Memberium & LearnDash: Do I Really Need Both?

Memberium and LearnDash work well together.  They make the solid learning management system (LMS) features provided by LearnDash available in a protected membership site orchestrated by Infusionsoft.  At the same time, they are two distinct programs with very little overlap that together provide a platform to consider for building e-learning solutions.

Transcript:  An interesting request I’ve gotten in the last couple of months is people asking for Memberium / LearnDash sites.  They’re not asking me for a LearnDash project. They’re not asking for a Memberium project.  They’re asking me for a Memberium LearnDash site and it’s interesting.  It's almost like those two products seem to be fused together in people’s minds even though they’re very distinct things.  They are very different.

So I wanted to spend some time talking about what each of these things does because in light of that, you’ll know which parts of these do you need.

Memberium is a plugin that takes WordPress and connects it up with Infusionsoft.  Wordpress already has a nicely functioning login system.  Memberium works along with the WordPress login and Infusionsoft so that, if Infusionsoft realizes that this person is either a paying member or someone who is opted in for some content, it will allow WordPress to give that person permission to the content.  So it’s a connector between Infusionsoft and WordPress.

Now there’s a lot of other things that it does:

• It gives you the protection.
• It gives you short codes so you can show part of the message on a page only to customers.
• It allows  you to show things like a login box only to people if they’re not logged in.

So Memberium is the glue that allows the two to work together.

Now LearnDash has a very specific function.  It’s an LMS or a Learning Management System.  Now the reason you want that is because building a course inside of WordPress is not an easy thing.  My team and I have been building membership sites for a very long time. We were building learning systems an awful long time ago and we were formatting courses, we were creating courses that had lessons and we built lessons that had sub lessons or sub chapters.  It was part of what we were being asked to do.

With LearnDash, the course structure is just natural. They have the concept of a course that’s made up of lessons that are then made up of topics.  You can change those in case you’re using the words "modules" or "chapters" or something else. So it’s very easy to create a course hierarchy and then create menus, navigation bars and open up content.  It's easy to configure the course so when I finish one lesson, I can very easily get to the next one without having to struggle.  It makes the administration of those things really, really easy compared to if you had to do it yourself.

Now another thing that LearnDash does very well is it allows you to get people to either:

• pass a quiz,
• answer some questions or
• press a button in order to get to the next section.

So for example; you can have five lessons that make up one cohesive unit of content and at the bottom you give them a quiz.  Only if they pass a quiz, for example you know if you give them five questions, only if they answer four out of the five questions,  can they proceed to the next section. So it gives you that sort of learning features.

Now there’s an awful lot of other things that LearnDash goes into and if you go to LearnDash.com they’ve actually got two or three really nice sample sites showing the features you can use.  So you can go into their membership site, and it's a fully functioning learning site, and see how it works.

For one of them, you pay a dollar and it shows you all the lessons that go into like a simple piano playing course.  I recommend that you do that because it’ll give you a good idea of what is it that LearnDash gives you so you can build e-learning system for yourself without having to go through any more trouble than you need to.

Again, Memberium is about protection. It connects WordPress with Infusionsoft.  It makes it possible for both Infusionsoft and LearnDash to work really well together and give you protected content with gates that help you manage the learning process.