We’re excited to announce that new Learning Mode templates are now available in Sensei Pro!
These new templates will help course creators like you get your courses up and running quickly. We’ve made it even easier to create beautiful courses that engage your learners and help them learn more effectively.
What is Learning Mode?
Learning Mode is a distraction-free view for courses. When enabled, instead of your WordPress theme showing course and lesson content, it opens up in Learning Mode.
Sensei does its best to bring over your site’s colors, fonts, and branding in Learning Mode, and you can use the Site Editor tool to customize it even more.
We initially launched Learning Mode earlier this year. It came with one default layout, which is available in the free Sensei LMS plugin. In today’s release, we’ve added 3 new templates available to Sensei Pro users.
Templates For Video Courses
If you’re creating a course with videos, you’ll now have access to two templates specifically designed for video content. These templates will help you optimize your video courses for the best learner experience possible.
The first shows the lesson video and the course outline as a playlist – similar to what you will find in video players around the web. Students can navigate between video lessons and track their progress.
The second template displays the lesson video as a full-featured hero at the top of the page.
With both templates, you can add text, transcripts, files, and additional content below the video. And these work perfectly with our video progression and interactive videos features in Sensei.
You’ll find a new Featured Video block when editing a lesson, and you will need to designate the video for each lesson if you decide to use these templates. Any lesson that doesn’t have a video will display just fine too.
A Minimalist Modern Template
We heard from many of you that you wanted an easier way of moving the Course Outline to the right side. So we developed this template with that in mind. It also has more white space and even fewer items to distract than our original template.
More Improvements Included
This update includes dozens of small fixes and improvements to the default Learning Mode template (available in the free Sensei LMS plugin!) that are a direct result of your feedback. For example:
- We removed the option to hide the course outline sidebar. It was clunky, confusing, and our research showed it wasn’t used very much.
- We moved the Complete Lesson and Take Quiz buttons to the bottom of lesson content instead of in the top right corner. Instructors told us they wanted to make sure students at least scrolled through the lessons before moving on, and the buttons were sometimes missed at the top.
- To reduce clutter and cognitive load, we’ve removed the Preview and Next buttons from the top right corner since students can also move through lessons in the Course Outline sidebar. Completing a lesson will also take you to the next one, so there is no real need for the Next button.
- The Exit Course link was often missed by learners in the bottom left corner, so we moved it to the top right.
- We worked through many WordPress themes that are popular with our users to better support styles out-of-the box. You should notice improved spacing and padding in Learning Mode too.
It is important to note that you can use the Site Editor to move many of these elements around in the template as well if you’d prefer to change these default locations.
Getting Started
You will need Sensei Pro to use the new video and modern templates.
Play with Learning Mode by creating a free Sensei demo site.
And check out our detailed docs on using and customizing Learning Mode here.
We hope these new Learning Mode templates will help you create even better courses. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. We’re always here to help.
Happy creating!
