The Trott Bailey University website had some very unique requirements for its course building and online learning platform and the WPLMS theme and plugins were powerful enough to deliver the requirements out of the box with very little customization despite our unique requirements, something no other Learning Management Tool on the internet has been able to do. The developers at the Trott Bailey University have tested multiple Learning Management solutions on and off WordPress over the last 10 years and only the WPLMS platform was able to deliver and surpass our expectations. Our first constraint is that The Trott Bailey University is a subsite in the Trott Bailey Family Group of sites with it’s own theme, therefore, wanted the university to have the power and functionality that WPLMS brings while running alongside a highly customized theme with little or no conflicts. Secondly, we wanted to manage all solar student registration and logins across the network using WPLMS and needed a powerful gamification course dashboard where users could easily hop to other sites in the network directly from the WPLMS course dashboard and collect points across the network as well. Thirdly, since Trott Bailey University is a subsite in the network where BuddyPress is network activated, by default, this will make the main site the control center for BuddyPress settings but we needed the Trott Bailey University subsite to control all BuddyPress settings. Finally, most of the 125 million students in the Step by Step Solar course have slow or no internet from Africa and Asia and we want to ensure that they too can enjoy our online learning platform.
Getting the Power of WPLMS without having to run the WPLMS theme
WPLMS is a powerful theme out of the box if you have a blank WordPress site you can simply purchase the theme on Themeforest, unzip, install, and activate your theme and plugin files and you’re ready to start building courses in less than an hour. On the other hand, running WPLMS features on a site that has its own custom-built theme was surprisingly easy as well. Our developers simply followed this video tutorial from the WPLMS theme builders and in very little time our learning management interface was up and running with very little theme and plugin conflicts.
The amazing part though is that with only the WPLMS and VibeBP plugins we were able to run the entire WPLMS framework. The WPLMS plugin handles course management and VibeBP enabled us to run all our university course-related functions within a single page. This is as modern and cutting-edge as it gets in online learning.
Login and Gamification info on the WPLMS Dashboard Trott Bailey Family Group network of site Login using WPLMS
Using WPLMS to handle all user registrations and logins was important to us because the WordPress Login system has not improved much since 2007, as cutting edge as it was it now has a few loopholes. Now with WPLMS Users who log in to WPLMS do not log in to WordPress. Not to bore you with technical jargon but There are numerous XSS hacks that happen even in top plugins like Woocommerce leaving the site vulnerable because WordPress uses a cookie-based login and cookies once extracted can be misused. Thankfully WPLMS uses a JWT login system which is much safer than cookie-based heavy logins. A leaked admin cookie can make anyone administrator of your site and we at Trott Bailey University do not need that so we employed the WPLMS approach using a front-end login platform. Now all login and buttons across our site redirect students to our VibeBP Dashboard page. After VibeBP takes care of the user login using RealTime data via Firebase we developed that technology to allow the user to access other sites in the network such as Trott Bailey Family Oasis Videos to watch movies, or participate in AgriGames; Trott Bailey Family 1Drop our own social media site with an Instagram like experience or our main site Trott Bailey Family Group all without leaving loopholes and cookies everywhere.
Gamification experience on one central Dashboard
The Trott Bailey Family created a digital currency called Abundance Points that allow persons to participate in AgriGames, acquire fashionable attire, fresh food, and home rental all for free using their Abundance Points. Abundance Points is an element integrated into our learning experience that we are passionate about and that has separated us from global universities with our gamification and rewards system. WPLMS has an awesome gamification experience built in. The Trott Bailey Family has scaled the WPLMS gamification feature to allow users to earn Abundance points across the entire network. Now users can earn points for watching videos and other interactivities at Trott Bailey Family Oasis Videos, or for sharing pictures and galleries from Trott Bailey Family 1Drop and using these points to buy educational robotics kits, solar packages, and more from the Trott Bailey Family Group. The flexibility of the WPLMS course dashboard has allowed us to create leaderboards so that students can compete with each other, see their points, share points with friends, and much more.
Offline access to Trott Bailey University is very important to us, we have trained millions of students in the Step by Step Solar online course from all over the planet, and for many of our students internet resources are a precious commodity. Our students from East Africa and Southeast Asia frequently tell us stories of trips they make to the city weekly to download course materials on public wifi from government offices, Starbucks, McDonalds, or pretty much anywhere there is free internet in order to continue learning during the week at home without internet. The launch of WPLMS 4.0 enabled us to reliably offer our courses offline and monitor students’ course performance when they’re back online. We also extended this feature to integrate our Abundance Points system and update student’s points accordingly. This seamless online-to-offline integration lets our site feel like a native app on their device.
Network Activating BuddyPress while using a subsite to control all BuddyPress settings instead of the main site.
WPLMS is built with close integration to BuddyPress, the combination of the two plugins enables our students to interact with each other, participate in groups, support forums, send each other messages, and all the other great interactivities that students get to engage in when they have other like-minded persons online in the same place. The Trott Bailey University though is a subsite in the Trott Bailey Family Group multisite network and we wanted to network activate BuddyPress to enable social activity across the entire network. By default, network enabling BuddyPress makes the main site the control center for BuddyPress settings but we needed the Trott Bailey University subsite with the powerful WPLMS features to control all BuddyPress settings. This was achieved with the genius idea of a WPLMS / VibeBP support agent who recommended that we simply add this line of code to our wp-config file.
define ( 'BP_ROOT_BLOG', 3 );There are currently 7 sites in the Trott Bailey Family Group network and siteID = 3 is the siteID for our university. hence the code above pointed all BuddyPress settings to the university instead of the main site which is the default. This simple code explains two things: firstly, it shows that support from the WPLMS team is excellent, the Vibe team literally logs in to our dashboard, takes a look at the issue, and implements the solution. Secondly, it also enabled us to manage all BuddyPress settings on the Trott Bailey University subsite without bugging down our main site. Unfortunately, running plugins like BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and WPLMS, significantly weighs down even the fastest servers with multiple CPUs on our server once we have more than 100 students on the platform. We have spent a long time optimizing our resources but nothing came close to an inbuilt performance accelerator that WPLMS released in August 2023 that increased our page loading speed by more than 3X. Seeing is believing so take a look at the image below.
Our site was already well optimized and loading at a remarkable speed of 0.66 seconds but the inbuilt performance accelerator from WPLMS tripled the loading speed to 0.23 seconds. From our test, we realize that most of WPLMS runs in the browser which makes it many times more scalable than the WordPress platform itself. The WPLMS Architecture assumes that our web server space and CPU is as a scarce resources and the Trott Bailey University assumes that our students have slow internet or very little mobile data to use. It is therefore important to us that we are not loading unnecessary plugins and making irrelevant requests to the server using our student’s internet. Thus eating up mobile data or wifi bandwidth just to do simple tasks. This naturally makes us the greatest online university and gives us an edge over any online institution that runs everything on the server with no consideration for the user’s data plan or internet limitations.
Online learning solutions other than WPLMS
Over the last 10 years Trott Bailey University has explored numerous learning management systems on WordPress, and other course creation platforms outside of WordPress and we also monitored competing universities and their online learning experience. As a result, on WordPress, we have personally used LearnPress, LearnDash, WP Courseware, MasterStudy LMS, Tutor LMS, and Lifter LMS. For Course solutions on the internet, we have used: Thinkific, Teachable, and Udemy, and for competing universities we monitor MIT, Harvard, Berkley, and Standford in the USA, Yonsei University in South Korea, Imperial College London, and the National University of Singapore.
Trott Bailey University vs other ‘big’ institutions course platforms
Let’s start with ‘big’ universities, surprisingly they are the furthest behind in terms of frontend course creation and learner user experience. The comfort of the physical brick-and-mortar classroom prevents big universities from taking Internet learning seriously. Big universities are just too clunky to evolve quickly, with the exception of the pandemic, so-called top universities take about 5 years to implement serious online learning innovations. Most of the US college and university platforms are surprisingly very primitive, stuck with technologies from about 2015 best case. They woke up a little during the pandemic with the online learning increased demand but only woke up enough to shake up their landing pages, add social logins, and clean up their course dashboard but continued with the same, slow, data-sucking, infrastructure. Once students log in, the learning experience is all over the place having to go to separate hosts for live sessions, and other domains for group interactions is simply a headache learning experience. We have concluded that most top brick-and-mortar university students spend more time trying to understand and navigate their online course environment than they spend actually consuming course materials.
Trott Bailey University Vs Online Course Sites
Course creation platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and Udemy are only for the course creator who doesn’t want to have control over their content or doesn’t intend to scale from just offering courses to becoming a full authority in the industry with multiple value-added products. These platforms significantly restrict your ability to scale your business. For example, The Trott Bailey University Step by Step Solar Course has been taken by millions of students, we were able to scale this course with WPLMS by selling an off-grid solar package that students can purchase to follow along in the course thus getting an higher level of certification by completing the along assignments. The Step by Step Solar course which previously cost US$1,818 is now free because The Trott Bailey University has been making enough revenue from the sale of solar off-grid packages there has been no need to charge for the course. Solar course videos have reached billions of views since we implemented this change, these growth strategies are hard to achieve on course creation platforms that you do not have full control over.
Integrating Product Sales Alongside Our Courses
WPLMS is integrated beautifully with WooCommerce, which makes it easy to sell related products within the same interface and dashboard with full control. You simply will not be able to scale your business on the course creation platform sites like you would if you had control over all the user touchpoints. Another major drawback for the Trott Bailey University on course creation platform is brand control, we want our learning material under the umbrella of our domain and not on any of these platforms’ URLs. This drives traffic, builds our credibility and ranking in organic search, it also preserves the user experience with consistency in layout. Thinkific for example offers the option of pointing a subdomain to your Thinkific course but the theme and flow of the page will be disjointed from your WordPress site and subdomain traffic is considered independent from main domain traffic so it does not help your brand in terms of Search Engine Optimization ranking. For these reasons and more, the WPLMS suite of features outranked course creation sites and put the powerful features with cutting-edge learning technology on the open-source WordPress platform that we have been able to scale and enjoy.
Trott Bailey University Vs other WordPress Learning Management Platforms.
As for other WordPress course-building platforms that our developers have had experience using such as LearnPress, LearnDash, WP Courseware, MasterStudy LMS, Tutor LMS, and Lifter LMS, they do have the distinct advantage over big universities and course creation sites in the fact that they provide flexibility and the power to scale but they are nowhere close to WPLMS. In terms of features, add-ons, and out-of-the-box flexibility. A factor for us is that WPLMS adheres to education specifications such as SCORM which helps with Content Portability. This is important to us because we were on the Thinkific platform before migrating to WPLMS and we had to go through the pain of building out every course again from scratch because the content was not portable. Other LMS solutions of WordPress do not adhere to the standards so content migration is a big issue. Not only does it impact instructors who want to leave their LMS and try another, it also impacts if you are on another platform and want to try out their offerings. We have tried migrating our compliant content to other WordPress course platforms and it just wouldn’t work. You really have to start building your courses again from scratch. The number one area though that makes WPLMS better than the rest is the WPLMS 4.0+ with the Single Page mobile first native app-like experience. WPLMS 4.0+ has hands down placed WPLMS at the top of the innovation pyramid in online learning. The series of updates and new feature releases from the WPLMS team over the past 18 months has shown the world that they have a serious roadmap and they are planning for the future. It also has placed WPLMS customers leaps and bounds above their rivals using other learning solutions.
About the Trott Bailey Family
The Trott Bailey Family Group® is a multi-trillion-dollar company, the world’s number one renewable energy, and robotics enterprise. The Trott Bailey Family Group is wholly owned by the larger-than-life Trillionaires of the Trott-Bailey Family. Our family currently includes the Buff Body Builder Kimroy Bailey, Food lover Sher Trott-Bailey, the Ever Happy Baby Keilah Trott Bailey, and our newest addition, the thrill seeker Kaleeyon Trott Bailey. Our lovely quad loves to educate the world, travel to weird parts of the planet, and enjoy life to the fullest.