LearnDash 3.0 is finally here! (Spoiler: It’s awesome)

LearnDash is the proverbial WordPress LMS plugin (in our opinion), however, much has been said about it’s “clunkyness” and poor backend interface for building courses. All of that changed after the release of LearnDash 3.0.

Quick Backstory of LearnDash 3.0

We’ve written before about LearnDash being our go-to LMS plugin for clients who want to host their own online course on their WordPress site.

However, when it comes to other LMS tools (such as Teachable or Thinkific), it doesn’t stack up from a user experience and on-boarding perspective.

Courses were confusing to build. Lessons were hard to organize (and re-use).

And you needed to rely on a plethora of third-party plugins to get LearnDash to look like it belonged in the year 2019.

All that changed with LearnDash 3.0:

Rapid Quick Takes

LearnDash 3.0 released on May 28, 2019 and is less than a week old (as of this writing) so it’ll take a bit of time getting used to.

But after poking around on a demo site, we’ve found some gems that we are giddy about.

For example, you can now natively incorporate your own theme’s colors in the settings:

Before LearnDash 3.0, you needed an advanced degree in CSS and PHP to have it look and behave like it belonged in your website.

For most web developers this wasn’t an issue, however, for the common person looking to build and host their own online course, this was too big of a learning curve to overcome.

The drag-and-drop backend course builder is very nice:

The old LearnDash course builder had “drag-and-drop” functionality, but the kind that made you want to pull your hair out.

This new course builder is functional and, well, it works.

When working with clients, this used to be the most dreaded part of building their course. Now we’re kind of excited.

A simple registration feature that works:

Look how simple it is to login to a course.

For many of our clients, we jerry-rigged a login/enrollment feature with WooCommerce.

Now it looks like we don’t have to anymore.

This simple enrollment or login pop-up is bound to reduce abandonment rates for users.

The quiz builder is no longer a nightmare:

Did we mention how the old LearnDash course builder wanted to make you pull your hair out?

Well the quiz builder was much worse (like pluck-your-eyeballs-out worse).

Now the LearnDash 3.0 quiz builder is slimmed down and simple to use.

Look how easy it is to search and rearrange the questions:

Dream come true.

Introducing, Focus Mode:

Look how clean this is. It’s even more beautiful on mobile:

According to LearnDash:

By simply activating a single setting you enable this distraction-free experience that looks great and is easy to use. LearnDash Focus Mode has been specifically designed to help increase both learner retention and course completion rates.

And given the ever increasing role that mobile learning has in online education, we took the time to make sure that your courses look just as good on mobile devices – giving your learners a consistent experience no matter how they decide to access your content.

Conclusion

LearnDash 3.0 has changed the game. After building dozens of custom online courses with LearnDash for ourselves and for clients, we’re confident the team addressed all the major pain points and built a truly wonderful LMS tool.

If you’d like to test out LearnDash 3.0 for yourself, for a limited time Hub members get $40 off at sign up.