The Sensei LMS Post to Course Creator plugin allows you to transform your existing content into a lesson.
- Plugin requirements: Sensei LMS Post to Course Creator is an extension for the Sensei LMS plugin. You must install Sensei LMS version 3.5 or higher for it to work. It also requires PHP version 7.0 or higher, and WordPress version 5.7 or higher
Installing Sensei LMS Post to Course Creator
- Download the plugin to your computer.
- Login to your WordPress admin panel, and go to Plugins > Add New
- Go to Upload > Choose File and browse the folder where you downloaded the Sensei LMS Post to Course Creator plugin file.
- Double-click the plugin file, select Install Now and then Activate the plugin.
How the plugin works
First of all, make sure that you have installed and active these two free plugins on your WordPress site:
- Sensei LMS
- Sensei Post to Course Extension
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you can take the following steps to start turning your published content into courses:
- Go to Posts > All Posts in the WordPress dashboard of your site or blog.
- Check the posts you want to turn into courses. They all need to have the same category. This will allow the import tool to work.
- Go to Posts > Categories and create a new category called “Course” or similar — something you will remember.
- Go back to Posts > All Posts and use the ‘Quick Edit’ feature to ensure that each post for the lesson includes the selected/created course category. It’s totally fine if the post has more than one category assigned.
Now you can work the Import tool’s magic. Go to Tools > Posts to Course Creator in the WordPress dashboard.
From here, you choose a course name (this can be changed later), and select the category that you created for the posts in the steps listed above.
Click “Save Changes“, and that’s all set! ⭐️
The import process begins; it shouldn’t take long to complete. Once that’s done, head to Sensei LMS > Courses: you should see your new course over there.
Let’s fine-tune your course
Now that your content has been copied into a course, with the structure of the lessons applied, you can work on “polishing” the content and making it even more lessons/course-looking.
Change the lesson titles
Chances are that the title of your original blog posts doesn’t sound like a good title for a lesson: it can be too long or descriptive, and you want to focus the title on something different included in the content.
Lesson titles are usually way shorter than blog post titles. We recommend keeping them nice and short, with no more than three or four words; lesson titles are displayed in the course outlines and when students navigate a course — that is why shorter is better.
To change the lesson title:
- Go to Sensei LMS > Lessons: you should see the lessons imported.
- Hover over each lesson to select the Quick Edit link.
- Edit the lesson title down to a few descriptive words. You don’t need to edit the ‘slug’, the link related to the lesson, or anything else. However, you can do it if you’d like.
Order your lessons
It’s possible that the way you created and published your blog posts back in the day doesn’t match the order of your lessons in the course. You can change that!
- Go to Sensei LMS > Lessons and look for the link at the top to Order Lessons.
- Choose the course and drag and drop the lessons into a different order as you prefer
Edit Lesson Transitions and Content
Now that you have done the basic edit to your lessons and course, you can review each lesson and check that everything flows nicely.
You may want to add more content to give the content more context and make it look and sound more like a course. Depending on the original content in the blog posts, this step may take a little time – the more content you turn into a course, the more time this might take.
Adding an introduction and a closure to the course is a good touch: you may want to add an introduction to the first lesson that shares more about you and the course objectives.
In the last lesson, you may want to include a thank you note and any next steps to take, such as a link to other resources or how to contact you.
The lessons can be enriched with more complex content, like images, charts, or embedded videos; you can add or update more links, resources, or downloadable files. The sky is the limit!
You can publish the course and then go back at any time to review the content.
How to add Quizzes
One way to keep students engaged in your course is to add quizzes: they can help your student check how much they have learnt. This is also a nice feature that distinguishes your courses from your blog post content well!
The Post to Courses plugin includes the option to create quizzes to test your students’ progress: we have some suggestions and a handy how-to guide for Quizzes you can check out!
You can also choose how to grade the quizzes.
Elevate your courses
We have more features to integrate with the Post to Course Creator:
- Enable enabling Learning Mode for your courses which displays your courses and lessons instead of your regular WordPress theme, ensuring a distraction-free learning environment.
- Sell your courses via WooCommerce; we have a handy guide to using Sensei LMS with WooCommerce.
