How To Do Advanced Assessments From Your WordPress LMS With PressPrimer By Ryan Moore

Ryan Moore, the founder of PressPrimer and a previous leader at Uncanny Owl, discusses evaluation, one of the most important but often disregarded facets of online learning, in this LMScast episode. Ryan contends that whether or whether students really learn, remember, and apply the material being taught is the fundamental test of a successful learning program, despite the fact that many LMS conversations center on course development, marketing, and student registration.

It provides sophisticated question banks, thorough reporting, processes for grading assignments, AI-assisted question creation, and performance analytics to aid teachers in determining not only if students passed a test but also the reasons behind their success or failure. Press Primer assists course designers, educational institutions, healthcare organizations, certification providers, and corporate training departments in creating more robust learning experiences that can show quantifiable educational value by focusing solely on assessments. The distinction between true learning and course completion is a prominent subject throughout the conversation. Ryan proposes the idea of spaced repetition, a method of teaching that asks pupils questions that they are likely to forget over time.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. It’s Ryan Moore from Press Primer formerly Uncanny. Ryan is one of those people like me who’s absolutely obsessed with e-learning and WordPress and creating value for free, and helping online educators fulfill their goals and build cool stuff.

Ryan’s the creator of Press Primer. We’re gonna dive into that, but first, welcome to the show, Ryan. Thanks, Chris. It’s great to see you again.Yeah. I’m happy to ner- nerd out with you and get into online education and WordPress and helping the education entrepreneurs out there and the e-learning site builders.

And one of the things I love about e-learning is all the various niches and use cases and different things. It really feels like Press Primer is filling a need in certain use cases and niche scenarios. So let’s just start there. What is Press Primer as a solution? What does it solve for education entrepreneurs and e-learning site builders?

Ryan Moore: Sure. So what I’m trying to do with Press Primer is basically make assessment better in WordPress so that educators can better measure learning and assess student performance. So for now, I’m tackling quizzes first, so multiple choice, true, false, multiple answer, just to make them better, basically. So looking at what LMS plugins are doing and offering a solution for with a more academic focus that really looks at performance evaluation.

So making sure that people are driving learning from a course and able to apply it. And then also taking a look from the assignment side as well, so longer written works, to really measure and evaluate what someone is taking away from a course. So everything in the assessment sphere just making sure that education is better transferred to job performance, general learning, anything else people might be doing with it 

Chris Badgett: And you have an educator add-on, school add-on, enterprise add-on.

W- how do you think about these? What are these buckets for? 

Ryan Moore: So basically, they represent features that we offer to different groups of users. So individual teachers, m- what they might require in a classroom setting or with small groups. For looking at the school add-on, what larger organizations or more advanced institutions might need in terms of what they offer to students.

And then enterprises, there are things like there are features like compliance tracking, so audit logging, white labeling just extended features maybe AI content detection, plagiarism detection, things that maybe individual instructors don’t need but that larger institutions might. So offering features you might find in enterprise LMS products that aren’t generally available in WordPress right now.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. And how should. If somebody wants to try it out, you have a free version. Can you tell us about the free versus paid, like, how they’re different? 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. So there are free versions of both Press Primer Quiz and Press Primer Assignment, so both are available on WordPress.org. Basically, they’re fully functional and offer complete workflow solutions for quizzes and assignments, so everything an individual instructor would need to get started.

On the quiz side, it would be, creating question banks, using AI if you want to generate quiz questions where there’s always human oversight too. Generating quizzes themselves, and then all the settings that you would need to deliver a unified and productive quiz experience, including with reports.

And then on the assignment side, we have a complete assignment grading workflow, so students can upload documents, or they can submit documents or text online, and instructors can grade it right inside the browser. So we’ve got preview tools and a grading interface built right in, and everything’s in the free plugins.

The premium things add additional features like spaced repetition or advanced reports a- anything like that might m- advanced users might need to support the assessment workflow. 

Chris Badgett: This is so cool. One of the things that drives me crazy about having a WordPress LMS is, there’s this marketing advice that you should focus on your customer avatar, a very specific- type of user. But in online education or WordPress learning management system, there are so many different characters that show up to this party. Yeah. It could be just the subject matter expert teaching a hobby skill, all the way up to some enterprise compliance thing. And there and it’s just really hard to cover everybody’s use case and be the ultimate Swiss Army tool.

Ryan Moore: Absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: So having a tool like Press Primer come in and focus on these advanced use cases is super helpful, and I’m really glad you’re doing that. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. It’s interesting. Like, when I was working or when I was looking at quiz plugins initially, because I’ve done a lot of work with LifterLMS and LearnDash in the past, and LMS plugins, and when I was looking at quiz plugins in general, almost all of them try to do everything right now.

So they’d have, a dozen plus question types. They’d focus on lead generation and integrations, and a lot of it was focused on marketing, but nobody was really looking at purely what educators need. So LMS plugins would offer quiz solutions, but they tended not to go deep into looking at the results, looking at insights, how to track what’s working and what’s not working, how to support students.

So the quiz plugins weren’t really offering those kinds of solutions, and then LMS plugins, it was… It tended to be more surface level because they needed to offer everything to all educators. So beyond just the quizzes, you’d have to look at, the course, courses themselves reporting integration with e-commerce systems.

I’m not looking at any of that. I’m just really focused on the educator quiz experience. So very narrow. Same with the assignment solution. It’s just looking at what do educators need to offer robust assignment solutions to their users? 

Chris Badgett: I think this is really smart. And just to be clear, just ’cause there’s so much terminology and lingo in lear- learning management system space, when you say assessment, that’s like a bucket of in which quizzes and assignments fall under.

Yeah. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah, it is- Is there 

Chris Badgett: any other kind of assessment that- 

Ryan Moore: not… I have some ideas about other things in the assessment space to potentially tackle- Yeah … but those are the main ones that people are using to evaluate student performance. 

Chris Badgett: One of the things I’ve noticed among the LifterLMS user base is some of the most successful sites that stick around the li- the longest, and potentially aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, are in the compliance space.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And you said there’s a lot of really niche detailed needs in compliance. What are some example things that would, in Press Primer that are relevant to, let’s say, mandatory training for to keep a license as an example? 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. So we see, I’d say here and previously for assessment work when I worked at Uncanny Owl there were a lot of companies doing annual recurring training.

We saw a lot from that, and then healthcare was pretty popular too, and is right now for the plugins. So I would say one of the tools that we offer that maybe other quiz platforms, LMS plugins aren’t is tracking potentially progress over time, and h- supporting measurement of how things change year to year so that people can go in and not only make sure that requirements are done, but that they’re done and there’s progress within the company.

So being able to measure some of that. Also on the compliance side, if you’re just looking at w- what do we need to make sure that we stay certified also building things into the plugin that other plugins aren’t. Like tracking if someone changes a quiz question, or makes changes to a quiz settings, or changes behavior, or changes answers.

Tracking all of that to make sure that everything has an audit log, and that, if the organization themselves needed to be reviewed for compliance purposes, then they could point to, “Here’s what changed year to year. Here’s who made the change,” and you can audit all that. So there’s a record that can’t be deleted of any changes to your assessment system 

Chris Badgett: I love it.

There’s so many different angles on the LMS space, like the subject matter expert looking to make money online. This is sort of Lifter’s original beachhead market. Yeah. But you’re coming from… And it’s not that we don’t, we have a s- continuing education add-on and all kinds of stuff- yeah

but it’s really hard to serve all of these at once. If you were to d- to profile your ideal one to three use cases what i- what kind of thing is it? What’s a perfect scenario, either in the offline world, like something that’s happening offline that doesn’t really have a solid digital solution- or s- yeah what’s, who is the really perfect fit for this kind of thing? You’ve b- you’ve mentioned schools and enterprise- Yeah … but let’s go more granular. Who specifically within these? 

Ryan Moore: It’s hard to say, and the Press Primer products are pretty new too, so I’m trying to stay flexible and agile in responding to what people are saying.

I would say there still is a good audience in the course creator, individual course creator market that Lifter was focusing on because you can prove that the learning is effective and that the courses are working. So people can go through a course and you can say, as a result of going through this course, average performance or test scores went up 23%,” something like that.

Or that by using our space repetition system to prepare for, a real world test that somebody was doing so using it for a test prep, then you could say, “By using, the quizzes on a daily basis, then, performance outcomes were 20% higher than someone who didn’t use this system.”

So I think just having that proof that learning is being delivered and transferred And having the follow-up too, so that you can, improve performance over time before people forget. Having those systems in place helps to improve and show like this course is useful, and people who take this are making more money from it or are performing better.

So being able to quantify some of that is, is good for course creators. So that’s one. And then a lot of what went into it too, was thinking about some of the projects we’d turned down in the past, or that we couldn’t take on at Uncanny for various reasons, usually budget. So thinking about the medical space and what they need there, like how to develop assessments that they could measure what’s working, what’s not working, hone them, deliver better programs.

So some of the enterprise users offering the tools that they really couldn’t get elsewhere or at this price point. So there are definitely a couple of markets that people will use the products differently, and I tried to tailor it to those. And then too, the tiers help to refine that a bit.

Here’s what we expect larger enterprises to use. Here’s what we expect schools or, smaller organizations to use, that kind of thing. 

Chris Badgett: Just so I learn from you and the audience too, you went over it quickly, but I wanna make sure I capture it. What is the theory of spaced repetition? 

Ryan Moore: So yeah, the idea there is basically that somebody takes a quiz, we’re capturing their results, and we’re looking at, okay, what topic areas did they do perform well in?

Where did they struggle? And then they come in on a repeating basis. So every day they come in, and then the system is basically looking at where did they perform well, where did they have issues, and it’s showing them questions again or topic areas that they’re most likely to forget when, like, when they need that information.

So somebody goes into the system every day for two weeks. Ev- each day they see questions that the system knows they’re most likely to struggle with, and tests them on those, and gives them feedback to try to help them learn and retain it more. So basically you go to the same page or something every day and you see a different set of questions that are designed to help you retain information from the larger question pool on a topic area.[00:13:00] 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned medical, and I… This is something I’m fascinated with, ’cause I know that some of our stickiest, bi- biggest spending users are in the medical niche. And when I look at it, there’s all these different niches within medical. Like- … I, we’re actually working on some content for 10 different medical sub-niches from- Yeah

medi- medical device sales rep training, nursing continuing education, hospital employee onboarding, telehealth provider training, mental health practitioner certification. It goes on and on. And that’s just, even in medical alone, there’s all these different use cases. And, what’s the primary goal?

I’m starting to see where Press Primer fits in because, for the… I’m just being super stereotypical here, but for a course creator, they wanna make money online. So they care about- Yeah … “i want to have a full-time income or do really well teaching what I know and all that.” Yeah. So their main goal is making money.

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: They still wanna help people, I’m not saying they don’t. But a school doesn’t necessarily care at all about making money through the LMS. Yeah. It’s all about the assessments and the learning, which is where Press Primer comes in with some tools. Yeah. And then there’s these companies, whether it’s a hospital or medical- It’s, they’re not concerned with money.

They are concerned with learning, but it’s more like compliance and data. So it’s just interesting, all these different- Yeah … what is the primary objective? 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Some of the tools that I’ve gotten in there too are designed specifically with medical in mind, and also safety programs. I- Absolutely … I’ve seen a lot of those where their question sets, their question banks are extremely valuable.

That’s what people are paying for. So how do they make the question banks better? How do they know if they’re working? The one report that I started on early was a question analysis one, where it’s evaluating each question and once there’s enough there, there are enough attempts to get, meaningful data out of it, then you can look at are distractors too easy?

Do we need to revisit feedback? Are the people who’ve demonstrated knowledge in this topic selecting the correct answer? Having all these metrics about are these distractors working? Is this question effective? Helps them improve the questions and data bank and program overall.

So not only can students perform better, but they have a better set of data that they can kind of market to people and use and see better results from. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s really cool. I’m envisioning a different val- asset. The course, the traditional make money online course creator, the asset is revenue.

A school, the asset is the student’s brain. Like it needs to- Yeah … we’re building the future generation here. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And in the business, the asset is… I never thought about the quality and effectiveness of the question bank as the asset. But that makes a lot of sense. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Like For a lot of customers we had, for sure that’s what they’re protecting, that’s what they’re trying to build out, and always measuring.

Do we have the best question bank to do our students perform better on these tests than, they do from competitors’ programs? 

Chris Badgett: I have a side bigger picture question for you- … which is the e-learning industry is really interesting because it’s so fragmented and all over the place, and in some ways there’s all this cutting edge stuff like what you’re building, but then there’s also some old school antiquated systems that don’t get updated or whatever.

So this, it’s this interesting mix of old stuff, slow to change, versus innovative, hyper niche, progressive, making things digital. What’s your view on Like I’m a WordPress first person, so I’m like- 

Ryan Moore: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: i, that’s my bias. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just my bias.

And then, I’ll get somebody who’s exploring Lifter or WordPress as an option, but they’re deep in the SCORM world and they- … they’re not WordPress native. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And there’s so much e-learning and SCORM and the authoring tools. I’m trying to come up with a specific question, but it’s basically like- 

Ryan Moore: Yeah, I can s- I can talk to it though.

Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: speak to this SCORM versus WordPress or an e-learning authoring tools versus building content, and quizzes as a specific example or assessments directly in WordPress versus third party tools. Who’s it for? Who’s it not for? How do we help with the friction between somebody who wants to transition to WordPress?

Ryan Moore: Okay. That’s big. Let me start with different pieces of it. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Ryan Moore: So when I was thinking about Press Primer, so last year when I was starting to, get the ideas together, I didn’t really even look at what was in WordPress because I had an idea of what people were doing with quizzes, but they weren’t offering these advanced capabilities.

So when I was looking at what I wanted to do, it was more focusing on best-in-class products outside of WordPress. And e-learning too I feel like so much innovation was happening in WordPress from, 2012 to tw- to 2020 kind of thing, where all these plugins were coming out and offering new tools and then they got really big markets, and they’re pretty mature, and there was maybe less innovation that was happening.

So I wanted to look outside of WordPress just to see what other people were doing in the space to cap- capture some of those best ideas and bring them into WordPress to offer something that was a bit different. So that was part of it, just here’s what’s happening in WordPress, and then outside of that space, looking at that and where there’s innovation happening.

In terms of the different systems, yeah, so I got started really in corporate e-learning 25 years ago, and it was really using authoring tools, using dedicated LMS. And then bridging those has always been a challenge, and there wasn’t a lot of overlap where w- when I was at Uncanny, we built some tools that would help people in the corporate space port their authored courses into WordPress, but it was always awkward and felt like it was disconnected and not really a native part of the experience.

It was just targeted at a different audience and platform. So melding those two has always been tricky, and then I think some of that corporate audience has stayed away from WordPress. One of the biggest benefits, of course, is the flexibility and just being able to do what you want and bring in different pieces and combine things.

So like I, I think we’ll still see more there, where things are being brought together and combined, and it’s so much easier to integrate things than it used to be. There’s complexity, and there’s so many tools that discovery is a problem, but integrating what you’re using with, something that gives you the flexibility to add whatever you want is pretty powerful for WordPress too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What about that idea of, … i’m always struggling when I talk to somebody who’s using … you can fit SCORM content into a WordPress LMS, and there’s ways to do that. And a lot of times what people have is a huge back catalog that they have no interest in redoing.

They just wanna keep using that. Yeah. But they’re interested in moving forward with some of the benefits of native content creation in WordPress. Any tips with that? What would you say to an organization who’s “WordPress looks interesting to me with all this customizability, and I’m warming up to the idea of a learning management system can also be a content management system or e-learning- content creation system, but I’m like, I’m straddling two worlds here.” What would you say to them? 

Ryan Moore: I’d say take time to explore it. The nice thing too with WordPress is that everything is so low cost either free or very inexpensive. So if you can invest the time just to try things out, build a proof of concept, experiment, do those things, then maybe you can properly assess.

I know it’s tricky to find that time, but just putting that in, trying things out, can provide a better picture of what’s possible and maybe how it can grow in future. I just say it’s worth exploring. And Chris too, there is a question. I don’t know if you wanna deal with the comments, but maybe we could tackle that one.

Oh, sure. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: L- let me bring that up. So the question is at what point does a creator outgrow a plugin-based learning management system and need something custom-built? What are the signs in your community when WordPress stops being enough? 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, so you go ahead. I’ll ha- I have some comments too, but you go ahead.

Ryan Moore: Sure. I’d say, ’cause we dealt a lot with this, and it ties back into the previous question about just different systems. Because when we saw this happening the most with WordPress was when we started bringing in outside authored courses, and we started having to capture SCORM and xAPI data.

So really high volume sites with hundreds of simultaneous users that are generating, maybe 50,000 statements per day around learning. And then WordPress can have trouble scaling and handling that kind of load. Even in good hosting environments where it’s load balanced and everything else, unless plugins and everything th- is extremely optimized, you’re still gonna run into some bottlenecks.

So I’d say the limitations there are very high that we experienced, but there were situations where, if there are a couple thousand people on the site at the same time doing SCORM courses and tracking all that data, and you’re running reports on millions of records, then, WordPress can potentially be inefficient.

But it’s such a high threshold In terms of what I experienced, that it’s not the individual course creators, it’s not the mid-sized companies. It’s really big ones that m- maybe need to assess something that’s really optimized for the use case, that, has the budget, and they can look at every line of code and build something that’s really unique to their situation.

So I’d say for 99% of the users that we’d had in the past, WordPress has the room to grow, and is the right solution, and offers the flexibility and the right pricing. But there are some enterprise users where that’s when you start looking at something custom. And I don’t know how that compares to your experience.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’d say that’s… Yeah, WordPress, I lo- I love it, but it’s not the solution for everything. The cool thing that I’ve seen, I’m sure you have, too, over a decade plus, is that WordPress hosting has evolved a lot and gotten a lot better, and there’s, different options, from a low budget host to some for a real serious business with lots of performance optimization and whatnot.

At Lifter, I actually really love it when somebody shows up with some scaled out situation “Hey, we have 75,000 courses and we have this problem.” 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Or, “We did a product launch,” and, like- You know, 20,000 people had to take this quiz at the same time, and w- and then we see oh, there’s a issue there.

Sometimes we can solve it- … like in the code of the LMS, but sometimes we can’t, ’cause it’s a hosting limitation- Yeah … and resource allocation thing. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So can WordPress scale? Absolutely. Yeah. Is e-learning more challenging to scale? Absolutely, because it’s not just a static site with… It’s very different from a high traffic news site that may get- a million visits a day, but they’re just serving cash page views. Yeah. 

Ryan Moore: It’s 

Chris Badgett: totally different. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah, and a- once you get to a certain point too, we did a lot with custom caching solutions. Like, where are we hitting the bottlenecks? Doing that analysis and then building a way, like maybe the data that populates reports, only the core data, the metrics only get processed, overnight.

And then maybe you’re looking at records that are a day old for the, largest reports. Again, very atypical solutions, but if there are solutions even if you get really big, where you can implement changes to support whatever the needs are, 

Chris Badgett: let’s do a a term thing since we’re doing a lot of education here on terms.

I, when I first discovered the concept of a learning record store- Yeah … like a LRS, or this idea that like some situations have multiple LMSs reporting into one learning record store. Yeah. So there’s these hybrid solutions where, let’s say you have a WordPress LMS site here, you have like a SAS LMS over here.

You have an in-person training thing that’s scanning ID cards or something, and it’s feeding data in. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So it can get like super complex. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah, and that’s something we had to do. This is outside of the w- the Press Primer space. But- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah … 

Ryan Moore: yeah, in the past, if we were storing a lot of records, then some of those records might be passed off to a different system where reporting was run from.

Again, just to offload the WordPress site itself. Which you can do, and then centralize learning records, and it’s like a single point that’s the authority too, which can be helpful if you’re collecting learning information from different sources. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I would also just add that WordPress and tools like LifterLMS and PressPrimer are often creating a ton of value in micro niche scenarios- that don’t necessarily have huge volumes of users. So for example like you mentioned compliance stuff, medical stuff, it could just be one company with an internal training si- pharmaceutical sales company, and they’re training their sales team, and it’s super valuable to them. And they need this they need to make sure the learning is awesome, and they’re using the qu- the question bank optimization and all this, but it’s not like an LMS for millions.

It’s like this niche thing, or this one- Yeah … hospital has this thing, or this one company has this thing, or this one franchise network has this thing that only the business owners look at. There’s just so many niches. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. There are. There are. 

Chris Badgett: I always like to remind myself that the internet was literally invented for education.

It’s really education, communication, and defense. That’s why the internet was invented, and it started as a academic thing. It’s just, we’re just continuing on that path, and things are just getting more advanced and more niche. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Do you at PressPrimer do agency work, or strictly product focused?

Ryan Moore: Right now we’re offering a bit. Again it’s new products, a relatively new company. We just started in December of last year, and the first plugin just came out in January. So it’s still at a point where I want to have the experience of working with customers. We did something similar with Uncanny Owl first.

We released the first plugin there in 2015, and we were still doing a lot of consulting work, and using the consulting work and talking to customers to inform the products we were building, just to make them more useful and seeing the use cases. So there is an element of that I just wanna do now, just to have the relationships and conversations with heavy users to figure out, how can we do this better?

How are students using it? Just again to make sure that we’re collecting the feedback and offering things that are of value. So I know some of the things that we might be building are unique to an organization, but there are still lessons and value we can get out of that apply to the wider [00:32:00] market.

So yeah, limited consulting at this time i- in terms of the agency work, but mostly focused in, on what we can offer to the public. 

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And you mentioned AI detection. AI is a hot topic these days. It comes up on most podcast episodes. Tell us about AI detection and how it works and any other AI features or plans you have, ’cause it’s an interesting time right now with how does AI affect learning?

So it’s just interesting. There’s a lot of change and disruption happening. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah, for sure. So in both of the plugin suites there are AI-based tools to help educators produce things, grade things more efficiently and effectively. So on the quiz side, we can help with things like distractor generation, quiz question generation from really large input data sets.

So I- I’ve seen some other examples in the learning space where, instructors are putting in a paragraph or two and then asking it to generate a quiz, which is not helpful. It’s not getting the full context. Whereas, we’re offering a tool where people can upload entire textbooks or chapters or, visual aids, whatever, and it’s gonna generate relevant questions based on that.

And again everything goes through the instructor, so it’s just you can go in, make tweaks, reject any questions that don’t fit. And then it’s based on, question category or topic category, difficulty, things like that. So there is that element on the quiz side. We can do more on the assignment side in terms of if people are submitting text-based assignments, looking at things like basic proofreading in different languages, and again, just offering suggestions to the reviewer so that they can save a bit of time not populating feedback, or integrating with third-party plagiarism and AI content detection systems so like Winston or GPTZero, just so we can pass assignments through, and it can provide feedback on what it thinks.

And so it’s not gonna tell a student, “Here’s… you cheated,” or, “You copied this person,” or, “This came from Wikipedia,” whatever. It’s just gonna say, “Here’s what we found. You do with this information what you want.” And things like rubric based grading for assignments. So basically for the AI, you can define, here’s how we want to assess the assignment based on these categories, within those categories.

Here are performance levels. Here’s what they look like. And then the AI can use all that feedback and context to suggest feedback about the grade and just about the assignment quality to the instructor so that they can just use that as an input to the grading process. So not replacing what they’re doing, but just offering different inputs that are informed and have the context so that the instructor has another source of feedback they can look at if they want to use it 

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s very cool.

And I can tell you’ve done your research. Like you said, you went outside of WordPress and you saw what was going on in other assessment and LMS spaces, ’cause it’s a vast universe out there, and I love that you’re staying super focused on assessments. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause 

Chris Badgett: that’s the challenge. If you try to do it all, the, all of these areas are, like, a million miles deep, and that deep dive on assessments is really cool.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: One more AI question since you’re into AI and been in the e-learning space forever like me. One of… One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is, and this may not really apply to the assessment space, but I’d love your take on it, is- we’re like getting Lifter in a place where AI agents, as an example, can consume courses.

Like, where somebody would send an agent to take the course instead of the human take the course, similar to how we might use ChatGPT today to like, “Hey, can you summarize this article and give me the little bit?” Or take this course and then add it to your as a resource in your, in the agent file as part of your training or whatever.

Like, how do we, … This idea of there’s gonna be m- demographics are expanding. It’s not just humans that will consume e-learning. In fact, it’s probably already happening. Just I think I heard the other day that more than 50% of the traffic on the internet is bots, it’s not humans.

So how’s it … What’s coming for education? And obviously, humans need to learn and grow, but what’s your take on agents or AI as student? 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. I think it … there’s the risk, too, with cheating and students using the AI to do things for them and just get the certificate, whatever.

We’re trying to incorporate some of that consideration into Press Primer, so things like offering proctoring tools. So I know you can’t eliminate it, but just like forcing people to complete a quiz in a full-screen mode and timing it so that they don’t really have time to ask questions.

Limiting what’s output in the HTML to make sure there’s no clues given away. Pulling from the course material, making sure that it’s unique and it’s, somebody potentially can’t view the course material as they’re taking the quiz or something. I think, too, you have to look at how involved is the instructor.

Is there any face-to-face or in-person kind of discussion assessment? The longer evaluation, just with the assignment side of things, so that it’s not just multiple choice questions that an AI could potentially answer. But looking at making sure that people understand the information enough to apply it and synthesize new information.

So incorporating some of that into the assignment side where someone has to do the reflection and write something, based on the course that an AI couldn’t do, and then adding some detection in around that. So I think pushing it so that students are forced to do a bit more can help prevent some of the AI intervention.

People should still use it to learn, if it helps their learning process, then they can use that. But for the evaluation, like just, you can put tools in place that kind of reduce the incentive and also the opportunity to use AI tools 

Chris Badgett: I love that. And just a feature request, ’cause I haven’t been able to solve it, but maybe you’re the guy is, and I say this a little bit in jest, ’cause there’s only so much you can do from a compliance and proctoring thing remotely.

But I’ve gotten requests for, like, how do I set up LifterLMS for eye tracking to make sure somebody’s not cheating. Yeah. That sounds like- Yeah … i’m like, dude, I’m still, we’re not there yet, but I don’t know. Yeah. This whole compliance proctoring thing is another example of a niche thing of we care very strongly about not cheating.

And it’s a very specific kind of thing, and then there’s accessibility concerns and all kinds of stuff that it’s just fascinating. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. It’s, it helped too, my wife’s been doing some undergrad courses lately just for personal education. She enjoys learning. So as part of that, like, when I was building out the spaced repetition feature- how can she leverage it for her own learning? And then, too, she had to take an exam with that was proctored. So just looking at what schools are doing right now so she could walk me through it, like, how they had her move the, her computer around, what had to happen on her phone, and then thinking about how can we potentially offer some of those tools in a more automated or easy way in WordPress.

So I think we can push proctoring more, and that might be helpful. I don’t know. There are lots of opportunities there. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s cool. We have some questions. Let’s run through these. Yeah. So this person’s building a custom LMS for a client in the math education space to compete with, it sounds other math education products.

How would you leverage AI to differentiate from what’s already out there? And one thing is you’re saying you can use AI to reduce cheating and increase actual learning, but what else? 

Ryan Moore: So I wanna be careful. AI normally for educators and the way we’re building it out and looking at it is that it extends what they can do and augments their capabilities and what they know in the space and their expertise.

So I wouldn’t necessarily lean on it too much to say that you’re delivering a better product because you’re using AI. I’d say you’re just trying to incorporate it so that it enhances what you’re already offering. Maybe you’re using it to, ingest more material and offer feedback or students, as students are going through things so that you can offer additional supportive tools.

But I wouldn’t say AI is necessarily a selling point. It could even be a distraction. But just looking at tools in general that can support better performance and learning in the course. 

Chris Badgett: And a follow-up question we have here is how can AI actually improve learning for the students so they don’t just mark stuff as completed and move on?

And I think I’ve tie- I’ll go first and just say I think this sort of ties into what you just said- 

Ryan Moore: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: about using AI to augment, not to replace. Like some of the ways to make sure students actually learn and don’t just hit the mark complete button, there’s several. I’ll just give some LifterLMS examples.

One, we have an advanced videos add-on which requires the whole video to be played before they can move on. You can inject an assessment that has a minimum passing grade requirement before somebody can move on. You can do micro quizzing just to reinforce the content of the lesson to make sure they got the key knowledge checks or whatever you call it.

These are… This has nothing to do with AI, it’s just like- yeah … if you’re focusing on learning, these are tools the instructor has to help make sure it happens. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: And what was the thing we discussed earlier? What was it called? The spaced repetition. That’s another example, this is a Press Primer thing, that helps make sure that the learning happens.

Ryan Moore: Yeah. And it’s something we used to struggle with. It’s not necessarily an AI question. People are always gonna look at how they can skip ahead. A long time ago when people were authoring SCORM courses, and we were too, then there’d be shortcuts, like hotkeys that they could press to skip slides.

Like just taking some of those tools away so that someone has to ingest the content themselves. There’s… They’re forced to, or ideally they’re incentivized to. Like they get rewarded for going through it or spending more time on things. But yeah, there are interventions you can put in to reduce people’s dependency on AI and just how much they wanna use it both before the course, like during it and after, having follow-ups and just some of the larger assessment pieces so that, if they did find a way to move forward quickly and just mark things as complete, then they would hit a wall.

If they’re talking to the instructor or they’re submitting something that requires them to demonstrate mastery of the topic that they can’t do it unless they’ve gone through the course and spent the time actually learning things like that. 

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And just a quick plug for LifterLMS, we do have a lesson time feature in development right now, so if you have minimum lesson time, this is just another way to try to help ensure students stay for the amount of time that’s required.

You mentioned and this question involves somebody sort of gaming a system and just clicking a mark complete button. On the note of the mark complete button, can you explain how Press Primer integrates with LifterLMS, LearnDash, and others in terms of the mark complete button the WordPress LMS has?

Ryan Moore: Yeah. So the integrations we’ve built so far for the plugins are basically around controlling course progress so that someone can’t move forward unless they’ve had a positive outcome for a quiz or assignment. So basically you’re mapping a quiz or assignment to a LifterLMS lesson, and in order for someone to complete it, then they have to earn a passing score, either through automatic grading or through with the assignment, an instructor actually looking at it and giving them feedback.

So yeah that’s how we integrate and control progress based on assessment performance. 

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. That is Ryan Moore from Press Primer. We’re gonna have to do this again ’cause there’s so much we could continue to talk about. 

Ryan Moore: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But that’s at pressprimer.com. And do you have a recommendation on where somebody should start or how sh- they should choose which plan is right for them?

Yes. And also, if they have questions before they make an investment what should they do? 

Ryan Moore: Yeah, I’d say definitely start with the free plugins. So they’re both on wordpress.org, so Press Primer Quiz, Press Primer Assignment. See what they offer out of the box, and then once you have an understanding of their capabilities, then you can check out the website at pressprimer.com to better understand what the features are, how we allocate them to different tiers, and maybe what would add value to your specific course.

It’s hard to jump in and just tackle everything, so the free plugins are a good gateway just to get onboarded. That’s awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show. You out there listening or watching, head on over to pressprimer.com, check it out. Also check out the free version on WordPress.

Chris Badgett: And there’s two, there’s the Press Primer Quiz and Press Primer Assignment. Thanks for coming on. We’ll definitely have to do this again sometime, Ryan. 

Ryan Moore: Sure. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.