Creating a Product & Course

Overview

This section will cover the steps involved in adding a product to your site. 

Before we begin, it is important to know how products are structed within the LearningCart system.

In the LearningCart platform, there are three components to every item you are selling to your consumer:

1. Product - Products are items for sale on your site, and they can be courses or physical products. Products act like an umbrella that contain one or many courses, and/or physical items like a book or poster. Additionally, when you have a course that has an in-person or virtual event content item, you can specify date(s) and prices for each session. Products can have multiple prices and contain multiple courses.
2. Course – A course falls within the Product umbrella. Your course is the collection of training items, which we refer to as content items. A course can have one or more content items that are required or optional and sequencing of the items can be enforced. One or many courses can be linked to a Product. You can also link a course to multiple Products, if desired. Consumers gain access to your course through purchasing the parent product through your site.
3. Content items or modules - To build out your course, you will need to add at least one content item, but can have as many as you like. Click here to view supported course content items.

Now that we've touched on that, log in to the backend of your site and we will walk through setting up a product.

Building a Product – Step 1: Creating a Course

Keeping in mind the components required to build out a product, we will begin with the middle element - a Course.

On the left-hand menu, click ‘Training > Courses’. 

Click on ‘Add Course’ in the top right corner of your screen.

• Title: The course title will be visible to your end learner when the course has been granted or purchased.
• Course Identifier: Only shown internally and is helpful when pulling reports or managing curriculums.
• Complete in Order: When checked, a user will be forced to complete the course in the order the content items are listed.
• Show Progress Bar: When checked, a user will be shown a progress bar.
• Use Course Player: When the course player is enabled, a table of contents will automatically appear allowing users to navigate through the course without popup windows, or the need to go back and forth from the LMS to the content item.
• Certificate: Select the Certificate you would like associated with the course. To setup or modify your certificate(s), see Certificates.  
• CEUs: Field that can optionally be configured to display on the certificate or reports to track CEU credits.
• Course Image: The course image will show to the end user when the training is accessed. Note: If using the Course Player, this image will not show. 
• Course Level: Field that can optionally be configured to display on the certificate.
• Course Location: Field that can optionally be configured to display on the certificate.
• Additional Certificate Text: Field that can optionally be configured to display on the certificate.
• Sort Order: The order this course should be presented in. If all course sort orders fields are blank, courses will be sorted alphabetically.
• Course Administrators: Designated course administrator who will receive signup information and can view completion status on all users assigned to that course. 
• Badges: Ability to assign a Badge to learner when they complete the course. The badge will show up on their 'Badges & Profile' page under their account. To create and manages badges, see Badges. Note: Any course completions prior to a badge being associated to the course will not show to learner.
• Schedule Content Availability: Use the following fields to control if your course will become available on a specific date or X days after the user gains access. Leave these fields blank to make the content immediately available.
  • Specific Date
  • Number of Days After Enrollment
• Course Completion Expiration: Use the following fields to control if completion of your course will expire on a specific date or X months after the user completes the course. Leave these fields blank to make the course completion never expire. You can also add this date via a variable to your course certificate and / or notifications informing the user that their course completion is about to expire.
  • Specific Date
  • Number of Months After Completion
• Date Added: This field will automatically populate with the date this course was added. 
• Date Modified: This field will automatically populate with the date this course was last modified.
• Course Length: 
• Language: 
• Closed Captioning: 
• Course Description: The Course Description is shown below the name of the course. Use this field to provide the learner with general information about what the course will cover.

When finished, click Add. You will be able to go back at any time to edit any of the settings.

After the Course is set up, you will then add / assign Course Content or Modules.

Building a Product – Step 2: Adding Course Content

Click the drop down and you will see the option to add existing Course Content or New Content. 

Existing Course Content
Selecting existing course content enables you to use content item(s) you have already created. You can use content items across as many courses as you like and only need to update it at the content item level. To manage existing Course content, navigate to the learning content section [Training > Content & Settings > View Learning Content]. You can learn more about course content here.

New Course Content
Courses can be made up of the following elements –