Will S2M work for a free educational site?

I’m helping to do a major upgrade for an educational site – ibioseminars.org – which offers free video seminars for young scientists by some of the world’s leading biologists, including Nobel winners.

We are building a new WordPress site (with Genesis), with a section called iBioEducation that will offer a free video course in microscopy, and we want to be able to:

* Have different levels of access for the teachers and students who follow the course. I assume that both teachers and students would need to sign up and would have access to different pages (teachers could access Answers page, for example).

*Track the different teachers and students following the course (Literally, we just need a list of the teachers and a separate list of the students who have signed up for the course.)

My Questions:

Would the S2member plugin be a good fit for this functionality? If yes, would we need the free version or the Pro. Am I right that the Pro version for a single site is a one-time $69 fee, with no monthly charges?

And a separate question. Ideally, we would like to allow the people who take our course to:

*Track how many videos they have already watched and which exercises they have already done, so that they could see somewhere on their screen, for example, the videos and exercises they have completed.

*We’d also like to be able to offer virtual certificates to folks who complete the course. So, if you watch 10 videos and finish 5 exercises, you get a “certificate.”

Could we do this in S2Member, or should we look for a programmer?

Thank you so much for the help!

Yolanda
iBioSeminars.org

* Have different levels of access for the teachers and students who follow the course. I assume that both teachers and students would need to sign up and would have access to different pages (teachers could access Answers page, for example).

Yes, s2Member allows members to be assigned one of any number of levels. By default, all levels are cumulative, meaning higher levels automatically have access to everything granted to lower levels. If you want to prevent higher levels from seeing something granted to a lower level, you’ll need to also use Custom Capabilities.

*Track the different teachers and students following the course (Literally, we just need a list of the teachers and a separate list of the students who have signed up for the course.)

There is no “tracking” provided with s2Member, but you can certainly see a list of all the members in the WordPress users list (all s2Member users are effectively WordPress users and s2Member uses and integrates with the WordPress user base). However, as the WordPress user listing functionality is somewhat limited in terms of sorting and filter abilities, you may want to find a WordPress plugin specifically for sorting and filtering users (or hire a programmer to create the customization you need).

Would the S2member plugin be a good fit for this functionality? If yes, would we need the free version or the Pro. Am I right that the Pro version for a single site is a one-time $69 fee, with no monthly charges?

Yes, there are various aspects of your scenario that s2Member is well-suited for. It sounds like you’ll want to have separate signup forms for Students and Teachers, which would require the s2Member Pro-Forms feature. That feature is only available with s2Member Pro.

You are correct in that the single-site license is a one-time, non-recurring fee of $69.

*Track how many videos they have already watched and which exercises they have already done, so that they could see somewhere on their screen, for example, the videos and exercises they have completed.

While videos can be protected with s2Member, s2Member itself does not provide any tracking or reporting features for videos. You would need to find a video player that offers that specific functionality. The video can then be embedded in an s2Member-protected page so that access is restricted to those who should see it.

*We’d also like to be able to offer virtual certificates to folks who complete the course. So, if you watch 10 videos and finish 5 exercises, you get a “certificate.”

This also isn’t a feature of s2Member. The Virtual Certificates feature would need to be linked to the video player so that reports about which videos were watched can be generated.

Thanks so much for your response, Raam! A few more questions:

• All of our courses are free. Clearly S2Member is designed for paid membership sites. Will we be able to set up different levels of unpaid access, such as for students and teachers without needing custom programming?
• It looks like S2Member Pro Version would be able to help us with 2 levels of viewers (teachers and students) in one course. Would we be able to have separate access for multiple courses? For example, we will have a Microscopy course, and a Biology 101 course, and each will need to have hierarchical access for teachers and students. We could eventually have many courses. Could each course have separate hierarchical access for its teachers and students? And would we be able to see in the user lists on WordPress that a particular user had signed up as a teacher to the Microscopy course vs. the Biology 101 course?

Best,

Yolanda
iBioSeminars.org

All of our courses are free. Clearly S2Member is designed for paid membership sites. Will we be able to set up different levels of unpaid access, such as for students and teachers without needing custom programming?

Yes, most definitely. Please see this video: Free Registration On Multiple Levels?

It looks like S2Member Pro Version would be able to help us with 2 levels of viewers (teachers and students) in one course. Would we be able to have separate access for multiple courses? For example, we will have a Microscopy course, and a Biology 101 course, and each will need to have hierarchical access for teachers and students. We could eventually have many courses. Could each course have separate hierarchical access for its teachers and students? And would we be able to see in the user lists on WordPress that a particular user had signed up as a teacher to the Microscopy course vs. the Biology 101 course?

Using a combination of Levels and Custom Capabilities, you can certainly create “separate access for multiple courses”. For example, each course could gets its own Custom Capability and all content for that course would be restricted to that Custom Capability. Then, only students and teachers who have that Custom Capability would get access to that content.

I’m not entirely clear what you mean by “hierarchical access for teachers and students”. Could you give me an example?

In the user list, you’ll be able to see the users Level and their Custom Capabilities. If Level 1 is for students and Level 2 is for teachers, and Custom Capabilities identify which course each user is signed up for, then you’ll be able to view a list of all Level 2 users (teachers) and then see which course they signed up for by looking at the Custom Capabilities.

Thanks again,

By “hierarchical” I meant what you referred to as “cumulative” access, so that teachers have access to all the student materials but not vice versa. So in our scenario, Course #1 and Course #2 could each have separate access AND teachers in Course #1 would have higher access than students in Course #1 AND teachers in Course #2 would have higher access than students in Course #2.

I appreciate your patience!

Yolanda

Sorry, I forgot one thing. Would the same person, a student John Smith for example, be able to sign up for 2 different courses?

By “hierarchical” I meant what you referred to as “cumulative” access, so that teachers have access to all the student materials but not vice versa. So in our scenario, Course #1 and Course #2 could each have separate access AND teachers in Course #1 would have higher access than students in Course #1 AND teachers in Course #2 would have higher access than students in Course #2.

Yes, that’s correct. In the eyes of s2Member, however, there would only be Level 1 and Level 2. You would then need to also use Custom Capabilities in conjunction with Levels to create separate sections of access for each course within those two levels.

To do that there would be a Custom Capability called course1 that would be given to both Level 1 (students) and Level 2 (teachers). All Course #1 content would need to be restricted with the course1 Custom Capability. That way, you can have many “courses” within Level 1 and Level 2, without users having access to course material they’re not supposed to have access to.

Would the same person, a student John Smith for example, be able to sign up for 2 different courses?

Yes. From an access perspective, giving access to a new course would simply be a matter of adding the Custom Capability for that course to the users account. How it’s done from a payment perspective will depend on how you’re charging for courses.

If the courses are subscription-based (i.e., recurring cost), then you’ll need to use a Billing Modification form (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Billing Modification Forms) to assign the new Custom Capability and increase their recurring subscription rate.

s2Member does not currently support multiple recurring subscriptions on one s2Member account, so “adding” additional recurring cost can get quite tricky, as you’ll have to detect and handle things like figuring out how much should be added to the recurring subscription and doing any calculations for pro-rating things. s2Member can handle all of this using the Initial/Trial period on the Pro-Forms and dynamic shortcode attributes, but all the calculations and any other business logic will need programmed by you.

If courses are sold on a one-time basis, (i.e., fixed and non-recurring), then charging for a new course is very simple. You just use a Capability Buy Now form (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Capability (Buy Now) Forms) to “sell” a new Custom Capability (in your case, a new “course”) to the existing user (the user must be logged in when making this additional purchase, otherwise s2Member won’t know which account to add the Custom Capability to). Once they complete payment, the Custom Capability will be added to their account and they’ll have access to the new course content.

Thanks, again, Raam, these are great responses. All of our courses are free to the users so we don’t need to concern ourselves with issues of payment. Hopefully, we can do everything we need to do with multiple levels and custom capabilities, all with allowing no-cost access to all of our users.