How to Build AI-Generated Quizzes for LearnDash

LearnDash is arguably the most popular LMS for WordPress, and for good reason. It handles courses, lessons, certificates, and student management well. And after over a decade of using it (and building a company around it!), LearnDash has proven itself as a great choice for a wide variety of WordPress e-learning sites.

LearnDash has built-in quizzes that make student assessment easy. With a variety of question types and dozens of features that can be enabled or disabled, LearnDash quizzes are a convenient option that work well on many WordPress sites. There are also some limitations though, and wanting to do more with student assessment, including measuring performance, is part of why we built PressPrimer Quiz. We also wanted to make it easy to incorporate AI into e-learning development in a pretty powerful and flexible way.

This post walks through how LearnDash handles AI quiz creation natively, what’s missing, and how PressPrimer Quiz can fill in some of the gaps.

AI Questions in LearnDash Quizzes

LearnDash includes an AI Quiz Builder that generates quiz questions using OpenAI. By filling out the details in the screenshot below, LearnDash can generate quizzes in a few seconds that you can instantly incorporate into your course.

It’s a simple and convenient tool, but there’s a lot you can’t do with it, like:

• Choose the OpenAI model that best fits your context.
• You can’t choose how many distractors you want for questions.
• You can’t select source material for the quiz questions.
• You can’t set difficulty, category, or other question attributes.

How PressPrimer Quiz Handles AI Generation

PressPrimer Quiz is a quiz plugin that integrates directly with LearnDash lessons and topics as an alternative way of offering assessments. It takes a very different approach to AI question generation, allowing you to provide your own source material. You can paste in very large quantities of text (up to 250,000 characters), upload a PDF, or even upload a Word document. That means questions can come from anything related to a LearnDash course: textbooks, research papers, policy documents, training manuals, etc.

If you choose to upload a document, the interface provides a preview of what will be sent to OpenAI. Then you can choose exactly what you want OpenAI to generate, including the difficulty of the questions, how many distractors to include for multiple choice and multiple answer questions, and categories.

Before any questions are added to your site, or to a quiz, PressPrimer Quiz gives you an opportunity to review each question, make any edits, discard any questions you don’t like, and give final approval to what gets imported. There’s complete flexibility in how questions are generated and imported, including the model that you want to use for question generation. Here’s a screenshot showing the model selection; you can choose from the latest models that your OpenAI account has access to.

Generated questions go into question banks, which give you a layer of organization that’s helpful for larger question sets. You might create separate banks for each chapter, topic, or competency area. And when you create quizzes in PressPrimer Quiz, your quizzes can pull questions in dynamically for one or more question banks based on whatever criteria you define (like category or difficulty).

Using PressPrimer Quiz with LearnDash

PressPrimer Quiz detects LearnDash automatically when both plugins are active. There’s nothing to configure for the integration; PressPrimer Quiz simply adds metaboxes to lesson and topic edit pages that allow mapping a quiz to a LearnDash object. PressPrimer Quizzes are automatically added to lesson or topic pages beneath any existing content, and they can be used to control forward progress in a course (e.g. users must pass a quiz to mark a lesson complete).

Sites can absolutely use both LearnDash quizzes and PressPrimer Quizzes. Perhaps reflective quizzes during a course use the variety of question types that LearnDash supports, and pre- and post-test quizzes use PressPrimer Quiz for some of the additional benefits it adds, including:

• Anti-cheat tools, like server-side answer validation and delayed retries
• Native xAPI support
• Comprehensive quiz reporting, including question and distractor analysis
• Quiz availability windows, including automatic submission

Getting Started

PressPrimer Quiz is a free plugin available on WordPress.org. Install it alongside LearnDash, connect your OpenAI API key, and start generating questions from your course materials in minutes. AI question generation is fully supported and unlimited in the free version of the plugin.

The free version includes unlimited quizzes, unlimited questions, AI generation, question banks, save and resume support across devices, three themes and visual customization, detailed reporting, full WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, and full LearnDash integration (as well as support for Tutor LMS, LifterLMS, and LearnPress). If you need premium features like quiz assignments, question analysis, xAPI support, full audit logging, question history, and white-label branding, add-ons are available and on sale through the end of February.