How to Run Live, Instructor-Led Training Inside Your LMS

Enjoy a demo of the all new LifterLMS Events Add-on for creating virtual and in person instructor-led training inside your LMS

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How the LifterLMS Events Add-On Runs Live Instructor-Led Training

LifterLMS Events lets you run live instructor-led sessions inside your existing WordPress LMS instead of stitching together a separate calendar plugin and hand-pasted meeting links. Chris Badgett walks through why live events matter in an AI-native content world, then does a full live demo of the add-on: setting up events at the course, lesson, and membership level, publishing the Events block, connecting Zoom, and giving students recordings of past sessions.

What You’ll Learn

• Why human, instructor-led training is the part of a course that AI cannot replace
• Where LifterLMS Events attaches inside your course, lesson, and membership structure
• How to publish an event start to finish, including calendar subscription and Zoom auto-creation
• How to give paid students access to recordings of past live sessions
• How to change the word “Events” on your site to whatever your business actually calls them

Key Takeaways

• Add one monthly one-hour office hours session to any course or membership to raise perceived value without adding curriculum prep
• Put live sessions inside your LMS so students see them next to the content they already paid for, and so future events show up in their My Events dashboard
• Turn on the calendar subscription so events land on students’ Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar automatically
• Post the replay of a live session in the same lesson that hosted it, so students who missed the call can still watch
• Use memberships when you need a general event channel that is not tied to one specific course

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

What LifterLMS Events Is and Why We Built It

This is the new LifterLMS Events add-on, which rolled out recently alongside LifterLMS 10.0. One of our company values at LifterLMS is what we call learner results first. Whatever is going to help facilitate the learning objectives of your students, or your learners, or your clients, is one of our top priorities.

So we build LifterLMS software for you, of course, but we are also building to maximize the impact that online education can have in the world.

One of the things that makes us humans is that humans get together and share learning experiences. It’s a big part of what makes us a human being. LifterLMS Events allows you to blend instructor-led training, or live training, whatever you call it, into the rest of your LMS. You may not call it an event. You may call it a class, or a workshop, a webinar, a coaching call, a group coaching call. It can be named whatever you want, and we’re going to show you in a little bit, in our live demo segment, how to change the terminology on that.

There’s nothing wrong with self-study, self-paced, predominantly video-driven online courses. But if you want to take your courses to the next level, I would encourage you to check out what’s possible with LifterLMS Events.

Why Instructor-Led Training Wins in the AI Era

Passive content in today’s world is not enough anymore. Perhaps you might have noticed that artificial intelligence is kind of a big thing. What that means for course creators is that it’s never been easier for somebody to access just training content by talking to ChatGPT or Claude.

But what is not replaced by AI is the human connection. That still happens virtually. All of you on this call, I very much appreciate your time, and we are connecting in a live event right here.

You can, of course, also do in-person events. I was part of a coaching program that was primarily online. There were courses, there were Zoom coaching calls, but there were also in-person events in different cities around the country. There are many different ways to mix and match events into your learning use case.

Live Training Should Not Be This Hard

There are very few tools that you actually need to deliver a world-class online training platform. With a Zoom account, your WordPress website, and LifterLMS and all of our add-ons, of which LifterLMS Events is one, you can do a lot with just that stack. Maybe add a video host like Vimeo and you are off to the races.

There’s so much you can do with that. But we wanted to make it easier to integrate the event experience and managing it, without a separate calendar plugin, or Zoom links pasted by hand, or students losing track of your event details, whether that’s virtual or in-person.

A lot of great thinking, studying, and talking to LifterLMS users about their goals for events is how we created LifterLMS Events.

Your Live Events Belong Inside Your LMS

WordPress is a content management system. LifterLMS is a learning management system. Part of learning is events, which means those events need to be managed as well. A lot of what LifterLMS does is structure chaos into clarity, to make your life easier and to make the lives of your students easier.

The Events add-on is focused on that blending of learning, live event sessions, and on-demand content, all in one place.

It’s important to note, just a technical detail here, that LifterLMS Events can be incorporated at the course level, at the lesson level, and at the membership level. Even if you’re not necessarily doing events as part of your courses but they are part of a membership, you can do that. We’re going to show you how to do all of that in a live demo.

Native Support for Live, Virtual, and In-Person Sessions

LifterLMS Events has native support for live, virtual, and in-person instructor-led training. It’s built right into WordPress. You don’t have a new platform to learn.

A lot of you may not think of events as events. You may think of them as something else. Some people call them classes, or webinars, or workshops, coaching calls, tutoring sessions, community social time, or a practicum.

For example, my daughter recently took an online CPR class, but then she had an event where she had to go in and prove her skills and that she was paying attention. That’s an example of an event. They don’t call it that. They call it a practicum. You can call events whatever you want on your LifterLMS site.

The Easiest Place To Start With Events

The easiest place to start is this. This is my favorite trick with events. It’s something LifterLMS has done for, gosh, probably eight or nine years now. If you have the Universe Bundle or the Infinity Bundle plan, or a lifetime plan, you get access to our weekly office hours mastermind.

So this is a powerful way to add more value. Think of it this way. Once a month, you do an office hours mastermind call for an hour. That allows you to show up on Zoom, and that Zoom can be automatically created. You don’t have to prepare in the sense that you need slides. You just come and make yourself available for questions.

Self-study content can be really good, but sometimes people get stuck or they have questions. Maybe they are looking for a little social connection with some of the other users or students in the community. And the great thing about office hours is that it’s a group format. Whether there are three people there or three hundred, you can still execute and deliver the same value.

You can time box it. If you do it once a month for an hour, you are done at the end of the hour. If you can’t get to all the questions, sometimes that happens. That’s a signal to open up another session at a different time, or do it more frequently than once a month.

Ask-Me-Anything Calls for Pre-Sales and Lead Magnets

You can also run events for prospective students who haven’t bought anything from you or enrolled in your main program. Let’s say you have a free course as a lead magnet. You can have an ask-me-anything call, which is kind of like a pre-sales call, where you just help people.

I’m a big fan of what’s called results in advance. Before anybody gives me money as a business person, it’s in my plan and philosophy that we’re always delivering value before we ask for the sale. If you show up and help people on an ask-me-anything call, it just builds that goodwill. It’s also the best marketing you can do, and it demonstrates trust in you and your subject matter expertise.

The Three Things LifterLMS Events Does for Your Content

Three things LifterLMS Events does for you. It’s tied to your content at the course, lesson, or membership level. It has smart visibility, so people looking at your courses and memberships can see that events are available, and can even see the schedule. You can fine-tune that.

The actual physical location or the virtual meeting link is only visible to actively enrolled students. Events can be part of your marketing, but only your actual enrolled students, or learners, or clients, can see the access details.

The other cool thing is that there’s a new dashboard endpoint, which means students have a My Events area of your website, not just My Courses, or My Memberships, or their order history.

The Optional Direct Zoom Integration

There’s an optional direct Zoom integration. When you create an event in LifterLMS, it will automatically create a unique Zoom meeting, can password protect that, and has other features as well. We’re going to look at that in a little bit.

You can also just run it without the integration and post your Zoom links directly. It’s not a requirement.

Calendar Subscriptions And Why Attendance Goes Up

Everything is all in one place. Students can see past events and future events. They can subscribe to the calendar, which is absolutely key. Once you get an event on somebody’s Google Calendar, or Apple Calendar, or Outlook Calendar, attendance goes way up.

Not only did we help you manage events by creating them. We also helped with the direct calendar integration to the top calendar systems on the internet.

Types of Events You Can Run

What can you do? You can do cohort-based courses. You can do weekly coaching calls, live continuing education sessions, or webinars. You can do in-person workshops at a specific physical location. You can do masterminds. You can even run a virtual or in-person conference. There are so many different types of events.

Really, the sky is the limit in terms of your creativity and what you call your events.

Events Bring the Humanity Back to Online Education

Events bring the humanity back to online education. It’s not just about the content. It’s about the transformation. Doing an event is an important part of maximizing the success of your learners.

You’ll see who shows up, who’s engaged, and you’ll help people actually reach the outcome that they sacrificed their time and potentially money for in your programs.

Live Demo: What Students See In My Events

Here’s my WordPress website running LifterLMS and LifterLMS Events. I’m going to jump to the front end, so we can talk about the student experience.

One of the best things is that students can easily find their events. It’s right here, under My Events. You can see upcoming events. This one is an Academy Membership Conference, and it’s actually at a physical location in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I can add this to my calendar just like that, and you can see it adds that event directly to my calendar. Which means I’m way more likely to show up. If your students or learners are busy, this calendar integration is awesome.

You can also subscribe to all the events at once. In this case, there’s only one event here, but I could add all the events that I have access to in one click.

You can also look into the past to see what you missed. For example, this was an event that was tied to a course called Financial Independence Retire Early. It happened a little over a month ago. You can see what the Zoom access link was and so on.

Adding An Event From The Course Editor

Let’s go into setting up an event. I’ll show you more on the front end of what a student can see and what your options are.

I’m just going to go back into the back end of WordPress here, and go to Events. I can add one here, or I can do it from the course builder. Let me start from the course view so it’ll make a little more sense.

Here are the courses on my site. Let’s just go with the Investing for Retirement course. This is a LifterLMS course presented on the theme that we make, which is called SkyPilot. If I click Edit Course, there’s a couple of places to add an event. We’ll do it at the course level, but I’m also going to show you the lesson level and the membership level.

Down here on the course edit screen, you’ll see the Events meta box. A quick pro tip: in WordPress 7.0, they hid the meta boxes a little bit, so there’s a small dragger where once you open it up, they’ll be easier to find. LifterLMS on WordPress is so powerful that there’s a lot going on, so you can customize how you like to work.

I don’t have an event on this course yet, so I’m going to click Add Event. We’ll just do an Office Hours event. We’ll do it tomorrow. Let’s say 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. So there’s my one-hour event. You can do an all-day event if you want, but I’m just showing you how to do the hour.

In this case, we’re going to run virtual office hours to get your questions answered live. Since this is a virtual event, I’m actually going to drop in my Zoom link. I’ll show you the automated Zoom integration in a little bit, but just to keep it simple, I’m doing this without the automated integration.

Since we came from the specific course, it knows that we’re working at the course level on the Investing for Retirement course. It could also be doing this from a membership or a lesson, which we’ll show you in a bit.

I’m going to go ahead and publish that, and our event is live.

What Enrolled Students See After You Publish An Event

When we go back to the front end, let’s see what happened here. I need to be enrolled in this course to get access to the event. So I’m checking to see if my user is actually enrolled in Investing for Retirement. It looks like I am.

If I go to my dashboard, and then to My Events, you can see we have now added the office hours for retirement.

Adding A Second Event To The Same Course

I was over on the Investing for Retirement course, and I clicked Edit Course. Then in the Events tab in the sidebar, I clicked Add Event. You can actually add multiple events to one course, one lesson, or one membership as well.

Let’s assume we’re going to do an ask-me-anything call. This is going to be an ask-me-anything call. We’ll say, “Join us live for pre-sales questions about the membership.” So this is us doing an upsell from a course or something like that.

Again, we’ll do June 23rd, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. In the location, I’m not using the direct Zoom integration this time. I’m just putting in my Zoom link directly. We’ll publish that event.

If we go to the front end of our website, you can see we’re going to have three events showing up now.

In this case, I’ll subscribe my whole calendar to all these events at once. My calendar is really busy. I’m a busy guy. All those get added at once when you subscribe through that method.

Adding An Event From The Course Builder At The Lesson Level

To show you a different way to do it, we’ll pick a different course. We’ll do the Young Retirement course. We can also do it from the course builder.

I’m going to launch the LifterLMS course builder. Let’s pick a particular lesson. I want to show you how to add an event on a lesson. Let’s say we want to add an event to this lesson right here.

You can see there’s a new area in the course builder called Add Event for This Lesson. I’m going to launch that. This is going to be our Annual Continuing Education Conference. It’s going to be an all-day event on June 27th. Join us in Las Vegas. Here we can put an actual physical address, since it’s an in-person event.

We’ll publish that event. Now the event is live, and you can see it’s associated down here with this particular lesson.

If we go back to the front end and go to our events, you can see we have the Continuing Education Conference. It’s listing these events in the order that they are coming up, so this one shows a little later, on June 27th. You can see we have an address instead of a Zoom link.

Managing Events At The Membership Level

Just to complete the training on how to attach these things: if I go to my course and go to the lesson that I added the event to, and edit the lesson, you can see that the event, which we added from the course builder, also shows up on the actual individual lesson post. If we didn’t want to do it from the course, we could just add the event directly from the lesson post too.

To complete the training, if we look at a membership, it’s the same in terms of the structure. Here’s my Academy Membership. If I edit this membership, you can see you can manage the events at the membership level. I already have one here, the Academy Membership Conference, out in the future.

Placing The Events Block On A Course, Lesson, Or Page

You can also add event data directly to the course or lesson content itself. I’m going to go back to my site and look at the Investing for Retirement course. If I want to put my event information directly on the course, and this is true for lessons and memberships as well, I’ll click Edit on the course.

Let’s say I wanted to put the event information right below the description. We have an Events block. I’ll type “events” in the block inserter and add that Events block. You can see what that did. It added the event information that is associated with this course, right there.

We’ll click Save. There are settings on the block, too. If you have tons of events, you can limit it to the five that are upcoming. Or if you just want to display a lot of them, you can put fifty events on the page. You have settings for that. You can choose to show or hide past events, show or hide the calendar links, and show or hide the location.

The block also has logic built in, so when you publish it on the front end, people who aren’t enrolled can’t see the access details that enrolled students can see.

For you shortcode fans out there, we do have a shortcode option as well. If you’re not doing the blocks thing, you can do this with shortcodes too. This is how you add that events block.

The LifterLMS Events system works at the lesson level, the course level, and the membership level. You can use that block, or the shortcode, on any of those types of content. You can also use it on a landing page, or some other part of your website, if you want to list out events in a different way or in a different place.

Visitor Versus Student View Of An Event Block

This is a cool feature you may not know about with LifterLMS, where you can check out your website as a visitor or as a student. If a visitor is looking at this page, you’ll notice that the location details and the Subscribe to Calendar buttons are gone, but the events themselves are still visible.

If somebody’s considering purchasing this course, it’s obvious that this course includes lessons, but also events as well. That’s a pretty cool feature.

Changing The Terminology From Events To Workshops

Let’s dive into the settings. To find them, go to LifterLMS Settings, click Integrations, and then click on the Events integration.

Starting with terminology. Under the Event Language and Terminology section, you can change this. If you don’t call them events, if you call them, let’s say, workshops, we can change that terminology. I’ll click Save Changes. You’ll notice that even over here in the sidebar, it changed from “Events” to “Workshops.” Now if I go to Workshops, it says “Add a new workshop” up here.

Call them classes, call them events, call them webinars, call them CEU trainings, whatever you need to call them. You can change that terminology in the LifterLMS Integration settings for LifterLMS Events. I’m going to change it back so we don’t confuse people with the names. That’s updated. Now you can see we’re back to them being called events.

Getting Your Date, Time, And Time Zone Formats Right

Moving on, these time settings are a little confusing, but just so you know, depending on where you are in the world, people like to format dates and times differently.

The main way to think about it is that the LifterLMS Events settings basically change the global website settings under WordPress General Settings. Whichever one of these formats looks correct to you, whether you use military time, whether your country puts the month before the day, or the day before the month, you can modify those settings.

The big thing to think about is that until you get into advanced settings, you may not realize that your website is not in the correct time zone for where you live. You can figure out which of these time zones matches where you live, so that your website is communicating in the time zone you actually want. If you’re new to that, you may not have noticed. It might be on the default UTC + 0. I would recommend definitely converting that to your local time zone.

Setting Up The Optional Zoom Integration

Now this is the Zoom connection. As a reminder, this is optional. There are clear instructions in the settings on how to do this. I just followed the instructions right there.

Let me show you what it looks like. Once you follow those settings, there’s a Develop button, then Build App. You do not have to be a developer to do this. Basically, you just copy and paste the information over into your settings, and you’re good to go. I’m not going to do that right here and expose my API keys, but that’s all there is to it. We also have documentation on our website and a video tutorial on exactly how to do that.

If you use the Zoom integration, you have some default settings. You can require a password. You have the options that you would have setting up any meeting: do you want it to record automatically as soon as it starts, and so on. Basically, it automates the entire process of creating a Zoom meeting for your events if you enable it.

That is the Zoom integration. So that is how to use LifterLMS Events.

How To Give Students Access To Past Event Recordings

One question we got was, can you add a link or a file to a past event, for users who missed the event? Let me give you a pro tip there. I’m going to jump back into the course.

This is the way I would do it to give students access to the recordings of past events. If we’re doing cohort-based courses, or delivering the first version live as an example, here’s the pattern.

I’ll add a new sample lesson at the end of the course, and call it Class 56. We’ll save that. Then I’ll add an event to it, called “Class 56 Live Event,” and publish it. I’ll put some dummy info in the location field, using the Zoom method here. I’m grabbing my Zoom link and putting it into the location.

Back on the course, I’ll edit the Class 56 lesson and add the Events block. Now the students see the upcoming event on the lesson page. What does that look like to your users? They see this event, ready to attend live.

After the live event is over, this is the important part. What I personally would do is just add another piece of content to that same lesson, containing the recording. In this case, I’m dropping in a YouTube video. That way, the people who attended live can come back and see it again. If we were doing a replay scenario, or people didn’t have to attend live because it was optional, I just post the replay right there. That’s how I would think about managing past events that are recorded.

As a reminder, within the student user experience, they can go here, go to their events, and see future and past events. They can keep tabs on what they may have missed.

Add To Calendar Versus Subscribe To Calendar

One attendee asked about subscribing to the calendar. Let me explain the difference between these two buttons.

“Add to Calendar” just adds this one event. If I add this one event, it’s just going to add that one. “Subscribe to Calendar” is going to pull in all the future events at once.

Integrating With Microsoft Teams Or Google Meet

Can it integrate with Teams or preferably Google Meet? Yes, it can. We don’t have the direct Zoom-style integration where it automatically creates the Teams or Google Meet meeting yet. If we get enough of that request, we will.

You can of course just create a Google Meet link and drop it into the event’s location field, the same way we’ve been dropping in Zoom links. The direct integration is cool, but not necessary. It’ll work with any virtual event system that gives you a link option, either to jump right into the meeting or webinar, or to register for it. You can put any join link in there, including Teams and Google Meet.

Where To Watch The Webinar Replay Later

An attendee asked, is this presentation available after this evening? Yes, we are live streaming this right now, so it will be on the LifterLMS YouTube channel under Live. We also have the webinars section on our website. We keep the webinar vault permanently, so you will be able to access this after the call.

Using Events For Continuing Education Delivery

One attendee asked, does this go seamlessly into the continuing education add-on? Yes. If you’re delivering continuing education through events, either virtually or in person, you can just start integrating events into your courses, lessons, and memberships, however you structure your continuing education.

There’s not some new setting inside continuing education. It’s more that you would just start using this Events add-on to add events to your courses or lessons. Some continuing education folks do a mini course with one lesson, for something like a webinar as an example, or an in-person session at a hotel, wherever it is. You can use LifterLMS Events inside your lessons, courses, and memberships for continuing education.

Running Multiple Live Sessions Simultaneously

One attendee asked, if he has multiple organizations as members, and each organization has multiple coaches running multiple live sessions simultaneously, will this be able to handle the demand? Yes, it will.

The key is that, similar to working with Zoom, you can have multiple Zoom meetings running at the same time. It’s just a question of staying organized and setting up all your events, and using the membership and course structure to segment out who has access to what. If you have a complex site with tons of courses, tons of instructors, tons of lessons, it’s all about creating one event at a time.

You’re also leveraging the power of the event tool that you use if you’re doing it virtually. If it’s on location, like a conference that has multiple tracks or rooms with different trainings going on at the same time, you just add all of those in. People can subscribe to the ones they have access to, or if they get to pick and choose, they can do that.

Attaching Events To Courses, Lessons, Or Memberships

One attendee asked, an event must be attached to a course, lesson, or membership. You cannot do a standalone event.

That is true. It’s part of the architecture that an event does need a lesson, or course, or a membership to attach to. If that sounds like not quite ideal, you have a couple of options. If you’re not already using memberships, you can just create a membership that everybody gets when they get a course, and then that membership gives you a platform for publishing events to. That’s an example of a workaround.

If you have any challenges or feature requests, we totally want to hear it. We’ll do our best to help you provide an option or a different way to think about it, and potentially we’ll consider future features. The LifterLMS Events add-on as of this presentation is quite new. As you all find wish-list items or other things, we’re always listening.

Where To Go From Here With LifterLMS Events

Your next move: I would encourage you to run one live event this week or next. Pick a date, make it happen. If you’re not sure what you want to do, I would encourage you to try the office hours format.

I remember the first time I did that. I was shocked with how many people showed up. People are looking to connect with real humans on the internet, ask questions, and get help in a live format. That has never been easier with tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.

I’m really lucky, because my life mission is my company mission, which is to lift up others through education. I’ve always wanted to add an event management system to LifterLMS, and now it’s here. I want to give big props to the LifterLMS team, particularly Brian Hogg in this case, who developed the LifterLMS Events add-on. We’re grateful to have Brian on the team. He does great work.

We will continue to evolve LifterLMS Events to meet your needs. Reach out to us if there’s anything you need. If you have questions, you can email us anytime. LifterLMS support is awesome. You can come to our live events, our office hours mastermind, if you have the Universe Bundle or higher plan.

If you need anything, just reach out to us. We’re here for you.