Inspiration : Dashboards is a one stop area for Student / Instructor to get a brief snapshot of what is happening in the site/courses.
In this tip we’ll learn how to setup WPLMS Dashboards. Following steps will guide you in setting up the dashboards feature :
1. Once you update your theme to 1.8 version, you’ll get a notification to install the WPLMS Dashboards plugin.
2. Install and activiate the plugin
3. You should now see a Dashboard link in the front end, logged in panel and in your profile.
4. Initially the dashboard section would appear blank because this part is actually linked to sidebars/widgetized areas
5. Go to WP Admin -> Appearance -> Widgets ad you’ll see 2 new sidebars : Student sidebar and Instructor sidebar
6. Adding widgets in the student sidebar would display them in the dashboard area of students only where as adding widgets in the instructor sidebar would display them in the dashboard area of Instructors and Administrators
7. There are serveral Dashboard specific widgets added by the plugin which start with prefix ” DASHBOARD : ”
8. All Instructor dashboard widgets should only be used for Instructor dashboards, these widgets would start with prefix : “DASHBOARD : Instructor”
9. Remaining widgets can be used both for Instructors and Students
10 . Following is the list of Dashboard specific Widgets :
— Widget : Scope : Description
- Activity : BOTH : Displays activity, Last unread messages , Friends online
- Course Progress : Student : Displays list of courses with progress bars depicting student progress percentage in courses
- Simple Stats : Student : Displays Statistics for students like : Finished Courses, Finished Units, Finished Quizzes, Finished Assignments
- Student Stats : Student: Displays graphs with marks in various courses, quizzes and assignments, viz a viz Average marks
- Contact Users : BOTH : Displays a contact form using which messages can be sent to: Friends, Instructors(all),Administrators, Students in Instructor courses.
- Text widget : BOTH : Simple text widget, can be used by administrator for global announcements, also evaluates shortcodes.
- To do Tasks : BOTH : Small widget for creating and saving tasks in dashboards
- Line Break : BOTH : Useful for alignment in dashboards, starts a new line of widgets.
- Announcements : Instructor: Is used by Instructors to create and send announcements to students in their courses. Only 1 annoucement per course can be shared.
- Instructor Simple stats : Instructor : Much like student stats, displays small useful information about instructor
- News : BOTH : Useful for sharing Course specific information with users, shown in carousel form. Each news block supports post formats which has a different display style.
- Instructor Commissions : Instructor: Instructor earned commissions per month basis.
- Instructor Stats : Instructor : Statistics in instructor courses, automatically generates marks ranges based on maximum/minimum values and the number of ranges parameter set in the widget settings and displays number of students in each range.
Video of setting up Dashboard: