Tutor LMS

Tutor LMS is a Learning Management System plugin that allows you to sell and deliver online courses from the WordPress platform.

It’s part of the Themeum company that offers other WordPress plugins for Crowdfunding and block building among other things.

There are many WordPress LMS plugins on the market and we’re going to break down exactly how Tutor LMS compares.

It’s one of the fastest growing LMS plugins around and has been used by 70,000+ users according to their website, since its launch in 2013.

There’s a lot Tutor LMS can help you do and we’ll break down the main features below, let’s first take a look at the highlights:

• Unlimited course building
• Marketplace option
• Reviews and ratings
• Drip
• Unlimited students
• Event Calendar
• Instructors revenue sharing
• Payment (integration with Woocommerce)
• Certificate builder
• Learning tools: quiz, assessment
• Analytics & Student progress tracking

Something that’s important to mention of course is that this requires a WordPress website already setup and hosted.

Courses & Design

This is what everything else revolves around of course!

You can create an unlimited number of courses, which can be public, private or scheduled out.

These are created similar to Posts, and that’s where you’ll have access to the course builder:

You can have 2 layers of hierarchy: Topics & Lessons, with the later fitting within the former

Each lesson can contain 1 video and a short summary text as well as some attachments.

This is then automatically populated in the front-end course:

Note that just like all WordPress LMS, you will have to handle video hosting separately. This usually means paying for a video hosting like Vimeo.

You video options in Tutor LMS are:

• HTML 5 (mp4)
• External URL
• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Embedded
• Shortcode

This also goes for the Live Video lessons you’ll want to set up - there is no native tool to do that but can be facilitated by integrating one of the above.

A lot of the framework of the course comes out of the box when installing the plugin.

The pre-built pages by default are:

• The student and instructor registration/login pages
• Dashboard
• The course store page with all courses displayed
• The single course dashboard and its lessons

There is a lot you can control in terms of what is displayed and when, but something to note here is that you don’t have a lot of control over the fundamental layout of your online course.

You can however choose the color scheme of these pages:

Each Lesson can have comments - but you can also turn these off.

Lastly you can create very handy Q&A and Announcements to provide extra information and support to the students of your courses.

Once you’ve created a course you like and if you plan on having a lot of courses, you can create Tags and Categories or Bundles:

These will later be something students can use with filters to explore the courses they’re interested in.

Learning Tools

Beyond just video-based modules, a big part of offering online courses is to provide ways for the student to assess their knowledge.

In Tutor LMS Lessons can be created a Quiz with a ranged of different types available:

• True/False
• Single Choice
• Multiple Choice
• Open Ended
• Fill in the blanks
• Short Answer
• Text Matching
• Image Matching
• Image answering
• Ordering

You can also create Assignments giving the ability for your student to upload a file for your review.

If you want to add some pre-requisite or make it mandatory for a Quiz to be “Passed” before moving on with the rest of the course, that’s possible too.

You can allow Retakes to make this easier.

But there are also some more advanced settings if you want for example to calculate a final grade based on the highest attempt or on the average of all attempts.

All of this shows a lot of care from Tutor LMS to adapt to the needs of course creators that use these learning tools carefully

You can also drip the modules over time to spread out the release of the lessons.

Student & Instructors Management

You can decide to manually add students and instructors or allow them to register.

Of course students can be registered when going through a checkout process, which you’ll create by connecting Tutor LMS with something like Woocommerce.

This is one of the many addons available:

Students will then create a login access and see their dashboard which a lot of information about what courses they’re enrolled in, their wishlist, reviews, quiz attempt and a lot more:

And of course this is where they’ll be able to pick the courses they’re in where they left off!

But another interesting thing Tutor LMS allows for is for instructors to also register an account.

The plugin allows you to create a real marketplace of courses, some that can be yours and some that can be created and even directly uploaded by instructors.

From their profile, instructors will be able to see their published course, their reviews and manage their students.

You can decide whether or not to use Tutor LMS to manage a revenue sharing system and allow instructors to get paid when one of their courses is sold.

They can then withdraw that directly from their profile:

Of course you have full control over how much commission they’ll make and what exactly they have access to.

This feature is pretty unique and not often offered by other LMS plugins.

Other Features

Lastly let’s review a handful of other features that are interesting to highlight inside Tutor LMS:

Event Calendar: If you’re running live courses or cohorts, you can lay out different dates and events inside the built-in Event Calendar and set up reminders and notifications to get everyone on the same page.

Certification builder: This is a built-in drag and drop certification builder to deliver a customized diploma to your students with their name on it. Something to take away after they’ve successfully completed the course!

With so many features to offer, now is the time to see how much all of this value cost.

First of all, you can get started with Tutor LMS for free using the Basic plan.

This will give you limited access to the plugin’s functionality but enough to start playing around.

After that you’ll have choice between 3 paid plans:

You’ll also get a 30 days money-back guarantee after starting on a paid plan.

All plans give you full access to all the features Tutor LMS has to offer.

The only difference between them is how many site licenses you get.

Most people will probably only need to install the plugin on 1 site, so the Individual license should be enough.

At that price point, Tutor LMS is fairly competitive and on-par with competitors like LifterLMS or Thrive Themes.

You can either pay yearly or a one-off lifetime fee - which would be worth the extra upfront investment if you plan on using this tool for the long term (more than 2 years).

Getting some help from the support team or other users can mean the difference between being overwhelmed and actually using this tool!

There are a few ways to get answers to your questions, one of them being the exhaustive Documentation available for Tutor LMS:

You can also submit a support ticket and the team will be fairly reactive to respond.

There is unfortunately no community or Facebook group to connect with other Tutor LMS members.