TRAILBLAZING THROUGH TECH: THE EVOLUTION OF WP COURSEWARE IN DIGITAL LEARNING Ben Arellano, Co-founder of Fly Plugins

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. It’s an interesting journey. So I started my career way back in 2001 right around the time of the 9/11 attacks. And so it’s interesting I couldn’t find a job at that time because everything was just crazy. I had, I just graduated college about that time.

I had a degree and it’s an it degree. It’s called it’s a business degree with an emphasis on computer systems, excuse me. And so anyway I started my journey in the IT world around 2001. I worked in the IT space for about 11, or 12 years. And I did everything from, fixing computers to fixing printers and networking.

And I got into software automation and writing scripts for that kind of stuff. And then around 2009, I wanted to do something a little bit different. So I started exploring to see what was out there and I got into looking into building websites and right around that time, WordPress had started to take off just a little bit.

It was becoming more popular at that time. And so I started building these websites and it was interesting because, somebody came along and said Hey I want you to build a website, but I want you to build it like this guy. And so I went and I looked at the website that they had sent me.

And it turns out it’s a website. You may be familiar with it. I don’t know. It’s called smart passive income. com. Yup. It’s Pat Flynn. And it intrigued me. So I was intrigued by the website, but moreover, by the content of the website and what this was all about, which I’d never really heard of.

This type of thing and making money online and that kind of thing. Anyhow, I started following Pat Flynn and it turns out Pat Flynn was offering an online course on how to do affiliate marketing. It was building niche websites. And I went ahead and signed up for the course.

It was pretty pricey, but I signed up and started taking the course and it was really good. Pat taught some cool stuff back then. The things he taught back then probably don’t apply to today. This is obviously, cause you’re an SEO guy. Google is always changing its algorithms, but at that time, it was working well.

And one of the things that ended up happening was Pat offered a forum. So we would get into the forum with the other students and we would chat back and forth. And so I met Nate so that was that was around 2010, something like that. And so Nate and I got along real well.

We hit it off and we started talking and, we started talking a lot about how to make money online. How does this work? And then we started talking about, Hey, maybe we could teach this type of thing and so we set off on a little journey. We created a course on how to make money online.

It was using a lot of, the methods we had learned with Pat Flynn and that sort of thing. And but right around that time, we were, the stuff we were teaching with Google and how to rank in Google. Google had released their penguin update and I can’t remember the other one.

There were a couple of dates and it, wiped out a lot of our niche sites, and a long story short the course utterly failed. However what was interesting about that whole journey was that when we went to set up the website for, for the course for the online course, we used WordPress, of course, because I had already been delving into WordPress.

But one thing we couldn’t figure out was there was no method for a course. There was no course plugin for WordPress. And so that kind of spawned the idea. And so when we failed in our course, our online course venture. That idea just stuck with me. And so I talked to Nate and said, Hey, what do you think about making a WordPress plugin, a premium plugin?

And just see if maybe it just started as a side hustle and just see where it goes. And yeah, we both tossed in a little bit of money. We found a developer in the UK and we developed the very first version of WP courseware. We launched it. I don’t know if you’re, if you remember the the old warrior forum.

We launched it as a WSO in the warrior forum for 20 dollars and yeah, so that was our start into WordPress plugins. I don’t know if that’s a long-winded background,

Yeah.

Yeah, we could have, I don’t know at that time, the SEO game was just changing so much. Things were changing. Google was changing things so frequently. And I think we were looking for something that was going to be a little more sustainable and something a little bit more long-term.

We felt that the niche sites were just something you can do pretty well in, but you just never know with Google because Google changes 1 thing and everything’s gone. So we just really wanted something more sustainable. We wanted to build a business, even though it was a side hustle.

We were hoping for something long-term. And so we just felt that the niche sites were just not going to be the avenue to do that. Although I’ll be honest with you maybe we should talk after the podcast, but I still have a little bit of interest in trying the niche site thing again. I think it’s profitable.

I know a lot of people do very well with niche sites and it’s very interesting and intriguing to me how people build niche sites nowadays. Yeah sure. I would love to.

So as I mentioned, when we were building our course, our online course for making money online, we couldn’t find a solution. And that’s the biggest problem that this one solves, WP Courseware. Basically what we were looking to do is have an online course where we could.

Have some instructional videos where you could go through each video as a unit or a module and it would track your progress and it would allow you to go back and rewatch your videos and that sort of thing. But 1 of the biggest things is having a payment gateway for it and also having protection for it because we didn’t want to leave this.

These videos on YouTube or somewhere where they’re publicly accessible, which led to the idea of S3 Media Maestro. So S3 Media Maestro was born right out of WP Courseware just because we needed that as well. And so WP Courseware isn’t just like you mentioned.

It’s a learning management system. The funny thing is when we first developed we didn’t even know what it was called. We didn’t know what an LMS was. We would just call it an online course tool or an online course builder. But it’s a learning management system. It’s a full-blown learning management system.

It has student tracking. It has quizzes. It does have built-in payment gateways. It also has membership functionality so that if you want to hide some of your content behind a membership wall, you can do that it works. The way it works is when you enroll in a course, the course is technically your membership level.

And any page or post on WordPress that is associated with that particular course is what you will have access to. So you can hide premium content behind a course level if you will. And S3 Media Maestro is simply  It’s hard to describe because it’s a multifaceted tool.

And what I mean by that is it’s a player, it’s a video player and audio player in which you can host your content on Amazon, but in a protected fashion. In other words, what it does is it creates expiring links and encrypted links so that people can’t go onto your website, look at the HTML code, take your video link, and then.

Posted in a forum or something, so it prevents hotlinking. We do some other things to it as well so that you can’t right-click on the videos and the audio. And we also included the ability to add files in that sense. So you could put a file like a PDF, like a flat file, just a document file up on AWS with the download button.

And it does the same thing. It creates the expiring encrypted link so that you can protect your content and all of your media. So S3 Media Maestro, again, it’s a plugin that works hand in hand with WP courseware. There’s integration between the 2 so that when you’re going through your course units, what we do is we have it so that you can force your student to watch, let’s say, 80 percent of the video before they can move on to the next video.

It works hand in hand with WP courseware. So these are the two products and you asked, who are the target audiences? And that’s a tough question because first of all, we’re dealing with different layers of marketing. After all, we have your top-level WordPress.

So you’re looking for people who use WordPress now, WordPress powers, over a third of the internet. So a third of every website you go to is WordPress. So that’s cool because we have a big pool, but then it niches down. You’re looking for people who use WordPress or build their websites on WordPress who want you to host an online course there, on their website.

Yeah so we’re looking for, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, we’re looking for, maybe teachers, instructors, coaches, anybody who wants to teach the knowledge that they have and make a business out of it. You want to sell your course. And then we have some people that, they have, they offer free courses.

It could be a lead magnet, somebody who’s trying to just get you into their sales funnel. Maybe they offer a free course so that they give you free information so that you build that trust and that sort of thing. So there are a lot of different people who would profit from using a WP course and, or S3 Media Maestro.

Yeah, so it’s interesting because it has changed over the years. The cool thing about WP courseware is WP courseware gives you the ability to create different types of educational content. So you can create a video. You can create audio. Excuse me. Maybe it’s just text. Maybe it’s a downloadable PDF. Maybe their infographics and that sort of thing. So what’s cool is you can put all of that type of content into WP courseware.

But what you’re asking, though, is how does it look today for the e-learning industry? And how are people engaging? I would say that today, most people are engaging with video courses. Videos are number 1 and obviously, I think we’ve been conditioned to this because of social media, because we have YouTube, you have Instagram Reels, you have, Snapchat, you have all, YouTube Shorts.

And one of the things too that we’ve been conditioned to be short videos. Because we have Reels and because we have YouTube Shorts and that type of thing, TikTok this short-form content is really what’s engaging students. And, they’ve coined it in the e-learning space as microlearning.

And so this is what we’re seeing now. And again, WP Courseware is engineered for all of this because you can create short-form content, and short-form type videos in into WP Courseware. And then what’s cool is we also have S3 Media Maestro which is your video player so that you can host it securely onto AWS.

One thing I didn’t mention about S3 Media Maestro going back a little bit, is that S3 Media Maestro also integrates with CloudFront so you can deliver your videos a little bit faster. It also has integration with transcoding so that you can transcode your videos into different different sizes, 1080P, 720P, 4K, etc

So that’s S3 Media Maestro. But yeah, it’s the short-form content I think right now that that people are looking for and engaging with. Another thing that is engaging for online courses and e-learning in general is just building community. Helping your students and being available.

This is going back to Pat Flynn where, you know you work hard now and just let everything go so that you make your passive income and I’m like, courses can be that. But I feel you’re going to be a lot more successful with your online course for your students If you engage with your students if you have, office hours, or if you have, some sort of 1 on 1 coaching sessions with your students, or if you build community, maybe you have a slack channel for your students where they can all come together and they can chat and talk about these.

This is exactly what happened with Nate and I, when we were in that forum, we would connect and we would talk about our strategies and things like that. So building that community is very important for really keeping your students on track and engaging them and having them go and progress through your course content and taking them to the end.

There’s an outcome that you’re looking for, right? You’re looking to teach your students something. And so you have to have those outcomes in mind. And how do you get them from point A to point B and keep them moving along? Because the reality is there are distractions. There are things there’s life that happen, right?

Maybe somebody has a full-time job and they come home and they have kids and they have kids that play sports. And so how are they going to get into your course? Maybe you audibly deliver your course so they can hear it. Or they’re in the car, in rush hour traffic, or that sort of thing.

Ben Arellano: Maybe they just have a few minutes here and there, and that’s where the microlearning comes into play so that you can deliver short-form content so they can digest it much faster. So there’s a lot to it, but I think short-form content, engagement with your students, on a one-on-one basis, and community uploads are probably your three top methods for really keeping your students engaged in online courses.

Yeah, so it does. And that’s a great point, too. So yeah, a lot of engagement does happen or learning does happen through quizzing. The cool thing we did with the WP course was we offered two types of quizzes and also a survey. So the two types of quizzes are blocking and non-blocking with the ability to retake quizzes.

So I think that’s important. And so I think there’s a different context where you would want to use different types of quizzes. I think if you have just, a course, a basic course on, let’s just say somebody is learning coding or something and you’re quizzing them on that.

I think creating a nonblocking quiz and what the nonblocking quiz does. It allows you to continue progressing through the course. Even if you don’t pass the quiz, the cool thing is, that you can allow retakes. So you can come back to that. And if you want to learn it, then there’s the blocking quiz, which requires you to pass that quiz before you can continue progressing through the course.

And I think in those instances, it’s something that you have to learn before you get to the next unit or the next module. But yeah, these are different, definitely ways to make sure that your students are engaging and learning throughout your course. And then the survey is cool because then you can survey and ask, maybe at the end of your course, you can survey your students and ask, Hey, what could we do differently?

Is there something that you felt you should have learned and didn’t learn? And this helps you to, this helps you to go back and reassess, Hey, did I deliver all of the material and content that I should have to these students to get them from point A to point B? And maybe there’s something you missed and it’s cool because you can always come in, come back in and you can add that content, you can add it in as a different unit or a module or whatever.

But I think it’s very important to ask your students out at the very end, just so that how you did, how did you deal with the course delivery.

It’s a big one. Yeah. And one of the things she taught in it also was not just how to do it. She also taught people how to make a business out of doing it. And so I think that was very powerful to you because he’s teaching people how to make money with this skill set.

That was a very cool story. And there’s a lot of other stories where we’ve had customers that just do very well. There’s I know that we have I don’t know if I can mention the name. I probably won’t mention the name, but it’s a theological seminary that we have.

And they have, I don’t know it’s a crazy amount of students. I don’t know, over 400. 400, 000 students enrolled in their courses. Yeah, it’s there are some pretty amazing stories. And we have everything from, people teaching guitar lessons, people teaching the Hebrew language to others, to teaching transcribing.

Or, whatever in there, and some of them are paid courses, and some of them are free courses. As I mentioned earlier, some people use them as lead magnets or just ways to build content on their website and draw traffic to their website.

That’s a good question. It’s difficult because it’s open source, right? WordPress is open source and all the plugins and everything that, themes there are, and there are thousands of themes and thousands of free plugins that you can get on the WordPress plugin repo.

And then you have thousands of premium plugins. And I’ve come into sites when I’m doing support and I’ve logged into somebody’s WordPress admin panel and I look at their plugin list and they have a hundred plugins. It’s amazing what I’ve seen.

Yeah, so it’s not easy because we’re having to make sure that we’re compatible with other plugins, with other themes, also with WordPress, we have to worry about security and all of these things. We do have a support portal so you can log into our member portal and you can submit a support request.

And we take every support request very seriously. So we assess the issue and there are often where, yeah, it’s a bug or it’s something with WP Coursera that we need to address, but we’ve also run into instances where it’s another plugin that’s conflicting with WP Coursera.

And we do everything on our end to try to make it compatible with other plugins. Sometimes we have, and sometimes we have cooperation with the other plugin. And so we’ll try to work together. And then sometimes you don’t have that cooperation with other plugins, and sometimes we don’t have a fix, and we can’t fix it because we don’t have that cooperation with another plugin.

But we try to fix every single issue that comes into our support center. And yeah it’s a little bit of a juggling act because you’re just trying to stay compatible with everything and stay up to date, and, secure as well.

We want to make sure that the plugin is secure and that people aren’t able to hack your WordPress website through our plugin or, make sure there are no vulnerabilities and that sort of thing.

Yeah, We’ve done a lot of different things for marketing. We’ve done, everything from Google ads to Facebook ads. But a couple of the most successful forms of marketing that we’ve had, and this is something you probably know.

Word of mouth is probably the most powerful form of marketing. And so we were very blessed in the beginning when we started with WP Courseware and we picked up a couple of bloggers who would write about us and it drew a lot of traffic and we did have an affiliate program too.

So that did help. That way, they would be more enticed to send us more traffic and write more articles about us and so really it was these people that were writing about us and the bloggers that I think helped WP Courseware blow up. Now, we did also, we did do another thing that I think helped with marketing.

And that was what was, we created we created these integration plugins with other plugins. So for example I created integrations for, membership plugins. And this was before we even had a membership functionality and we’re in a WP courseware, but we would create integrations for others.

Membership plugins, or maybe other e-commerce types of plugins, like WooCommerce, and easy digital downloads. And so what we would do is we would create these integrations and we would contact the plugin authors that we’re integrating with, and we would see if we could get some sort of communication out to in front of their users as well.

Maybe it was a social media post or a blog post Hey, we’re integrated now with WP courseware. And I think that helped in our marketing just because we drew a lot of these people who wanted to integrate with other plugins and have that functionality and then again, we’ve used affiliate marketing as well, which has been very helpful.

Currently we have an affiliate program and, I think it’s still doing fairly well, but I don’t know. It’s something that we’ve not really, strongly pursued. I know there are some affiliate programs where they’re, offering incentives to their affiliates and that sort of thing.

And it’s just a time thing for us. It’s we’re just, but, yeah, then we also have as I mentioned, we do the Google ads and the Facebook ads, and honestly, that’s not my strong suit, but we do try to do our best and we’ve outsourced this at times so that we could get some traction with that.

And then we have the blog and then, the blog is hopefully, attracting or ranking some of these posts in Google for certain keywords. And so we’re drawing in that organic traffic as well. Yeah, these are probably all the levels. We do have a YouTube channel, which has drawn in quite a bit of traffic as well, just creating tutorial videos.

And we did some interviews as well. That’s where you’ll find that interview with Caitlin. And so we have those videos out there as well. I’ll be honest with you. We have social media, but we’re not super consistent with it. I would love to have a social media manager who just ran our content.

Just because that’s not my strong suit. Just consistency is a difficult thing and you have to be consistent with social media to get visible, especially with, Instagram, and to talk about those things as well. But yeah that’s our marketing strategy in a nutshell.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a good question. Right now the LMS industry is saturated. We, there’s a lot of SaaS tools. When we launched WP CourseWare, we were the very first LMS for WordPress.

And we had that space for, I don’t know, six to eight months before we got a competitor within WordPress. But as far as what’s coming in the future. I would love, to focus on the video aspects of video courses and micro-learning. I’m not sure how that would equate to the WP CourseWare which I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, but I would love to see something with that.

Maybe. I don’t know if it would be a different learning management system plug-in or not. But that’s just what I’ve been looking at. There’s just there’s so much with video right now. Video is the major focus right now for LMS. You look at any of the SaaS tools for LMS and a lot of them are focusing on video as well.

Yeah. And I’ve had ideas for things that would maybe, develop tools for people to record video that would maybe directly integrate with WP CourseWare. And so those are some other ideas I’ve had. Long-term, I don’t know. It’s difficult to say our economy is in a weird place right now.

So it’s really hard to even think about really how this is going to work in the future. Right now, we’re just trying to stay above ground or water and just keep going where we’re at. As far as S3 Media Maestro is concerned, I would say that we haven’t tapped everything that we could with S3 Media Maestro.

We have some cool ideas for S3 Media Maestro. We have I don’t think we’ve exhausted everything with the S3 medium. I, so I think with the LMS it’s difficult because we have a feature-rich plugin already. And I feel like there are other plugins out there.

There’s other elements, plugins, and I’ve, I’ve downloaded them. I’ve seen them. And I feel like there’s a point where there’s too many options and there’s too many bells and whistles and it’s just like you, somebody is going to get in there and be like, Oh man, there’s too many things to do in here.

I don’t know what to do. It’s I don’t know if you’ve been to In and Out before, but In and Out has a super small menu, you order the number 1 or the number 2, and there’s just, it’s a super simple menu. And I like simplicity. I like the simplicity. Especially in a UI, Apple phone.

That’s just what I like simplicity. So in a sense, we want to keep WP courseware that way. We want to keep it in a way that’s easy to use. I don’t want to, I don’t want to just flood all of the features we have. We have a troll aboard right now. That’s just, that it’s a mile-long full of feature requests.

We take, we log every single feature request that a user submits and we log it in there and we take account of it. Whenever somebody requests that same thing, we take account. And that’s how we go about releasing our features as well. But if I were to add all of those features into the WP courseware, it would be a headache to create an online course.

And so I feel like there’s a sweet spot and I want to keep it to where. Yeah. It’s easy to use and it’s feature-rich and people are getting used to it and use out of every feature. So that’s what we’re looking at. We just want to keep on that trajectory. We want to keep our customers happy and that sort of thing.

So, it boils down to we want to, we do want to make our customers happy. And so we pride ourselves on number one with our support. And so when somebody comes into our support we want to make sure we take care of them.

We want to answer every single question. We want to try to fix every single issue that comes through. And that’s primarily because I want the plugin to work for them. I want them to be successful with the plugin. So on top of that, we do try to produce good content on our blog.

We try to provide helpful content. One thing I could be better at is, sending out newsletters and, maybe sending out our blog content via newsletter. But that’s another way we engage. We have a pretty big list. And so we like to send out our customers things that are of value to them as well.

And then our YouTube channel as well. We were, we create videos, our tutorials and try to help our customers. One thing that we used to do several years ago, we used to offer office hours where people could come in and ask questions or send us questions throughout the week and then we would just do, we would go on live, I think, for probably about 30 to 45 minutes, and we’d answer every single one of those questions.

We’d give examples. If we had the opportunity to and that sort of thing. And I’m not quite sure why we stopped doing that. I think we just didn’t, we weren’t getting as many customers engaging or asking questions. And so we just thought we didn’t think it was a value, but that was another thing we had done in the past.

Yeah just trying to stay in front of our customers and give them whatever they need, whatever tools they need. I try to be personal with the customers and, sometimes, customers will see that the Co-Founder responded and it makes them feel, cool because the co-founder of the company responded to them or, thanked them for something or whatever.

I try to follow up. Also, we do get obviously, we get customer churn and we get, people that aren’t unsubscribing to their subscription. And so what I try to do also with them is follow up with them. And hey, what could we have done better? Why did you decide to go in a different direction?

And if and oftentimes I get a response and, they’re, they either found another product or they, Maybe don’t have their website. Maybe their business was failing or whatever. And I just try to respond again and just say, if you ever have questions, we’d love to, we’d love to help you.

And so that’s just really the attitude I want to have with the company is just, I want to help people. I want people to be successful. I know that, with our plugin business it’s it’s been a fun journey, but it’s also provided for me and my family.

It’s my full-time job. And I really would love for other people to have that advantage and, be able to create a business and, a lifestyle-type business. And so that they can be successful as well.

Okay, let’s go, man.

Humble.

Benny.

It was probably how to do something with AWS.

A torture to me? Oof that’s a tough one. I guess may be poor customer service.

Hidden talent. Oh, man. I don’t know. I like basketball. I don’t know. I like coaching basketball. Okay.

honestly, sometimes I’m mindlessly sifting through Instagram reels, and there are just some folks out there that are just super funny.

Yeah, I like watching reels to make me laugh.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.