myCred and WP Courseware can be integrated to incentivize your online course students and keep them engaged. Let’s take a look at how it works!

Over the last four years of WP Courseware, we’ve been able to create quite a few integrations to link our LMS plugin‘s core functionality with other WordPress solutions. Of course, we’ve focused primarily on integrating with popular membership and e-commerce solutions for WordPress, but we’ve been contacted by a number of other developers who have created plugins which offer other functionality.

We recently received a message from an ambitious and incredibly talented WordPress developer from Denmark, Gabriel Merovingi. Gabriel was looking to make a few tweaks to the integration he had written between his plugin and WP Courseware.

What Does Gabriel’s Plugin Do?

Gabriel has developed one of the most feature-rich points and rewards system plugins we’ve seen for WordPress. It’s called myCRED and its capabilities are beyond the scope of this post, but we’ll do our best to outline some of its more important features which might be helpful for WP Courseware users.

He’s also done an outstanding job of documenting the plugin’s functionality, shortcodes, and other necessary implementation information. To view myCRED’s full list of features, take a look at Gabriel’s chapter-by-chapter product guide.

Best of all? myCRED and its WP Courseware integration companion are both free. So you have no reason not to throw this setup on a dev box and explore the possibilities of extending your courses.

So What Can You Do with myCRED?

Again, you can take a look at the myCRED documentation page for a full list of features and in doing so, you’ll quickly see the benefits to WP Courseware users.

Here are just a few of the key features:

*Allow students to accumulate points for various activities on your site, including daily visits, logins, clicking links, commenting, and even viewing videos
*Set custom points for each activity
*Award badges for point balances
*Points and ranking leaderboards
*Points transfers between users
*Points notifications and emails

And get this…you can even setup a rewards store through WooCommerce so that users can redeem points for various products. Remember those tickets you used to get at the arcade as a kid? These “products” could be anything you choose to reward your students with, from gift cards to perhaps a 30-minute personal coaching call. It’s your choice.

How Does myCRED Work with WP Courseware?

The integration is a simple add-on plugin which Gabriel has developed to allow you to assign points to users for:

*Completing units
*Completing modules
*Completing courses

He has some other ideas in the works including possibly tying points to quizzes and also potentially including some point deducting hooks, such as penalizing students who do not log in for a certain number of days or who take too long to complete a course.

Let’s Take a Look at How it Works!

1. First, you’ll want to ensure you have the following three plugins installed and activated:

*WP Courseware
*myCRED plugin (free)
*WP Courseware + myCRED integration (currently free)

2. After installed, navigate to the myCRED menu in your WordPress admin panel and you’ll be prompted to walk through the setup wizard. Here you can format various details related to your points such as number formatting and what you want to call them (points, red pills, blue pills, etc.)

3. The next place you’ll want to go in the myCRED menu is the “Hooks” screen. This is where you’ll configure points for various activities such as logins, comments, etc. Simply activate each hook you would like to award points for and enter the points values.

4. We’re then going to head to the “Courseware” option in the “Hooks” menu. This is where we will input values for each of our course activities. As you can see in this example, I’ve assigned a value of five (5) points for completing each unit, ten (10) points for completing each module, and fifty (50) points for completing an entire course. Now our students can begin earning points!

5. After you’ve set up the “Courseware” hook, feel free to jump over to the “Add-Ons” menu to begin experimenting with other options. There is so much you can do here that we won’t be able to go through all of the options. However, I’m going to go ahead and activate “Badges” and “Notifications”. Notifications will simply display as pop-ups on-screen when a user earns points. Badges allow you to reward a sort of “status” upon accumulating a certain number of points.

After activating the “Badge” add-on, you’ll have a new menu option. In this example, I’ve added a new badge for completing a course one time. You could create a second badge for completing two courses. You can also award badges for units and modules. As you can also see, I’ve just added a simple icon.

6. Now that we have our points configured for course activities and a badge set up, it’s time to provide a place for our student to view this information. myCRED has an incredible list of shortcodes and parameters you can implement on your site.

For a full list of those you can visit this documentation page. It also has widgets available which you can learn more about here. For now, we’re just going to implement a few shortcodes.

I’ve set up a “My Courses” dashboard-style page for my courses. I’ve placed the dynamic “Overall Course Progress” shortcode for WP Courseware which will display a list of course outlines for all courses a logged in user is currently enrolled in.

I have then placed five of the myCRED shortcodes on this dashboard page:

[mycred_my_badges] <—This displays the student’s earned badges.

[mycred_history user_id=“current"] <—This displays a history of achievements. You can limit the history and also use the “current” parameter so that all students’ points are not displayed.

[mycred_my_balance] <—This will display the student’s total points balance.

[mycred_leaderboard] <—This will display a list of student points rankings.

[mycred_my_ranking] <—This will display the current student’s place on the leaderboard.

7. Now that we have our points set up, a badge in place, and shortcodes on our dashboard page, let’s take a look.

I am logged in as a current student who has completed the “Facebook Marketing” course. There are two other students in the course as well, as you can see in the screenshot below.

From here I can see my course progress from WP Courseware, the badge I earned from completing the course, my points activity, my points balance, the leaderboard, and my ranking. For purposes of illustration, I have not customized the CSS of these elements, but you could certainly do so on your site. (Note: To reduce the size of this screenshot I added a parameter to the points history shortcode to limit the display to the last five actions.)

Pretty cool, huh?

And of course, admins can always view points activity on the back end and manage or transfer user points. There are also several shortcodes which can be used for admin-only page views.

We hope this WP Courseware + myCRED walk through was helpful and can get you thinking of ways to keep your students motivated and engaged. We were thrilled to try out this integration and we think you will be too.

If you have any unique ideas on other ways to integrate WP Courseware and myCRED, please let us know in the comments below!