the survey form.
Customizing ‘My Account Page’ and Courses pages
One more requirement made by the client’s team was that they wanted us to customize ‘My Account Page’, to allow students to download both certificates, download case logs and show remaining days to complete the course. We added custom fields in the course that allows instructors to attach a document in each course as a case log.
For the remaining count, we added a custom field that would allow them to set the number of days in which the course is to be completed. And the number would be updated daily based on the enrollment date. We also added a custom field to the course that allows instructors to add a downloadable file for the course from the backend and we added a login area for the 3D workstation inside the course page.