Getting Started

I hope this getting started guide will not only get you past the initial hurdles of getting started with online learning but also open your eyes to the immense educational potential it offers.

Coding Skills Needed

Problem Solving Skills

Imagination

What is the ESTU LMS

ESTU Elearning is a learning management system (LMS) built on top of WordPress.

I have tried to create a platform that delivers a great user experience while incorporating all the essential tools our school needs to support effective teaching and learning.

Easily create courses, deliver quizzes, award certificates, manage users, download reports, and so much more! By using this LMS, you have access to the latest e-learning industry trends for creating robust learning experiences.

If you are brand new to the ESTU LMS (Learning Management System), this is a great place to start. This section will show you how to create and manage courses on ESTU Learning Management System.

You’ll learn how to create courses, assign lessons & topics, build out complex quizzes with a variety of question types, grade assignments and more. We’ll also explain some settings, which provide a way for you to customize the LMS to meet your specific online course needs.

Planning

So, you’ve decided to create your first online course. Now what? Where do you start?

Get a piece of paper and a pen. Go retro!

Believe me, this will save you a lot of hassle afterwards.

Plan your course

Questions to ask:

What is the goal you want to achieve with the course? Just wanna get your feet wet, want to get some self-marked quizzes up, or perhaps create a world-class online course that will establish you as a god in the elearning arena?
What will be the duration of your course? A couple of hours, a month, or a whole year?
How do you want to break the course down? Just a couple of quizzes, maybe a few lessons, or a complete course with topics within lessons within the course? Drawing the schematic would be great at this stage.

Course Name: Verb To Be

Course Description: One of the most important verbs in English is the “to be” verb. Learn about its meaning and uses in the English language.

Lesson 1: How to use the “to be” verb
Lesson 2: Forms of “to be”
Topic 1: Base form: Be
Topic 2: Present
Topic 3: Past: Was / Were
Topic 4: Past Participle: been
Topic 5: Continuous: being
Topic 6: Passive form
Lesson 3: Questions in English with the “to be” verb
Lesson 4: Examples of the “to be” verb

Quiz: Course Quiz

Courses

Courses are the backbone of any learning curriculum. This section will break down everything you can do with the courses—customize settings, add content, control access and more.

So you’ve decided to build a course, chosen a course name and jotted down the skeleton on paper. Let’s get started.

First of all, in the top menu, click on LMS -> My Courses -> Add New Course.

On the Add New Course page:

Fill in the title of your new course.
Click on the Builder menu item at the top.

The Course Builder

The Elearn course builder provides an easy, intuitive way to build out your courses. You can add new sections, lessons, topics & quizzes without ever leaving the page. This serves as a skeleton of the course, as well as an easy to access place to edit or reorder parts of your course.

Shared Course Steps

Shared course steps allows you to reuse a lesson, topic and/or quiz across multiple courses. A few key benefits of shared course steps include:

On the right-hand side, you can find a list of lessons, topics, and quizzes that you can drag into your courses.

However, in this guide we’ll create a very simple course from scratch.

Now let’s add the lessons and topics. If you have a large course, you can also add Section Headers to divide your lessons up into different sections. However, for the purpose of this short course, we have no need for that.

Course Builder - Course Skeleton

Course Settings Page

Before we continue with editing the lessons and topics, let’s set the course settings first.

Settings:

There are a few settings we need to look at on this page, we’ll go through them from top to bottom:

Course Materials: This is for you to upload course materials such as PDF files.
Course Certificate: You can create a certificate for the course that will be issued upon successful completion.
Course Content: You can generally leave this as Always Visible.
Custom Pagination: Speaks for itself, but can generally be left as default unless you have a very large course.
Access Mode: Open means everyone will see the course and can enroll themselves. Closed means you control who gets enrolled. Choose Closed.
Course Prerequisites: Do you want the students to finish another course before starting this one? Specify that course here.
Course Points: Students can accumulate course points upon successful completion of courses. How many points to set here? I don’t know. This should be agreed upon among the teachers.
Course Access Expiration: Will the course expire? When, and do you want to delete all student data regarding the course upon expiration?
Course Progress: Linear – Students must complete each step before continuing to the next. They must also press the Mark Complete button each time. Troublesome if your students are either forgetful or not so smart. Free form – Access lessons and topics in random order. I would personally choose this option most of the time.
Course Users: Enroll users in your course. You could alternatively – and more efficiently – create a group for your students and then enroll the group.

Course Groups

Enroll your students as a group in the course. This means you would first have tocreate a new group and then add your students to the new group.

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