Episode 11

In this Episode Michelle and Jeff chat with Jack Kitterhing about all the latest developments in LearnDash, and what’s on the roadmap going forward.

Mentioned in this episode:

• LearnDash
• MemberDash
• LearnDash on Twitter/X
• LearnDash on Facebook
• Jack Kitterhing on Twitter/X
• jak.dev

Episode Transcript

[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress Universe brought to you by StellarWP.

Welcome to the next episode of WP Constellations. We love exploring the WordPress universe, and today we’re actually exploring, like, the internal little universe, our own stellar verse. I’m here, of course, with my co host, Jeff Chandler. Jeff, it’s great to see you. How are you?

[00:01:26] Jack: Hello. Hello.

[00:01:26] Jeff: Having a good morning and looking forward to this show.

[00:01:29] Michelle: Me too, because we have an esteemed guest with us today who’s actually a co worker. So I’m not really sure if you’re a guest or not, Jack, but we are joined by the LearnDash product manager, Jack Kitterhing. Jack, thanks for being with us today. How are you?

[00:01:45] Jack: Yeah, thanks for having me, Michelle. It’s great to be here with you and Jeff and looking forward to digging into the world of LearnDash and Stellar.

[00:01:52] Michelle: That’s right, the world of LearnDash, which is awesome. It’s an amazing product. I have been digging into it a little bit more myself and helping. I actually helped a nonprofit set it up recently, so I have a little more knowledge than I did a year ago, I’ll say. But can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do as the product manager for LearnDash?

[00:02:12] Jack: Yeah, so I live in England, hence the weird accent, which probably sounds very unique to everyone that’s listening to this podcast.

And I, as the product manager of LearnDash, basically lead the strategy for LearnDash, all the products, LearnDash Cloud. I manage our engineering team and I also manage our other product owners that we have in the LearnDash organization. So you’ll see me doing anything from high level strategy to tactical execution to partnerships and everything in between.

[00:02:44] Michelle: And you do it so well. We love working with you because personally, I love the fact that you’re very clear about things that you need, and I think you’re very well organized that way, so it makes it easier to work with you. So thank you for that.

[00:02:56] Jack: Well, thank you.

[00:02:57] Michelle: As most people know, LearnDash is a learning management system. But can you tell us a little bit about what some of the main features of LearnDash are? So if somebody hasn’t used LearnDash before, what kinds of things can they expect when they log in?

[00:03:09] Jack: Absolutely. So we like to say that LearnDash is the easiest way to get your course online. So whether you’ve got a huge course and you’re in traditional education and you’ve got hundreds of lessons and thousands of topics and all these quizzes, or whether you’re a content creator and you’ve got a mini course that you want to get started on, TikTok, whatever way you want to go, LearnDash does it all. So we’ve got quizzes, we’ve got AI, which we’re going to touch on later in the conversation, so I won’t go too deep into that. Now we have some very exciting new AI features, and certificates. So whether you want to award someone for doing a great job in their course, completing their course, certificates are a great way to do that, which you can also extend with our gamification add on, which is a fantastic way to really engage the user in the content and kind of drive them through the course, because one of the biggest challenges any course creator will have is someone actually completing the course. So any way you can give interactivity to a course is fantastic.

And then we have a ton of great stuff in our premium add ons. We have a ton of premium add ons. We have ProPanel, which is perfect for reporting. We have Groups Plus for those that really want to deep dive into organizations. So a great example there, be Stellar if Stellar wants to use that internally. You could have each of the teams of their own and their own teams.

All the users, the managers can see the reports. So we have a load of great stuff in LearnDash.

[00:04:36] Michelle: I will say a plus one for sure on the gamification part. I mean, I love all of our stuff, right? But the gamification part, I will tell you that I have been learning Spanish for over 1000 days straight because I don’t want to lose my streak on Duolingo. Right? So the gamification part, but there’s other parts of the gamification that I couldn’t care about at all. So having multiple ways to make sure that people are engaged and continue learning, I think is brilliant, for sure. And I’m glad that that’s part of what we do. Yeah, there’s just so much that goes into making LearnDash such a great product.

Some of what we focus lately on in tech and in WordPress, I’ve seen a lot of conversation, of course, is AI. And so AI is implemented into LearnDash now. So how do people use AI within LearnDash to build their courses?

[00:05:27] Jack: So we have some really exciting AI features. We currently have two main features in AI. So we currently have a course outline builder which allows you to generate a course with all lessons included, just from a prompt to the AI. So you can say, hey, I’d love a course around the basics of golf for a beginner. And the AI will generate you an outline that walks you through everything that’s needed. And then you can go in and fill in the content. And some people have asked us there around that AI piece of hey, why don’t you generate all the content for it? Why is it only the lesson title? And I think a really good point of that is when you’re selling the course, you’re selling your knowledge. The point of the AI outline builder is to help write this block of oh, how should I structure my course? Should this information be relevant? And that’s really what the course outline builder can help you with. So then you can look at it and you can be like, great, I can now fill in all my knowledge in these gaps and then you’ve got a full built course ready to go. And the second feature right now is the Quiz Builder, which everyone loves, the Quiz Builder. The Quiz Builder is absolutely incredible to build an entire quiz based around all our question types with the answer key, with the correct and incorrect answers.

In a couple of clicks you can tell it, hey, build me a quiz with five questions around WordPress and it will generate that in sub 60 seconds and you got a full quiz that anyone on the website can take.

So the quiz piece is fantastic. And then as a bonus for anyone listening, we are currently looking into virtual instructors. The virtual instructor will actually be able to interact with your students, help them out in their course where they get stuck and help provide and prompt them with pieces to help them move forward. So we’re really excited about virtual instructors too.

[00:07:17] Michelle: That’s brilliant. So basically you can have an incredibly passive income once you’ve gone through the process of setting up your courses, as long as you continue to drive people through them.

[00:07:28] Jack: Exactly.

Virtual instructor like you say it really brings down that element of, oh, I need to spend 5 hours with each student. And the idea around it was, if you think about traditional education in a classroom setting, you got like one assistant for 30 kids, and that’s really difficult because you might have a challenging kid in the class that needs all that attention, and then you kind of neglect the other 29. So the virtual instructor gives everyone the chance to have a fair education at what they’re trying to learn. They no longer get stuck. They can ask this virtual human that. It’s like, yeah, we can help you with this. This is what you need to do. And there’s obviously challenges around there. Like you don’t want the kids entering in inappropriate information, you don’t want the AI to return inappropriate information. So that’s what we’re working through at the moment. All them kind of pieces of like, how do we prevent someone asking something they shouldn’t ask?

[00:08:22] Michelle: I would not have thought of that. But that is a very important thing to make sure is baked into the way we’re using it. Absolutely.

I love that. Another thing is that we have Bunny.Net integrated into LearnDash. What does that mean? What is Bunny.Net? How is that serving us in LearnDash?

[00:08:39] Jack: Bunny.Net is the most popular way for our customers to host their videos. So it’s an amazing system, it’s a great CDN, and it is also one of the cheapest, which is probably also why it’s one of the most popular, but it is generally the best UI, UX, everything there. And so for a very long time in LearnDash, we have a video progression feature that shows the video and loads it from external sources. And we integrated with Vimeo, Wistia and all them usual ones, but we never integrated with Bunny.Net. So you could embed a Bunny.Net video onto your course, but it didn’t work with video progression. So what that basically means is, know you couldn’t hide the Bunny.Net controls, you couldn’t prevent someone from advancing to the next lesson until they’ve watched all the video. So the Bunny.Net integration adds all them functions in, and it also saved the users having to buy a plugin that was like another $199 to integrate Bunny.Net. So now you get that inline dash out of the box, and it’s a great way for our customers to enjoy all the benefits that Bunny.Net brings.

[00:09:45] Michelle: I love that. Now I’m going to throw a question in here we didn’t prep you for because something just popped into my head, but we also have LearnDash cloud. So what I love about that is that we have people who have built their websites on platforms other than WordPress, and now they’re like, LearnDash looks awesome. How do I use LearnDash? But I already have this website. I don’t want to redo my entire website. So tell us a little bit, if you can, about LearnDash Cloud and how that’s changing the landscape of what’s going on with LMS.

[00:10:18] Jack: So LearnDash Cloud is like you say, Michelle, a really great way if you’ve got an existing website and then you want a course to really add that course component to it, because you can spin up a LearnDash cloud site from sign up to deployment of the site. It’s like sub 60 seconds. It’s incredibly quick. You get LearnDash. You also get what is going to be solid security included for free. So you get all that great stuff bundled up in Learn Cloud ready to go run through the setup wizard. You get a fully built site with Kadence using all the design wizards that we built into cloud. And then you can still connect it to your domain so you can still say like, hey, I want courses at Michelle.com. Rather than just being like, oh, some weird name. When you sign up for a teachable, you sign up for a podia and you get this like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, teachable.com. It doesn’t make any sense to anyone. You don’t want your users with that experience. So LearnDash Cloud is a great way to kind of bring that back into your site.

And it really is that hybrid of a SaaS application, but with control. You control the content, you own the content and you can extend it any way you like. So a lot of customers come to us from other SaaS platforms like Teachable, like a podia, like a kajabi. Oh, we like their platform, but we couldn’t extend it and so we found you because we can do what we want to do with it.

Go and hire a developer to build you a custom plugin, if that’s what you need, and you can deploy it on the platform. Go to wordpress.org and download one of the 50,000 plus plugins and install it. You can literally do anything you want. So that’s really where LearnDash Cloud comes into its own.

[00:11:58] Michelle: I love it. And even if you do have a WordPress website, this takes care of all of the issues of having to figure out how to do all the configuration and have all of those other things like themes and security. And also it’s brilliant. So I love what you’re doing with all of that.

[00:12:13] Jack: Exactly. We actually have, it’s very popular agencies for that very reason, because an agency loves it. Like hey, the clients come to us and they want an OMS site and sub ten minutes. They click a button and they’ve got the site fully built out of cadence and everything in it and it’s great for them.

[00:12:29] Michelle: Yeah, it’s beautiful.

[00:12:32] Jeff: LearnDash has been around for a long time, so we’ve got a lot of people out there with various levels of knowledge with it. But LearnDash recently opened up a submission process to the certified experts page. Can you explain the process for getting listed on that page?

[00:12:50] Jack: Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, Jeff, over the years we’ve had tons of people with great LearnDash knowledge. We have a really thriving third party ecosystem in LearnDash, both for third party add ons, but also experts which can be from development agencies that are going to build your website, freelancers or even people like instructional designers to help you create the most engaging course for the best learning outcomes. You can do so on the website. If you go to forward slash experts at the bottom of that page you’ll see that there’s a small call out banner that has an “apply here.” So if you click on that, you’ll open up a form, just fill in that form and that goes into our system.

Then I get a ping from Jeff on Slack with hey Jack, someone submitted a form. Can you take a look at it?

I then go through that form. Other team members are involved in the process. We all look at it and consider it on different variables and then you’ll get a success back or you’ll get a decline. But if it’s a decline, never feel like hey, you can’t apply again. We do allow you to apply after six months. I know that feels very much like applying for a credit card that declines you. Then they say, hey, apply six months later.

We do have a great experts process and we are really looking to get the finest experts in both LearnDash, WordPress and instructional design up on that page to help our customers find who they need.

[00:14:18] Jeff: This provides insight into how kind you are because you say decline instead of rejection. Rejection is such a harsh word.

[00:14:25] Jack: It is a harsh word. We don’t reject you.

We temporarily decline you to apply at a later date.

[00:14:34] Jeff: We talked a bit about what’s in LearnDash, now we’ve talked about AI, and I know AI is a big thing going on into the future. But can you share any details on what’s being worked on? What can we look forward to in future versions of LearnDash?

[00:14:47] Jack: Yeah, for sure. So we have a lot going on in LearnDash land. I actually, the other day sent are development team a 250 bullet point document of all the features that we want to build over the next period of time. So I did have that initial like, yeah, this is a really big document, we can’t do all that in three months. But the good news is we did pick out quite a few pieces there. So we had things from our entire new template system for LearnDash, which is going to be amazing, really modernized. The interface of LearnDash on the front end for students, better navigation in the course, better learning outcomes, all that type of stuff. So that’s really exciting that we’ve got that going on right now. Our designers are working incredibly hard on that, so it’s the development team. Apart from that, we also have all the new dashboard piece coming out. So depending on when you’re listening to this podcast, on the 19 September, we are launching a course dashboard functionality for LearnDash. And this is a way to give you insights into your actual LearnDash course. It will tell you who recently enrolled, how much money your course has made you, all that type of stuff. So if you look at the LearnDash ecosystem, a lot of people say to us, oh, we have ProPanel for analytics. And that’s true, we have ProPanel for analytics. But ProPanel’s analytics are more on like, hey, this many number of students has completed this piece, deep diving into analytics. All our dashboards are kind of about that high level management piece. So this is the very first dashboard we’ll be releasing, but we’re actually working on student management dashboards, order management and more advanced ecommerce functionality. So if you are a current LearnDash customer, no doubt you’re one of the people that have messaged us and said, hey, can you add a cancel subscription function on the front end of the LearnDash website? The good news is you will soon be getting that functionality. So we’re very excited about getting that into the hands of people. It’s been long time requested and there’s so much. Jeff, do you have a spare 5 hours to go through the…

[00:16:49] Jeff: No, no, I absolutely do not. Neither do our listeners.

But as product manager, I would think that you probably have a good handle on what’s going on across the landscape. But as you look across the e-learning Landscape, what kind of trends are you noticing?

[00:17:07] Jack: Yeah, so some interesting trends. I think one of the biggest ones that obviously we currently got in the WordPress space is the initiative.

Know everyone in Make WordPress that Matt announced at WordCamp US. Nearly lost my words there at WordCamp US. So about the initiative between LMS systems in the WordPress space, trying to play nicely together to compete on the bigger. You know, if you look at the LMS landscape, Canvas is the big one. They control predominantly most of the market space and they have a bigger market share than anyone else. None of the actual WordPress LMS plugins or systems even register on that market space scale. They aren’t even in that strataverse. And a lot of that is, and I mispronounced that, but I didn’t have to point it out, a lot of people miss that. That is because traditional schools, universities, colleges, they use these systems to integrate with other systems. And that’s something that you may think, oh, well, WordPress can do that. That’s kind of what WordPress is built on. WordPress is built on extendability, WordPress is built on integrating with other systems and platforms. But it’s not that easy. There are global specifications for LMS systems that these enterprise type LMS use that none of the current WordPress LMS integrate with. And that’s really, I think what we’re looking for there is kind of some integration with that specification. Maybe it’s going to be coming up with that own specification that we can integrate. There’s a lot of good work going on in that LMS slack in the Make WordPress channel and a lot of discussion going on. So it’s a big piece, but it’s very interesting. And then in the wider space you really have a lot going on with purchasing. So when you say, oh, is that a trend? And you think, well, that’s weird, it’s LMSs, is that really a trend? The trend is that people have stepped away from a traditional course. No longer is a course just a lesson going through a topic, going through a quiz and then finishing. It’s about offline quizzing, it’s about going to a test center and taking in person. It’s about attending a Zoom webinar and making sure that the student marked is complete. It’s about going to a Facebook Live, even now watching a TikTok. There’s everything there where someone just wants to make sure that someone saw this content in a place. And it’s about one-to-one coaching. No longer is it about, hey, you brought this course, have fun. If you get stuck, don’t come and ask anything. Because tough luck. It’s about building that in and selling it for the student. It’s about better education for the course creator. For the content creator, it’s not only about better education for their students, but it’s also about building themselves a sustainable income. It’s about building themselves a way where they can upsell other pieces of their knowledge to people that want to learn about it while providing themselves a living so that they’re not going to go and have to work three jobs and drive Uber in the evenings when they don’t want to. So there’s all that. And that’s really interesting in the course space right now is how content creators are finding ways to make more money.

[00:20:23] Michelle: When you mentioned that, you made me think about the fact that a lot of our content creators, our learning content creators aren’t setting out to be teachers to begin with. They are experts in their field that then people say to them, hey, could you teach me how to do that? Or I want to learn how to do what you do. And so they start creating these courses in addition to the work that they do, whether they’re a photographer or a chef or stand up comedian, whatever it is. Right? And so one of the things that I think is the beauty of working within a product like something that works with WordPress is you keep mentioning extendability, but it’s not just extendability, it’s integration with what you already have. And the fact that LearnDash is really customizable to meet your brand colors, your branding, to fit into everything. And on your website you can still have your merch store and you can still be selling other things in a relation. So it can be this whole career that you build, that you’ve integrated this education into. So how customizable is LearnDash for brand colors and theming and things like that. Could you talk about that for a minute?

[00:21:26] Jack: Yeah. With LearnDash, you can literally do anything. So I’m going to give you two pieces of information here, because I’m going to say on one side, you have LearnDash as it sits now, which has customizable colors in the admin. You can customize, like the button color, you can customize some of the other colors in the area, like headers and things like that, but it only has four or five options. If you want to get more involved, sure, you can apply custom CSS. There’s also some great add ons in the ecosystem that allow you to literally change anything on the LearnDash page. But coming up in our new template system, what we actually have is a bunch of customizer controls. So you can literally go through and customize anything, any color you can think of, any font size, any padding, any margin. The entire piece will be fully controllable by the content creator. And we really wanted to do that because, like we touched on, it’s no longer about just traditional education, and people want to represent their courses in unique ways, which comes back to the integration piece. That’s why we have things like the Elementor integration. So, Elementor, we provide everyone with a great set of widgets. They can place it in their template where they want. They’re no longer restricted to, oh, this is our page. This is how it looks.

[00:22:41] Michelle: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things that really makes it truly a thing of beauty. Right. So if you are creating courses on Kajabi or any of those other ones that I can’t think of off the top of my head right now because I don’t use them, you are really limited because you are working within somebody else’s system. But when you add LearnDash, you’re adding it to your system, and so you can make it be your brand, it can be your voice, which I think is a beautiful thing.

So our next question is, what else do you think you might like to share with our audience? I’m going to say don’t read us those 250 bullet points that you have.

[00:23:12] Jack: I bet that’s my plan.

[00:23:15] Michelle: I know you’re dying to. It’s like we got another, what, 40 minutes? We could do that.

What other things about LearnDash, maybe we didn’t ask you about that you’d like to share with our audience?

[00:23:25] Jack: Well, there’s two things I’m going to share. So, number one is going back to the customizability.

One thing that I think a lot of people have problems in the LMS space is they’re restricted by what that LMS defines as their structure. So while an LMS has to define that loosely, they’re restricted to, like, a course is a course. A lesson is called a lesson. A topic is called a topic. LearnDash has the ability to customize any label you want. So then if you’re in the WordPress space, you may be thinking, oh, yeah, gee, you can go and customize the translation file and change it that way. Sure you can. But we actually have a custom label feature in LearnDash. In the advanced settings of LearnDash, you dive into the custom labels. You can rename your lessons as modules. You can rename your quizzes as exams, you can do anything you want. It changes it through the entire user interface, both on the admin and on the front end for the student.

That’s a really neat way. We find people use that a lot because they don’t want to be restricted to, oh, I don’t do lessons, I do modules and oh, I don’t do modules, I do chapters. So they have all these different pieces where they can really do it, whereas on a SaaS based LMS system, you’re restricted to what they offer you. And that really goes to show how customizable LearnDash truly is.

Then another piece that I’d like to share with everyone is not really LearnDash. I’m kind of cheating here, but it’s under the LearnDash family is MemberDash. So MemberDash is our brand new membership plugin for WordPress. It is incredible, if I do say so myself, and everyone really should go and check it out. LearnDash.com member plugin.

It’s an amazing membership plugin. It really is one of the first membership plugins in the space that’s done something new in such a long time. There’s a ton of great membership plugins on the market. There’s been no people to disrupt that. So LearnDash is coming with MemberDash. We’re looking to disrupt the membership space, and ultimately, if you are a content creator, we’re looking to empower you to make more money. The purpose of MemberDash is that, oh, in COVID, you started out doing some TikTok videos, and then you’re like, people like my TikTok videos? Oh, someone’s asking me, how do I do that? And then you’re like, I don’t want to build a full course. Like, a full course is a lot of work. It’s not that straightforward to build a full course. So I’m going to go and write some posts on my website and just protect them with MemberDash and charge people a membership fee. And then once you’ve got going with that, you might be thinking, great, I want a full course. Then MemberDash integrates perfectly with LearnDash and you can sell your members a LearnDash course at the same time. So it’s a really neat way to extend the ability to make money, offer more things to your customers, and really empower you as a content creator to make the most out of anything even we’ve had people ask us like, well, why would I use it with LearnDash? Like, LearnDash protects my content.

Yeah, that’s true. But what about when you go to university and they tell you like, hey, go and buy $10,000 worth of books. And then you’re like, oh, well, there’s a use MemberDash with the digital downloads and you can sell your students the digital versions of the books they need to complete the course. You can sell them one on one coaching with MemberDash. Put a Zoom link behind a lock page. There’s so much you can do there and combine it that they really do connect wonderfully together.

[00:26:55] Michelle: It’s a perfect complement, really.

[00:26:57] Jack: It is. It absolutely is. It is like ketchup and French fries.

If you like ketchup, if you like ketchup. If you don’t like ketchup, then just completely ignore that comment.

[00:27:09] Jeff: What about fish and chips?

[00:27:11] Jack: It is a perfect, yeah, fish and chips. The fresh fish and chips is perfect.

[00:27:16] Michelle: I love it. That’s awesome.

You’ve heard it here, folks. We’ve got some really cool things coming online. We’ll do this again next year. We’ll see what else has come off that list of 250 bullet points.

[00:27:29] Jack: We’ll see how many we get through.

[00:27:31] Michelle: That’s right. It’s like Wilson’s twelve points or something in World War I. But now we’re at LearnDash’s 250 points of awesomeness. I think that’s the, you need to rename the top of that document 250.

[00:27:43] Jack: I agree. I’m going to do that literally as I sign off on this call.

[00:27:47] Michelle: I love it.

How do we find out more about you, Jack? And also about LearnDash? Where do we find everything online? Find you online? If people have questions, how do they get in contact?

[00:27:58] Jack: Yes, you can find me online. I am at Jack Dev. That is J-A-K. Because unfortunately, with the first name Jack, it’s not very easy to get a short domain. I did want to buy, I think it was Jack.com or something like that. I found out Jack Darcey owned it, the former Twitter CEO and founder. So I was like, I’m not going to get that. That’s not in my budget. So I am at Jak Dev. You can also find me on Twitter.

And that is the best way to contact me.

[00:28:28] Michelle: Yep. And LearnDash is at LearnDash.com and you can find all the socials right there on the website there. But we will also include them in the show notes for this episode. So if you are listening to this and you’re looking to find those links, go to stellarwp.com slash Podcast. Find Jack’s episode and all of the show notes and the transcript for this episode will be there. So Jack, thank you so much for spending some time and introducing our audience, the stellar audience, to all the things that are coming down the line with LearnDash and all the awesomeness that already exists.

[00:28:59] Jack: Thanks so much for having me. It was fun.

[00:29:01] Michelle: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s fun, isn’t it? I love it. And Jeff, thanks for co hosting with me, as usual. It’s always fun.

[00:29:07] Jeff: Not a problem. It was a fun time. Good times.

[00:29:10] Michelle: Yeah, we love getting to talk to people all over WordPress, and we realize that everybody’s time is very precious because we know what your schedule looks like, especially Jack. But thanks so much for spending some time with us, and we will see everybody else out there in the Stellar and WordPress Universe on our next episode. Thanks for being here.

WP Constellations is a production of StellarWP, home of The Events Calendar, LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, Iconic, SolidWP, Orderable, and Restrict Content Pro. Learn more about the StellarVerse at stellarwp.com.