Maintaining compliance and certification courses that happen regularly can prove difficult for organizations, particularly if you’re relying on an LMS such as LearnDash to handle training. Whether you’re managing staff safety training, annual professional certifications, or other time-restricted programs, it’s essential to have users retake courses on a consistent schedule.
Manually resetting course progress for hundreds or thousands of students can be difficult. But thanks to the LearnDash Progress Reset add-on by WooNinjas, it’s a snap to automate course resets on a schedule, ideal for ongoing compliance and certification training.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to utilize the LearnDash Progress Reset add-on to auto-reset courses on a schedule, make reporting easier, and stay in compliance without the headache.
Why Resetting Progress Is Important to Compliance
Some industries, such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and education, need periodic recertification and retraining. Typical situations are:
- Compliance courses taken every year (e.g., HIPAA, OSHA, GDPR)
- Recertification tests that are dated after one to two years
- Refresher training every month or every quarter for security procedures
If completions are not kept for a limited time, learners may not be asked to repeat the mandatory training, leaving your company vulnerable.
The LearnDash Progress Reset add-on helps automate this process by resetting learners’ progress at specific times or intervals.
Key Features for Automated Progress Resets
Here’s how the LearnDash Progress Reset add-on supports automatic compliance course management:
Schedule Progress Resets
You can automate resets with the “Schedule Progress Reset Task” feature. Enter a date, time, and recurrence interval (daily, weekly, monthly, or annually) for course progress to reset. This way, users are reminded to retake courses at the right time, without the need for manual effort.
Yearly Reset After Course Completion
For certifications that need to be renewed once a year, you may utilize the “Yearly Schedule” tool. After a user has finished a course, their status is automatically reset after a designated number of years (e.g., 1 year from now), forcing them to recapture the course.
It works perfectly for:
- Annual compliance courses
- License or credential renewals
- Long-term employee development courses
Reset by Users, Groups, Roles, or Courses
The add-on leaves you in total control of who is reset and when:
- By User: Reset progress for individual users.
- By Course: Reset all students registered for a given course.
- By Group: Reset all users within a given LearnDash group.
- By Role: Reset all users with a particular WordPress role (e.g., Subscribers or Employees).
The flexibility allows you to easily deal with various compliance cycles for various departments or job positions.
Optional Unenrollment After Reset
Do you need to have users re-enroll by workflow or a new enrollment link? Enable the “Unenroll Users” feature when resetting progress. This will make users need to re-enroll prior to finishing the course again.
Bulk Reset with CSV Import
Compliance management for a large team? The add-on features bulk options via CSV files. Export a list of users or courses, make modifications offline, and re-import it to mass reset progress for hundreds of users with a few clicks.
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Manage Schedules
This tab shows all of the scheduled progress resets. Over here, you can edit and delete the scheduled tasks for progress reset if required. Other than the schedule, you can also execute the tasks by going over the task name and clicking on “Execute Now”.
Allow User Roles
The LearnDash Progress Reset add-on lets admins control who can reset course progress by assigning permissions to specific user roles. Roles can be granted access to reset progress from the backend (admin-level controls) or the frontend (self-reset by users). Enabling the “Reset Frontend Progress” toggle allows roles like subscribers to reset their own progress directly from the frontend.
Dry Run Reports & Logs
Before executing a reset, you can click “Dry Run Report” to generate an Excel sheet preview of what will be reset, helping you avoid mistakes.
After resets, all activity is logged, giving you:
- Full visibility
- Audit trails for compliance checks
- Confidence that your LMS is following protocol
Automated Progress Resets Setup Instructions (Step-by-Step)
This is how you can begin automating LearnDash course resets for compliance:
Step 1: Install the Add-On
- Install and activate the LearnDash Progress Reset add-on.
- Enter your license key in the License Settings tab.
Step 2: Select a Reset Method
Navigate to Progress Reset in the LearnDash menu and select your reset method:
- Reset by Course for individual compliance modules.
- Reset by Group or Role for departmental or job-related resets.
By User:
By Course:
By Group:
By Role:
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Step 3: Set Up the Schedule
Check the “Schedule Progress Reset Task” option:
- Enter a task name
- Select your date and time
- Specify how frequently the reset will run (e.g., yearly)
- Click on the ”Schedule Progress Reset” Button to schedule the task.
Step 4: Review and Initiate the Reset
- Go to the Progress Reset screen to preview the selected criteria.
- Use the “Dry Run Report” to generate an Excel sheet showing the current user’s progress.
- Once verified, click the “Reset Progress” button to manually trigger the reset, or wait for the scheduled task.
Step 5: (Optional) Enable Yearly Reset After Completion
If you desire progress to reset one year after the course is completed:
- Visit the individual course settings.
- Turn on the “Course Complete Scheduler” toggle.
- Set the value for the number of years (e.g., 1).
- Optionally, turn on “Unenroll Users” on reset.
- Click on the save option to set the yearly reset.
Bonus:
Allow Students to Reset Their Own Progress. As an option with certain training programs, you might offer learners the option to restart their own training. Using frontend progress reset for certain roles, users (e.g., employees or subscribers) can manually reset their progress from your LMS’s front end.
Final Thoughts
Compliance and certification renewals can be overwhelming, but they don’t have to be. LearnDash Progress Reset add-on streamlines the repetitive task of resetting course progress and ensures your training programs remain up to date with legal and industry regulations.
Whether you’re training a dozen or thousands of users across departments, this solution provides the flexibility and automation that enables you to keep on top of repeated learning needs, without exhausting your admin resources.
