Any plans / suggestions for large courses, collapsible widget?

Hey WPCrafter, we appreciate the feedback and can totally see your point. There are others who have also voiced this feature request with the syllabus sidebar widget. It comes up when people have very high volume lesson courses.

We will keep this request in mind for the future for LifterLMS and the themes we are developing for LifterLMS.

I believe the best solution is to have an option to only expend the current section’s lessons in the sidebar widget … kind of like an accordion. Would that work for you?

I’ve seen other LifterLMS users adjust their architecture so that they carve out each “section” into it’s own course. They simply change from selling a course to selling a membership that contains a group of courses. Might that work?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Thats a good suggestion, thanks. That may work for this site in mind since the site only has 1 course available.

Yea an accordion would most likely be the most flexible. But your suggestion is fine for now.

Also there is hack I figured out with using one of your shortcodes in a text widget. The shortcode will only show the lessons in the current module. This makes sense as well, but has some styling challenges.

Since the topic of the course syllabus widget is being discussed, I would like to see an indication of free lessons in this widget. Currently free lessons are only indicated in the course outline which I do not use.

I would suggest that free lessons are shown in a different color, such as green with a short blurb at the bottom of widget that lesson links in green are free.

Thanks.

Grant, I appreciate your additional feedback and feature request on this.

Add me as another person requesting this feature. I’ve purchased LearnDash, but I’m in the 30-day refund period and have started evaluating LifterLMS. The backend experience of LifterLMS is far superior than LearnDash, but the front end student experience of LearnDash is superior to LifterLMS. The widget implementation is one example of LearnDash’s superior student experience.

If I had to choose (and I will in about 20 days), I’d choose my users over myself. The multiple-course hack you suggest would detract even more from the user experience. I plan to sell my courses for $500-$1000 each, so the user experience needs to be optimum.

In addition to this sidebar issue, LifterLMS does not scale as well on small screens. In particular, the lesson listing on the main course page becomes illegible.

And treating topics as only dividers with no opportunity for an overview of the area to be covered and how it will tie together is a serious detriment. At the moment, in LifterLMS, I have to do this:

TOPIC: What is Precision Machine Design?
Lesson 1: What is Precision Machine Design?
Lesson 2: Defining Performance and Accuracy in Precision Machines
Lesson 3: Accuracy, Repeatability, Resolution…
…

It looks silly and amateurish and detracts from the user experience, especially in the sidebar.

I want to be able to use the old presentation maxim:

– Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em
– Tell ’em
– Tell ’em what you told ’em

At the course level AND the topic level. Without being able to add content to the Topic, I have to use the hack I described above.

Beautifully implemented back end on LifterLMS, though. And fantastic support (especially the LifterLMS demo, which is essentially a getting started with Lifter course). I’ll keep testing Lifter.

Thanks,
Rob

Hey there @imagitec,

Thanks for all the wonderful feedback.

You have a lot more going on in your response here so I’m not trying to minimize but we’re currently testing and accepting feedback on the collapsible widget at https://trello.com/c/VbJuskUA/28-an-option-to-collapse-the-lifterlms-sidebar-sylabus-widget-by-section-and-have-them-able-to-be-opened-to-reveal-the-lessons-insi

I’m going to be closing the card soon and scheduling it for release in the next few days.

Take a look and let us know what you think before it goes to market.

Take care,