How to Build and Sell Continuing Education Programs with LifterLMS

Discover how to create professional continuing education experiences on WordPress with the LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on, including how to award CE credits, track learner credits, and deliver a polished CEU training experience your audience will trust.

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How To Build And Sell Continuing Education Programs With LifterLMS

This LifterLMS webinar shows how to build and sell professional-grade continuing education programs in WordPress using the LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on. Chris Badgett walks through the CEU market, why enterprise CE platforms are broken, how to assign and expire units, how compliance-ready certificates work, and answers live questions on licensing bodies, video integrity, renewal reminders, and access plans for reviewers.

What You’ll Learn

• Why continuing education is one of the most profitable niches for LifterLMS site owners and agencies
• How the LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on handles CEU assignment, expiration, and automatic recertification
• How to customize CEU terminology (CEU, PDU, PDH, CME) to match your industry
• How compliance-ready certificates work with merge codes, sharing, and PDF export
• How to send CEU renewal reminders, notify licensing bodies, and enforce course integrity

Key Takeaways

• Get the LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on standalone, or as part of the Infinity Bundle with every other advanced add-on
• Set a global CEU expiration rule (one year, calendar year, or never) and let the platform recertify students automatically
• Design one compliance-ready certificate with merge codes and reuse it across every CEU course you launch
• Use a hidden access plan to give licensing bodies free time-limited review access to a course before they approve it
• Combine Prevent Concurrent Login with the LifterLMS Advanced Videos add-on to enforce that the enrolled student is the one actually completing the course

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Professional-Grade Continuing Education In WordPress

If you’re wanting to learn about continuing education, LifterLMS released a new continuing education add-on to help you launch professional-grade CE or continuing education, to do it in WordPress, to do it more effectively, cheaper, and with more customizability than the expensive overpriced enterprise LMSs out there. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

The funny thing is LifterLMS has been around for 13 years, and people have been building continuing education sites with LifterLMS since the beginning. People come to WordPress for continuing education sites because LifterLMS makes it possible with the certifications, the tracking, the LMS, all the course stuff. But what was missing were some very precise dedicated continuing education features that people were kind of doing workarounds and just making work with LifterLMS. We launched the continuing education add-on to make all of that possible with even less friction.

Why Continuing Education Is A Profitable Niche

The people that build continuing education sites for themselves or for their clients are some of the most successful long-term. They make the most money with LifterLMS. The secret world, as I call it, of continuing education is a very profitable niche.

There’s kind of a journey I’ve seen that happens a lot where somebody is in a field, let’s say in a healthcare field, maybe they’re a nurse, maybe they’re in a specialty role in a hospital, and they decide kind of later in their career that they want to become an entrepreneur. Why not teach what I already know? There’s all this continuing education that I do in my profession. Maybe I’ll try to build a platform to do that for my industry. And I’ve watched many, many entrepreneurs transition from being practitioners in a niche to being continuing education providers, essentially replacing their day job income with a scalable business. Some of those continuing education sites do quite well.

What Continuing Education Actually Is

If you’re kind of new to continuing education, just to say what it is briefly: continuing education is where in certain industries and fields, it is required for people to either maintain a license, keep a job, or get a job to have a certain number of continuing education credits or training course content that they’ve successfully passed per year. There’s a lot of terminology in continuing education, which we’ll get into in a little bit, but essentially that’s what the LMS is for, to deliver online continuing education.

Usually continuing education, people have a percentage that they have to take in person, like at a hotel conference hall or a classroom somewhere. And then the other piece they can take online from providers that are approved in their industry, whether that’s real estate, healthcare, insurance, law, whatever the continuing education is. Continuing education is a huge, huge business.

Why The Enterprise Continuing Education Market Is Broken

So the reason we built the continuing education add-on: one, we saw people already using LifterLMS, and these were some of our most successful money-making users that did continuing education as a focus. But the industry is broken. It’s very complex and expensive.

I don’t know how many times I heard a continuing education entrepreneur say that their old LMS was charging them per seat, per course, per user, per student, per course completion, with tens or 20 or $30,000 a year just for the LMS, when you can obviously do that with WordPress and LifterLMS for a fraction of the cost.

On these enterprise continuing education LMSs, they’re very hard to customize. They’re not open source. In addition to being very inflexible, they’re also very opinionated in how they do things. And the reality of the continuing education market is a lot of niches do things slightly differently. Some people call them points, some people call them credit hours, some people call them classes, some people even the word CEU, people call it different things. They might call it professional development unit or a PDU or a CME, a continuing medical education unit, and so on. So a lot of the enterprise continuing education LMSs are just disconnected, with all kinds of duct-taped-together systems with forms and PDFs and tracking and spreadsheets, whereas you can do all that in WordPress with just LifterLMS.

How LifterLMS Solves Renewal Chaos

The other big issue in continuing education, which we’ve solved, is what we call renewal chaos. This is where, maybe you can relate if you’ve ever worked with kids or in a kind of outdoor camp environment, you have to get your CPR renewed every year to be a lifeguard or a camp counselor. You need those continuing education credits or hours to expire so that they can be renewed. We fixed all that so that the platform is infinitely flexible and even automated in terms of the need for renewed continuing education, or even just getting 20 hours for the next year. We’ll look at specific examples of this in a little bit.

The LifterLMS Continuing Education Add-On

So the LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on was born. This is included in the LifterLMS Infinity Bundle. It has the power, and I would honestly say more power than an enterprise-grade LMS, for a fraction of the cost, without the enterprise friction and the enterprise expensive cost.

There are really two clear use cases. If you’re already on LifterLMS and you’re doing continuing education, go ahead and get the continuing education add-on to make your life even easier with less friction, less workarounds. Or maybe you’re using LifterLMS and you’re teaching on a topic, but you haven’t thought about doing continuing education with your expertise, which is very sticky.

For example, you might help people become a lifeguard, do workouts and training to become really fit in the pool and be a lifeguard, but you haven’t thought about some of the continuing education that lifeguards are required to take every year. Maybe you could just also do that.

The other use case: if you’re on another LMS and you’re just packing things together and you’re paying a ton of money to do continuing education curriculum as a provider, just consider switching to a more affordable, flexible, customizable LMS with LifterLMS, and upgrade your continuing education business to a modern, more cost-effective, flexible stack.

Every Profession Tracks Continuing Education Differently

Every profession tracks continuing education differently. This is what’s super interesting. I’ve done over the years a ton of interviews with continuing education providers and worked with them closely, and they all do it a little differently. But after you work with enough of these continuing education providers, you can find patterns and things that can be systematized, as long as you give them the flexibility to do things like naming what they call their credits or how they phrase continuing education.

Which Industries Rely On Continuing Education

Some of the big niches in continuing ed are healthcare. These are doctors, nurses, and health professionals. Engineering has continuing education for certain things like cybersecurity. Finance and accounting: CPAs and other finance roles that require continuing education.

Architecture and engineering: when you’re building buildings, if you want to build a green building, green standard LEED certified, or you’re building a bridge and it needs to not fall down, there are various continuing education needs for different roles in that sector. Maybe you’re a crane operator building large skyscrapers. You better believe they have continuing education to remain safe and highly skilled at what they do.

Pilots have continuing education. Teachers themselves have continuing education, learning things about curriculum design, classroom management, new developments in their fields. Then there’s corporate continuing education. The most classic example is whenever you join a big corporation, there’s going to be an onboarding continuing education thing that you need to do to remain compliant from an HR standpoint. It could be sensitivity training and things like that. But all of these are continuing education. They just go by different names and have different needs.

Rename CEUs To Match Your Industry

With LifterLMS, you can define your own continuing education. By default, we just call it continuing education and continuing education units, and for short, CEUs. Unfortunately in our industry there’s a lot of TLAs, which is three-letter acronyms. CE is another one. If you work in healthcare, maybe you want to rename continuing education unit to continuing medical education unit. In another field it might be PDH, which is a professional development hour, and instead of units you call it hours. So those are PDH, professional development hours.

What this will do in LifterLMS, and I’ll show you this in a little bit, is it will change the language both on the front end and the back end of the website as people are earning continuing education units or hours, as well as for the people creating those courses and assigning those values in the back end of the website.

Assign Continuing Education Units Per Course

You can assign continuing education units per course. You can set the exact number in the course editor. For some it’s five units or five credit hours, 10 hours, and so on. Once you set that up, it’s automated and ready to go forever.

Set Flexible Expiration Rules For CEUs

The other thing you can do is set flexible expiration rules. We learned about the importance of this by interviewing several continuing education providers who use LifterLMS and learned about some of the workarounds they were doing or friction they were experiencing. LifterLMS is very engaged with our customers and we listen. That’s how we find out things like this.

Basically what this means is you could have continuing education units that never expire and just constantly build up over time. But the reality is what happens in most continuing education use cases, and the reason they call it continuing, is you have to renew your hours every year.

So we built tooling in LifterLMS to handle this. Let’s say you’re in pharmacy and every year as a pharmacist, those pharmacists have to get 20 CEU credits for that calendar year in advance of that calendar year, and report that to the board to keep their license and continue to practice pharmacy. LifterLMS can handle that. Not only can it handle it, it can automatically expire those units at the end of the year, reset that dashboard, and the certificate that they earned is accurate and shows when it expires. We’ll look at all that in a second.

Automatic Unenrollment For Recertification

Students can be automatically unenrolled from the course, which is cool if a student needs to retake the same course again. So if we use the camp counselor lifeguard example, if you have to take the same CPR training or competency course every year or every three years, LifterLMS is ready to automate all that so that students can reuse the same course if they have to recertify.

What Students See On The CEU Dashboard

There are a bunch of stakeholders in continuing education. There are people who build sites for that industry. Some people build it themselves for their business or their use case. Then there’s the student experience, and then there’s the board.

The students need to usually submit their credit hours. This is where something like LifterLMS PDFs comes in, so the students can send their PDF certificate to the board.

If we look at the learner dashboard, they can clearly see how much they have earned in terms of units that are not expired. They can really see what they have and when it expires, because it can get confusing for a student if they have to take a bunch of courses and they’re trying to keep track of when their CEU units are valid through, how many more they need, how many more hours or points or units they need to be good for the next year. It’s all super clear in the student dashboard experience.

Compliance-Ready CEU Certificates

LifterLMS allows for compliance-ready certificates. On the certificate that the student earns, which is digital and can also be turned into a PDF and emailed or printed on paper, there are merge codes to dynamically insert all the data into the automated certificate system of LifterLMS. Those certificates are fully customizable so they can match the brand.

The certificates are easily shareable for audit and credentialing purposes, and the creation of these compliance-ready CEU certificates is 100% automatic with no manual work required once you set it up the first time.

Continuing Education Reporting And Notifications

There’s also a bunch of reporting that happens. In LifterLMS reporting, the CEU data is there. That data can be exported. It can be filtered by student, by course, and so on. You can do notifications in LifterLMS that happen automatically by email based on things that happen when a CEU is earned for a specific student.

Get The Add-On Standalone Or In The Infinity Bundle

There are two ways to get the continuing education add-on. One, you can get it standalone. What most people do is they get it as part of the LifterLMS Infinity Bundle. That’s our top bundle that has all our advanced features. I recommend getting the Infinity Bundle because if you’re doing continuing education, you’re likely going to want a lot of our other add-ons.

LifterLMS PDFs for PDF certificates, which we mentioned. You’re probably selling this continuing education, so you’re going to want our e-commerce integrations like Stripe. And then there are many other awesome add-ons in the Infinity Bundle like LifterLMS Advanced Quizzes. If you need to do an advanced quiz to test competency in the subject matter to earn the continuing education units, that’s there.

You may be offering continuing education at scale to entire companies, then you’re going to need our LifterLMS Groups add-on. And another plug for the Infinity Bundle: we’re about to release an events add-on for LifterLMS, which is going to dovetail nicely into continuing education, where a certain percentage of live in-person continuing education needs to happen and that can all be managed from the LifterLMS-powered site. Just a little spoiler for something else very cool coming to the Infinity Bundle very soon.

Building CE Sites As An Agency Opportunity

If you’re ready to launch your CE program, set your own system up, whether as an entrepreneur or doing it for clients: if you build sites for clients, I would encourage you to focus your agency on the continuing education market. It’s a huge market. There’s so much opportunity around the world. These are very valuable platforms. They’re great clients to work with.

A Tour Of The Student CEU Experience

So that’s it for the presentation, but now I want to show you what we’ve been talking about. This is the student experience. You can see this course has five continuing education units, which means when somebody completes this course, they’ll get those credits. This one here has three.

Here’s somebody who’s earned continuing education units. You can see that five units were earned. We can print that to paper. We can download it as a PDF. We can also share this digitally with our continuing education board. If I was a pharmacist, I could send in my PDF, I could mail the printed version, or I could enable sharing and just copy that link and share it to approve my continuing education units.

You can see also in the dashboard where the CEUs are. There’s a place with six non-expired CEUs for that student.

Set The CEU Value On A Course

Now let’s look at our courses in terms of setting up continuing education units. Edit the course. Scroll down into the General area, and you can see the continuing education units field. This is set to five units, and that is good to go.

The Course Data Settings area is where, if somebody’s going to be retaking the same course every year and you want them to recertify (like with the CPR example we used), you configure that. If you earn that credit, it expires after a year and so on. That’s some of the setup there.

Design A CEU Certificate With Merge Codes

For certificates, go to Certificates and create a new one. Give it a name, like Safety Course Certificate. As an example, we’re not going deep into certificate design here, but I want to show you how to work with it. You can copy the content of an existing template to speed up the design process, then change the data to be something else.

The way LifterLMS merge codes work: use the LifterLMS merge code picker to insert dynamic data. You can see the merge codes for continuing education units. Add that merge code and give it a label. So when the certificate is set up and somebody completes the safety course, they’re going to automatically get the certificate, which they can give to their board, with the units automatically populated.

You could also change the CE expiry date or the CE earn date. You see how we can work with this data and put that continuing education dynamic data in. It’s all 100% automated.

Fire The Certificate With A LifterLMS Engagement

Publish the certificate and then set up an engagement to have it fire when somebody completes a certain course. For a safety CEU, we set up an engagement where when a student completes a course, they get awarded a certificate. Pick the course (Saving Strategy in this example), select Award Certificate as the engagement, choose the CEU Safety Certificate, and set it to fire immediately. Now the CEU system for that course is 100% automated.

Change The CEU Terminology Site-Wide

Now let’s look in other areas in the LifterLMS settings. For terminology, go to Settings, Integrations, then Continuing Education. This is where you change the name. If we want to change it to Professional Development Unit, we type in the long name (Professional Development Unit), the long name plural (Professional Development Units), and then the short form (PDU) and its plural (PDUs).

This is also where you could set a global expiry for when CEUs expire. For simplicity, we could say expires one year after being earned, but there are other options here like working with a calendar year or having them never expire.

If we save that, you’ll notice everything changes on our site when it comes to continuing education. It’s now called PDUs. In the student dashboard, you can see these are now called PDUs: Total Non-Expired PDUs, PDUs, and so on. If we look at our courses, you can see those are now called PDUs. Even if you are editing your course, you can see they’re Professional Development Units. This is one of the ways that LifterLMS just makes it customizable for the user.

Export CEU Reporting Data

Let’s look at some reporting. If we dig in, you can see PDUs earned up here. This is data we can export in terms of our CEUs (or in this case PDUs), filtered by student, by course, and so on.

Send CEU-Earned Popups And Emails

A couple other things to look at are in the LifterLMS Settings Notifications. There are two options for the Continuing Education PDUs Earned notification. One is a popup, a visual popup that the student gets as soon as they earn their CEUs. It says something like "Five new Professional Development Units have been earned for the Saving Strategy course."

And then there’s the email notification. This is the email the student gets to confirm that they have earned those units and to go check out their dashboard to see how many total non-expired units they have. Here’s where you could get creative. You could email yourself or the site owner whenever somebody earns stuff, if there’s a process you need to kick off. You could email your assistant or somebody in addition to the student with this information automatically if you wanted to.

Report CEU Completions To The Licensing Body Automatically

A question from Erica: is there a way to directly report the earned certificates to the licensing body? Yes, there is. Go to the CEUs Earned email notification. The student gets this email, but if you want to also report it directly to the licensing body, you could do that by adding the licensing body’s email address as another recipient on that notification. That will automate it. There are probably other ways to do it as well, but that is the simplest, most easy way to have it be completely automated and hands-off.

My understanding in the CE space is that it’s really up to the student to report to the licensing body. If we set it up this way, it allows us to automate it so the student doesn’t even have to report it.

Prevent Account Sharing And Enforce Full Video Watching

Follow-up question: how do you track if the student who is taking the course is actually the one who completes it? There are several ways LifterLMS helps with this issue in terms of honesty, piracy, or account sharing.

First, go to LifterLMS Settings and open the Account tab. Turn on Prevent Concurrent Login. This makes it much harder for people to share the same login. That’s going to stop a lot of piracy right there.

The other thing you can do is use the LifterLMS Advanced Videos add-on, which is also included in the Infinity Bundle. One of the main features of Advanced Videos in terms of compliance is that it requires students, if you’re doing video continuing education material, to watch 100% of the video. They can’t just phone it in, fake it, press Mark Complete, and move on and complete the course in 30 seconds. They have to watch the content. That’s another way to really lock these down. Those are the top recommendations.

Send A CEU Renewal Reminder On A Schedule

A question about sending a reminder email to students to renew. The first way is just having emails sent them to their dashboard URL, which will show them their total non-expired credits. Just by sending them through automation, it reminds them to go check. Now let’s think about the schedule for that.

In this case, create a LifterLMS engagement, specifically an email engagement. Create an email titled something like "Your CEUs need renewal." Use merge codes: "Hi [student first name], your CEUs need renewal." That’s as an example. Create that email, and we would do this for a specific course. In our example we were using the Saving Strategy course, and they’re good for one year.

Create an engagement, title it Saving Strategy CEU Renewal Reminder. Trigger it on Student Enrolls In Course, pick the Saving Strategy course, choose Send Email as the action, select the renewal reminder email, and delay it 360 days. That’s going to give them a heads-up right before their credits expire.

There are more complicated ways to do it. You could look at doing some automation with WP Fusion, which is an awesome tool, and have the reminders happening from the CRM. Those are just some highlights around how to do that. If you need help or have deeper questions on that, reach out to the team at LifterLMS. We’re always happy to help. And we do really care about feature requests, so if you see something that would make it even better, please send us a feature request too.

Handle Two Governing Bodies For The Same Course

Kathleen asked: is there a way to send different certificates for the same course, for example if we’re offering CEUs for two different governing bodies?

I would probably just clone the course and use a different course, because that’s the only way to really tell "this is the course for governing body A, this is the course for governing body B." There are two ways to do that. LifterLMS has a really simple clone feature you can use right on the course. Just click the Clone button.

The other option is to create a cohort. You could go through the cohort generation process and create the cohort for governing body A and the cohort for governing body B, that basically share the same source content. That’s how I might look at that one.

Give A Licenser Free Access To Review A Course

Erica asked: is there a way to provide a beta or free version of the course as a link to share with the licensing body, so they can approve each of my courses, at no cost, just to share with the licenser? Yes, there is. This is pretty cool.

Go back to the front of the website and look at the courses. This course has three CEUs associated with it. When I edit this course, I have pricing on it. All the existing access plans require payment, but what I can do is create a secret access plan for the licenser. Add a new access plan, name it Free Access or Licenser Access. Set it to free.

We don’t want to give them access forever, so set Expires After to something like 3 months. Since they’re going to just be checking it out and you don’t want their dummy data messing up your reporting, set Data Expires After 3 months too. So they just disappear off the system after three months.

Then in the plan’s visibility settings, we actually want to make this plan Hidden instead of Visible. Save it. This link on the plan is called a purchase link. If a licensing body clicks it, they’ll register and get three months of free access to the course. But if a website visitor browses to all the courses and goes to that course, they can see that Free Access is not showing up publicly. It’s a hidden access plan that you just give out via the purchase link, so that the licenser can check out the course and approve it at no cost.

Groups And CEUs

Another question: how does CE integrate with Groups? Can a group leader view CEU status and expiration dates for their students? I need to look at that. I can’t remember if we’ve added that yet or that’s on our roadmap. Looking at it, I think we may still need to add that. I will take a note to look at it. We want to make the group users happy and doing CEUs at scale, so if you see anything you want related to that, please email us. But I will take a look at that as well.

Restrict A Course To Once Every Two Years

Matthew asks: what if they can only take the class once every two years? That’s totally possible. Set up a two-year access plan on the course. Set Expires After to two years, and set Data Expires After to two years. What that’s going to do is when they enroll, they can’t get out for two years, they’re going to be in the system, and then in two years it’s going to remove them and they can re-enroll. If you have any questions on that, please email the LifterLMS support team and we can help you out.

Interaction Options For Student-Instructor Communication

Erica has one more: the licenser wants me to indicate what methods I will employ to ensure that students have a means of interacting with the instructor. What might you recommend that is available inside the platform?

LifterLMS has a lot of interaction capabilities. Lessons have comments that you can turn on. In WordPress, on the lesson’s Discussion settings, switch from Discussion Closed to Discussion Open. That’s one option.

The other thing you can do is in LifterLMS Settings, under Integrations, we have a bbPress integration. This lets you use bbPress, a free forum system plugin for WordPress that LifterLMS integrates with. If you want a curated forum, you can do that with bbPress.

The other cool thing that LifterLMS has for community is the LifterLMS Social Learning add-on. If you turn on Social Learning, you can have a whole discussion going. Think of it like social media or a Facebook group but on your website, where instructors and students have a feed or a timeline where they can talk to each other.

Another option: use one of the popular form plugin integrations. LifterLMS doesn’t have a multipurpose form plugin like Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, or Formidable, but you could put a contact form in the lesson sidebar template encouraging students to interact. The form would both document interaction and pass emails.

The other thing you could do is work with LifterLMS assignments and quizzes, where there’s review and interaction, or homework and things like that. There are a bunch of different ways to create communication channels, document them, and also have the reporting required for that.

Closing Thoughts On The Continuing Education Entrepreneur

The continuing education entrepreneur is near and dear to my heart. It’s how I got my start building sites for clients. I had continuing education clients and it really opened my eyes to the whole world of LMS and what’s possible, and all the training and everything that goes on the internet, and how cool and special that is. It’s a really cool thing to just help people with their jobs, get jobs, and keep jobs. Thank you all for coming to this training.