Best Strategy for Building an Online Course in EE?

I know there were a couple of LMS add-ons available for EE2, but I think they have both been discontinued. I’m going to reach out to some others and see if anyone else has done this recently.

If it’s only a “simple” LMS what I’d do:

Create a channel for lessons

• each lesson is one entry

Create a channel for courses

• each course is one entry
• use a relationship field to list lessons in the course, this allows you to order lessons as you want them done, I’d use a grid field with the relationship field inside that, this allows you to add extra data should you need it in future.

On the front end you’d list out available courses for your students, click on a course page to get links to lessons for that course.

For students marking what courses/lessons they have complete you could use something like the Favourites addon - https://eeharbor.com/favorites - this provides a mechanism for students to mark any course/lesson

Thanks for looking Andy! And Rob, that is actually a brilliantly simple strategy, exactly what I was looking for. I never thought of using Favorites as as a way to mark progress, but of course that totally works too.

I guess my only other question is: when it comes to purchasing courses, I’d want a way to offer one-off purchases as well as a subscription for all-access. Would that be possible with something like Charge and EE6’s new member roles feature?

What I’m thinking is a new member role would be added after a successful transaction that would give that paying user access to a particular course, or all courses, depending on what they purchased. I’m just not sure if member groups automatically get mapped to the new member roles across all add-ons.

Yes Charge should work for that, it is EE6 compatible so I’m assuming it work with member roles. Charge allows you to change a members role/group when a payment has been made. You’d have to set up your roles in advance though so some pre-planning will be needed and you’d have to figure out how to limit course/lesson access via whatever role.

Instead of Charge maybe the module Subscriptions would be a better fit here?

I’m also looking for a module to bill subscriptions and intangible items, that allows at least Stripe and PayPal or let me add a custom payment with some hook or API.

It seems Subscriptions is the closest thing I found so far as sadly older modules are not supported any longer. If someone is aware of another way to bill with EE (don’t need products, just subscriptions or one time services) please share your ideas here. Payment support on CMS system seems like a critical missing feature.

Thank you so much for sharing your ideas on how to do this. I liked the idea of using Favorites the most! I remember that I also studied a lot of online courses and resources in college, because the information there is much more interesting and relevant to my future work. I also used useful content to do complex assignments because some topics were too complex for me. I recommend this resource to all students, there are many interesting things.