User Management For Creating and Selling WordPress eLearning Courses | LMS SSO | User Sync

Requirement: Want to build an online store and sell E-Learning courses without worrying about the hassle of managing subscriptions?

With the rise of E-Learning, there is an increasing number of WordPress LMS products sold on various WordPress eCommerce websites seeking to provide an easy way to make money and help educate people with minimum hassle. Traditional educational establishments thrive alongside these new-fangled eLearning services, If you’re running a traditional school, college, or university yourself and you haven’t already looked into eLearning, it’s probably high time to consider it. You can build your own environment for teachers and students and seamlessly manage the user profiles and their respective subscriptions across multiple applications by using a single set of login credentials with our solutions!

• Do you want to build and sell online Courses?
• Do you require to store the user's profile information in a centralized location?
• Are you looking to build a platform where you can manage subscriptions?
• Do you want to display courses in mobile / IOS / Desktop / Web applications?

To Build an e-commerce store and sell your courses over WordPress e-commerce platform. You will be required to manage users’ profiles, their opted courses, subscriptions, payments etc. hence you will need to establish a Centralized User Management System for your users and sync their profiles’ information across the eLearning store.

Let’s say you have built an online e-learning course, hosted over popular CMS like WordPress. We are all familiar with WordPress being the most popular content management system (CMS) consisting of a lot of features and plugins making it a one-stop solution. WordPress enhances the eLearning experience for users as it offers various LMS and eCommerce plugins which can import courses & enable users to access and sell the WordPress eLearning courses such as:

• WordPress LMS Plugins: WordPress LMS integration turns your website into an eLearning website which includes features for managing your online course content, handling subscriptions, running and grading quizzes, accepting payments, and more. Some of the popular WordPress LMS platforms include Learndash, LeanPress, Lifter LMS, etc.
• WordPress eCommerce Plugins: WordPress offers a full range of eCommerce options enabling you to turn your website into a full-fledged membership business allowing you to sell on WordPress, from one‑click payments and paid subscriptions to a fully customizable online store. The most popular WordPress eCommerce plugins include WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, etc.

What is Centralized User Management System?

• Centralized user management makes it easier for your organization to manage all of your users and resources in one place and ensures a higher degree of efficiency while creating less administration.
• It allows control and visibility over every device, application, or network, without dictating what resources are the right choice for each group.
• The data is synchronized across the portals which allow synchronized changes in courses and quicker deployment to students. some definitive benefits gained from centralized management include ensuring better productivity, higher quality, quicker speed to market, automated user lifecycle management, enhanced security, etc.

To Implement Centralized User Management between WordPress and LMS you’d require the following:

• A WordPress Website
• An E-Commerce Store: [For example Woocommerce]

  WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for online merchants using WordPress. It provides e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website so you can have an online store. With just a few clicks, your WordPress website turns into a fully functional e-commerce website.

• A Learning Management Platform: [For example Learndash]

  LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin that connects directly to your WordPress website so you can offer a complete online learning platform. It enables you to create and host courses from within a WordPress website. Users can access all the courses from the LMS from a single tab in WordPress without leaving the WordPress instance.

• A “solution” to enable users to seamlessly login into multiple applications using a single set of login credentials viz Single Sign On (SSO) solution

  Single Sign-On (SSO) is basically an authentication process that gives a user access to multiple applications using one single set of login credentials. So, you can login into the LMS instance from WordPress with just one click. miniOrange offers a “ WordPress Single Sign-on (SSO) Solution” which would allow you to Login In WordPress (WP) using any Identity Provider supporting SAML as an authentication protocol. When applications need to access user information protected by Identity Provider (IDP) and data from other services, apps will need to establish a trusted connection with these providers which can be seamlessly enabled using our SSO solution.

• User data Synchronization Solution

  User data synchronization means that anytime a WordPress administrator creates a new user account, a new learner account gets created in the learning management system. Moreover, whenever there is an addition/removal/update in the user data in one of the portals, the information in the other portal automatically gets updated. miniOrange offers a “WordPress SCIM User Provisioning Plugin “ offering Users data Syncing Solution that allows you to sync user's creation, updations, and deletions from your IDP to your WordPress site. It will allow syncing of user’s profile information between WordPress and other applications enabling a centralized user management system.

 Say you want to offer live webinars for the course learners, there are a few popular webinar options ranging from free to enterprise, which one can choose depending on the feature requirements. Learndash provides integration with all these platforms including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, join.me, etc

• Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams allows integration with Learndash to provide access to the courses for the participants from there. Teams is a platform enabling lectures or discussions that scale from one-on-one chat to larger group conversation, and the option of focused content work, like assignments and a Class Notebook.it provides a meetings app that LMS can integrate into their experience.
• Zoom: The Zoom WordPress Plugin enables you to create Zoom meetings right from your WordPress dashboard and conduct meetings directly on your WordPress page by simply using a shortcode. It gives you the ability to conduct on-site Zoom meetings without the need for downloading the Zoom App.

What We Offer:

Our SSO solution for your training program will enable you to seamlessly integrate an interactive way of learning by syncing your user profile data stored in your IDP into your ELearning Solution. Sync different applications in one place, configure centralized user management and give access to your users for different applications by using the miniOrange Single Sign-On (SSO) solution.

Architecture:

User Flow:

User browses through the e-learning courses and opts to purchase your courses on Woocommerce. If he is a :

• New Users: User will register on your site to purchase the course on woocommerce and would be simultaneously created in your Azure Directory and also synced across multiple applications like learndash and Microsoft teams when the user performs SSO using our SSO + SCIM solution
• Existing Users: Users will log in to your website using the Azure Directory credentials to purchase / Upgrade the course and their user profile attributes would be updated in azure at the time of purchase and it will be updated in applications at the time of SSO.

Workflow:

• A student/course participant would first buy a course via WooCommerce, create a profile, and registers in the process, which will add the user to the WordPress site and Azure.
• The user will be registered in IDP( Azure AD) and simultaneously will be logged in to the WordPress site.
• The user profile needs to be synced with Learndash and Azure AD, the users will login using their centralized IDP credentials and will not be needed to manage passwords at multiple sites.
• Users then access courses from the Microsoft Teams tab on the WordPress site.
• You can authenticate your users into Microsoft teams and allow login using credentials of your Identity Provider by using miniOrange Single Sign-On (SSO) Plugin, in this example Azure AD login credentials.
• To do so, Microsoft teams will need to establish a trusted connection with Azure AD to access user information protected by Azure AD and allow login into Learndash courses using Microsoft teams without logging in again.
• Your users can consent to Microsoft Teams apps for themselves to allow the app to obtain their profile information. The app can then use this profile information provided by Azure AD and Microsoft Teams as the ID of the currently signed-in user.
• Your user profile data will be automatically synced according to their LMS profile and you can assign access to your users based on their opted subscriptions and courses with the help of our Single Sign-On (SSO) solution.
• You can easily map user’s access into single or multiple teams along with their opted set of courses.
• You can enable Single Sign-On (SSO) / Login via Mac, Android, IOS, and browser applications using Azure AD login credentials.

If you are looking for anything which you cannot find, please drop us an email on samlsupport@xecurify.com

Additional Resources

• Federation Single Sign-On
• University Single Sign-On
• Learndash-Zoom SSO Integration