LearnDash Notes is a note taking addon from LearnDash. It makes note taking a lot easier and allows instructor communication when it is needed the most during a student’s study time. This enables easy note taking and establishes two-way communication. How can you use LearnDash notes to improve the engagement and retention of your online courses? Well, in today’s post, we’re going to find out.
LearnDash is one of the most popular LMS plugins for WordPress. It has been designed in such a way that it makes online classes fun and engaging. There are several tools and addons that you can use to enhance your eLearning experience. LearnDash has a ton of native and third-party add-ons to help you build the online education platform you’re looking for.
In this post, we’re exploring the LearnDash Notes addon. This is a native addon from LearnDash that you can utilize in your online courses. This can boost your course engagement and increase the student’s chances of success.
What is LearnDash Notes?
Building an online education website with LearnDash is really easy. You simply install LearnDash, then install an LMS theme. Then you proceed to create a course with LearnDash with all the powerful features of the plugin.
LearnDash Notes is a native addon that allows students to take notes through an intuitive interface. This addon allows you to add the Notes interface directly to your courses. Your students can take notes on-site and the instructors can also communicate with your students and answer their queries whenever necessary. So LearnDash Notes provide the following benefits:
- Frontend implementation: You can place the note-taking application directly on your LearnDash course frontend. This makes note-taking easy and also allows teachers and instructors to directly communicate to improve the outcomes.
- Dependable, secure infrastructure: As LearnDash Notes is a native application, it provides a safe and secure educational and communication enhancement. And since it’s from the same LearnDash team, you won’t have to worry about integration issues.
- Streamlined communication: LearnDash Notes allows you to increase the interaction between students and teachers with asynchronous and simple tools including pop-ups, dashboard tools, and emails.
- Personalized learning: This feature is just like a notebook a student might have in a classroom. It allows them to highlight important information, summarize key points, and ask questions.
This is one of the many innovative features of LearnDash. Because when you’re learning, you need a notebook. If you don’t have one, it would be difficult to take some notes, write down some questions, highlight points, etc. It is especially useful if you’re learning while you’re outside and are unable to carry a physical notebook. It’s basically a notebook for LearnDash courses. The following image was taken from the LearnDash website which demonstrates how students can take notes and how teachers can respond.
Again it’s not just an alternative to a physical notebook. Because now the instructors or teachers can see what notes the students are taking and also communicate with them to make things clear. This is truly a good way to make learning and communication more streamlined.
LearnDash Notes core features
So far we know what LearnDash Notes is and how it helps you make your course more engaging. But what are some most notable features of the LearnDash Notes addon? To make learning more interactive and effective, LearnDash Notes was introduced. It helps students take notes and allows teachers to better communicate with students. Some of the important features of LearnDash Notes are as follows:
- Mobile friendly
- Download notes as a Microsoft Word document
- Notes can be printed
- Compatible with almost any WordPress theme
- Customizable colors
Although LearnDash Notes is compatible with almost any WordPress theme, we suggest you use any LearnDash themes for better overall results.
From the top, we’ve seen what LearnDash Notes can do and how it allows students to learn things more effectively. We’ve also looked at some features as a whole. But in the backend what are the features of LearnDash Notes? There are specific global settings for Notes which you can enable/disable. These settings are available on the LearnDash LMS > Notes > Features area.
- Editor Toolbar: This feature makes the editor toolbar available for the users.
- Character count in rich-text area: If this feature is enabled, it will include a character count for your users.
- Instructor notification: This feature allows the students to send a note to their instructors. In order for this feature to work, you need to setup a Group and assign a Group leader, and then set up the emails. The Group leaders will be the ones who will receive the notification from that group and will be able to respond. The following image has been taken from the LearnDash website. It shows how teachers can respond to students’ notes.
- Add new notes: This feature allows you to include LearnDash Notes on every course page automatically.
- Add new notes popup: This feature will allow you to add a new note popup on every course page automatically.
There are several more features that you can enable from the backend. To check out the full list of features, you can check out the LearnDash Notes documentation.
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How to use LearnDash notes
LearnDash Notes is a premium addon. So first you must purchase it. Although this isn’t a tutorial on LearnDash Notes, we will give a few starting tips to get you started with the addon. So we will take a look at how you can install the addon, discuss some settings, how to manually add Notes to your LearnDash courses, and also we will see how the Instructor notification works. This will give you an idea of how the addon works.
Installation
If you’re logged into your LearnDash WordPress site, you can simply go to Addons and select the “LearnDash Premium Add-ons” tab. From here you can click on the “Buy Now” link and it will take you to another page where you can complete your purchase.
You can also log into your LearnDash account and purchase the addon from there. Once you get the plugin, follow the given steps to install the plugin:
Step 1: Go to Plugins > Add New and click on “Upload Plugin”
Step 2: Locate the compressed (.zip) file and select it
Step 3: Click on “Install Now” and after installation, click on “Activate Plugin”
You can also check out our guide on how to install a plugin on WordPress.
LearnDash Notes Settings
After you install and activate LearnDash Notes, it is added to your WordPress dashboard. You can find it in the LearnDash LMS option in the WordPress dashboard. If you want to look at its settings, go to LearnDash > Notes > Settings. Here you can toggle various settings of the plugin. You will find how-to, features, labels, styling, and email options.
In the “How to” section you will find shortcodes needed to add notes to your LearnDash courses. You can also use the instructor notification feature from here. In the features tab, you’ll find global settings for Notes. We’ve already mentioned that above while discussing the features of the LearnDash Notes plugin.
In the Labels tab, you can edit the labels of Notes. For example, if you want to call your Notes Journal, diary, notebook, etc. you can edit that from here. You can also rename your instructor to the teacher. Here are some of the labels that you can customize:
- Note title
- Sum of characters
- Notify instructors
- Instructor was notified
- No notes added
- Added
- Submitted and much more.
You can find the entire list in the LearnDash Notes documentation. Basically, you can edit several labels of the addon to customize your Notes.
In the styling tab, you can customize the icons used in the LearnDash Notes. You can style the icons to better match your branding. You can also use Font Awesome’s icons as well.
Finally, in the email tab, you can customize the emails the users will receive where students send the notification from Notes.
Adding notes to the courses
Notes can be added to the courses through two methods mainly. You can enable the global Notes shortcodes to automatically enable notes to all the course contents. You can also manually copy and paste the Notes shortcode to each specific page (such as lessons, topics, quiz, or any page within your LearnDash site).
To automatically add notes to all your courses, navigate to LearnDash LMS > Notes > Settings > Features. Now enable Automatically include the [llms_add_new_note] shortcode when viewing Course content or Automatically include the [llms_add_new_note_popup] shortcode when viewing Course content. You can enable both of these features if you want.
If you want to manually add LearnDash Notes to your pages, go to LearnDash LMS > Notes > Settings > How To and copy Add New Notes or Notes pop-up shortcodes. Now simply go to the page where you want to edit the notes and edit it. Then find the Shortcode block in Gutenberg (or any shortcode block element if you’re using a different page builder) and paste in your shortcodes. Now update that page and LearnDash Notes should be added to that page. Now you have Notes for LearnDash on the pages you want.
Instructor notifications
The instructor notification is a great way through which students can interact with their course teachers. They can share their notes with the teacher through email and the teacher can then respond to it via email. When the student is logged in, they will receive the notification that the teacher or instructor has responded to their email.
In order for this feature to work, you must create a Group and assign a Group Leader. This group leader will be the teacher. Now navigate to LearnDash LMS > Notes > Settings > Features and enable the Instructor Notification feature. Also, set up emails with a subject line and email body for both students and teachers.
LearnDash Notes – Price
As we said before, LearnDash Notes plugin or addon is a premium product from LearnDash. In order to get this addon, you have to purchase it separately. Even if you have LearnDash Cloud, this addon won’t be included in it. You have to purchase it separately. This might be a little upsetting because the LearnDash cloud includes some really great addons such as the LearnDash ProPanel, the certificate builder, etc.
There are three plans for LearnDash Notes. These are available for 1 site, 10 sites, and for unlimited sites. Following are the LearnDash Notes price plans:
- 1 site for $49/year
- 10 sites for $99/year
- Unlimited sites for $199/year
All the plans include updates and support. So if you want to purchase LearnDash Notes, head over to the official site and get a license to make education more interactive for your platform’s students.
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Conclusion
Note-taking is very important when you want to make learning effective. LearnDash Notes is a very innovative addition in the large feature list of LearnDash. However, LearnDash Notes is a premium addon so you have to purchase it separately. We know we’ve mentioned this several times, but in case you’ve missed it we are mentioning it again!
Jokes aside, this addon might be very useful for learners and teachers as well. Many students watch online courses and lessons while they’re outside or traveling. At that time, a physical notebook might be difficult to take out. In that case, a feature like this will be immensely helpful. Not only that, a student can also share his/her notes with the teacher and ask questions. The teacher then will be able to respond to those questions. Students can also print out their notes with one click. So we would say this is an excellent feature to have.
So what do you think about LearnDash Notes? Do you use it? If you do let us know how you like it in the comments below.
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