Uploading and Adding a Video Lesson Topic

Hosting Videos

While it is technically possible to upload a video directly to your site (using the “Add Media” button to the top and left of the textbox in the edit page area — read more here), the recommended procedure is to upload the video to YouTube. This saves your server storage and bandwidth, which helps your website run better and faster while saving you money on hosting fees; YouTube’s servers are top-of-the-line designed to play videos, which are large files that are intensive to display. Another benefit is that displaying the video from YouTube is very easy.

Uploading to YouTube

You’ll need a YouTube account to upload a video (read more here). On the YouTube homepage, click the arrow button in the right top white menu bar. You can also go to youtube.com/upload. There, you can select the videos to upload, give them names, and so on. When you are done, you will receive a YouTube link to your video.

Adding a YouTube Video to WordPress

To add the video to any WordPress page, including LearnDash pages, you can just copy and paste the YouTube link into the page textbox.

Adding a YouTube Video to LearnDash

LearnDash also has a special “Video progression” option that makes it easy to display videos (read more here). Near the bottom of the LearnDash edit page, click the “Enable video progression” checkbox; several options will expand. Paste your video link into the “Video URL” textbox. This is all you need to do; you can now save the lesson or topic using the “Publish” or “Update” blue button.

Protecting Your YouTube Video

If privacy is a concern, make sure to set the video to “Unlisted” on YouTube (read more here). “Unlisted” means that when people search YouTube, your video will not appear in the search results. However, technically, anybody with the YouTube link can still access the video. This sounds bad, but remember that determined pirates would likely to be able to share your video even if you hosted it on your own server with typical protections. You can also set the video to “Private” on YouTube, but that means you will have to hand-enter the email addresses of those authorized to see it, and they will have to have YouTube accounts tied to the approved email addresses — an overall pain. That generally makes “Private” an inappropriate option for an online course. There are other methods for protecting videos, but they are beyond the scope of this lesson.

Revising the Order of Lessons and Topics

Method 1: Go the the lessons and change the the number in the “Order” textbox under “Post Attributes.”

Method 2: Go to the course’s edit page (see “Editing a Page”). Scroll down to the “LearnDash” Course Builder. Use the drag-and-drop builder to re-order the lessons and topics into the correct order. Click the blue “Update” button (top right of the page) when you are done making changes.

You can read more about the Course Builder feature here and here.