AccessNow LMS is a free WordPress LMS plugin for running online courses on your own site. Version 1.1 adds the thing I was asked for most after 1.0: a course can now stop being open on a date you choose, such as the end of a term or a club season.
Download 1.1 from the AccessNow LMS project page. It is on its way to WordPress.org; until it is listed there, that page is the place to get it.
Access that ends on a date
When you enrol students, there is a new optional Access until date. Leave it empty and nothing changes: access has no end. Fill it in and the student can open the lessons and quizzes up to the end of that day, in your site’s time zone. After that the lessons and quizzes are locked, and the course page says that access has ended.
Nothing the student did is lost. Their progress, quiz results and certificates are kept, so if you set a later date, or remove it, they carry on where they stopped. A student whose access has ended can’t enrol themselves again, because extending it is your decision. Students see their date on the course page and on their dashboard, so it is never a surprise.
You can set, change or remove the date for several enrolments at once from the Enrollments list, and the enrolments CSV has a new column with the date each one ends. The guide to enrolling students walks through it.
Courses have their own permissions
Until now, courses, units, lessons and quizzes borrowed WordPress’s permissions for posts. In 1.1 they have their own. Administrators and editors keep everything they had, and editors now see the AccessNow LMS menu with their courses. Authors and contributors no longer work on courses; before, they could reach a course’s editor through the “+ New” menu even though the menu never showed them anything. If you want someone to write courses without being able to touch your posts, you can now give a role course permissions only.
Related fixes: anyone who can edit a lesson or quiz can open it on the site to check it without enrolling, and a lesson’s unit (or a quiz’s lesson) can only be set to one the person can edit.
For developers
1.1 also adds the extension points that add-ons need: hooks for the course page, dashboard and certificate template, and a quiz engine that add-on question types can plug into, including answers marked by hand. They are listed in the changelog. Courses, students and settings are unchanged; the upgrade adds two small columns to the plugin’s own tables (the end date, and a status for quiz answers) and runs by itself.
Get it
Download AccessNow LMS 1.1 from the project page. Updating from 1.0 is the usual way: replace the plugin, and your courses carry over. If you are still on Simple LMS, read the moving guide first.
