Learnomy 1.8.0: A Real Gradebook, and Settings You Can Trust

Learnomy 1.8.0 is the release where the plugin stops asking you to trust settings that did not do anything, and starts giving you a real answer to the question every course creator eventually asks: what is this student’s grade in this course, right now, across everything they were assigned?

Alongside that headline feature, this release closes a bug class that was quietly denying certificates to students who had actually finished their courses, tightens what the public can see of unpublished content, and removes a handful of controls that implied behaviour the product never had. None of that is changelog trivia. It changes what you can promise a paying student or a compliance officer today.

What Learnomy actually is, if you have not looked yet

Learnomy is built around a simple pitch: the LMS WordPress should have shipped with. You do not bolt on MemberPress to gate a course, WooCommerce to take a payment, and a third quiz plugin to run an exam. Courses, membership plans, checkout, quizzes, exams, and instructor payouts are native to the plugin.

The free plugin is not a trial shell. It includes unlimited courses, sections, lessons and topics, with no cap pushing you toward Pro. Membership plans and checkout (Stripe and PayPal) are built in, so a paid course works without a separate commerce plugin. Instructors can be paid on a revenue-share model similar to Udemy’s, with commission tracked automatically and payouts visible in the admin dashboard.

Quizzes and exams are where the free plugin goes deeper than most LMS products bother to at no cost. There are six question types (multiple choice, true/false, short answer, fill-in-the-blank, essay, and multi-select with partial credit), three quiz modes (graded, practice, and survey), and five layouts, each aimed at a different kind of assessment:

• Focused, for timed exams where the student needs to concentrate on one question at a time.
• Classic, the familiar scroll-through quiz format.
• Sectioned, built for SAT- or GRE-style exams split into timed sections.
• Conversational, a lighter, chat-style flow for shorter checks.
• Review board, designed for long certification exams where students need to navigate freely.

For anyone running a real certification exam rather than a quiz, the free plugin includes multi-subject exams with a subject-wise score breakdown, plus what amounts to real exam-hall infrastructure: a clickable question map, flag-for-review, per-answer autosave, and the ability to resume to the exact question and remaining time after a disconnect.

There is also basic proctoring, tracking tab switches, flagging students for graders, and optionally auto-submitting after a set number of switches.

If you already sell the course somewhere else, Learnomy’s closed course pricing mode lets you grant access here by email, CSV upload, or a signed enrollment webhook, without running checkout through the plugin at all.

Underneath all of it sit 166 REST API endpoints with JWT auth, a batch endpoint, offline progress sync, and device registration hooks for push notifications, on 35 custom database tables rather than a stack of custom post types. The admin and front end follow your active theme’s light or dark colour scheme, and GDPR export and erase hooks are included for data requests.

What the Pro license unlocks

One Pro license activates every extension in one purchase; there is no separate add-on cart per feature. Pro adds Spaces (group course containers), Learning Paths, Content Drip, Advanced Quizzes (question banks, randomization, time limits, multi-page quizzes, hints), Assignments with grading, Stripe Connect instructor payouts, Certificates Pro (a drag-drop designer, signatures, QR verification, Open Badges 3.0, and Credly integration), Memberships Pro (proration, pause/resume, retries, refunds, gift codes, and MRR/churn/LTV analytics), Analytics, Notes and Bookmarks, Webhooks Pro, and User Journey.

And, as of 1.8.0, the Gradebook.

Capability	Free	Pro
Unlimited courses, sections, lessons, topics	Yes	Yes
Membership plans, Stripe/PayPal checkout	Yes	Yes
Instructor revenue sharing (Udemy model)	Yes	Yes
6 quiz question types, 3 quiz modes, 5 layouts	Yes	Yes
Multi-subject exams with score breakdown	Yes	Yes
Large-exam wayfinding (question map, flag, autosave, resume)	Yes	Yes
Proctoring (tab-switch tracking, auto-submit)	Yes	Yes
Closed course pricing (email/CSV/webhook access)	Yes	Yes
REST API, JWT auth, offline sync	Yes	Yes
SCORM completion gate (lesson-level setting)	Yes	Yes
SCORM package upload and progress tracking	No	Yes
The Gradebook (weighted course grades)	No	Yes
Assignments with grading	No	Yes
Learning Paths	No	Yes
Spaces (group course containers)	No	Yes
Content Drip	No	Yes
Advanced Quizzes (banks, randomization, time limits)	No	Yes
Certificates Pro (designer, QR, Open Badges, Credly)	No	Yes
Stripe Connect instructor payouts	No	Yes
Memberships Pro (proration, pause/resume, MRR/churn)	No	Yes
Analytics, Notes and Bookmarks, Webhooks Pro, User Journey	No	Yes

One thing worth flagging before it comes up as a support question: the SCORM completion gate mode lives in the free lesson editor, but you need Pro’s SCORM package upload and tracking to actually have a package for it to gate on. Free lets you require it; Pro is what answers the requirement.

The Gradebook: an actual grade, not a completion checkmark

Every LMS can tell you whether a student finished a lesson. Almost none of them can tell you, in one number, how that student is actually doing across a course that mixes quizzes, graded assignments, and a SCORM package. That gap is what the Gradebook in 1.8.0 closes.

The Gradebook builds a weighted grade for each course out of the scoring sources that already exist in that course: quizzes, assignments, and SCORM packages. As the instructor, you decide per course how much each source counts toward the final grade, and what score counts as a pass.

This is not a fixed formula baked into the plugin. A skills-practice course might weight assignments heavily and quizzes lightly; a certification course might do the opposite.

The behaviour around incomplete work is deliberate, and worth understanding before you set weights:

Source	Counts toward grade	What happens if not yet completed
Quizzes	Yes, at the weight you set	Treated as 0 until attempted, pulling the average down
Assignments	Yes, at the weight you set	Treated as 0 until graded, pulling the average down
SCORM packages	Yes, at the weight you set	Treated as 0 until the package reports completion, pulling the average down
A source weighted 0	No, excluded entirely	Has no effect on the grade at all

That “counts as 0 until complete” behaviour is intentional, and it is the right default. A grade is supposed to reflect standing right now, not a projected best case.

If a graded assignment worth 30% of the course simply dropped out of the calculation until the student submitted it, a student who skipped it entirely would look identical to a student who had not reached that point yet, and both would look better than they actually are.

Treating an incomplete source as 0 makes the grade honest. Set a source to 0% weight if you genuinely want it excluded rather than penalizing; that is a separate, explicit choice from leaving it unfinished.

Overrides, without losing the underlying record

Automated weighting will not fit every situation. A student might have a documented reason for a missed assignment, or an instructor might want to apply judgment a formula cannot capture.

Instructors can override a student’s final grade by hand, but the override requires a reason before it saves. It cannot be a silent edit.

The override replaces only the computed final grade. It never touches the underlying quiz score, assignment grade, or SCORM completion record that fed into the calculation, and it can be reverted, which restores the calculated grade and clears the override.

That separation matters for accountability. If a student or an auditor ever asks why a grade looks the way it does, the component scores are still exactly what they were, and the override with its stated reason is visible as a distinct layer on top, not a rewritten history.

Where instructors and students see it

A new Gradebook admin screen lists every course the instructor or site owner has access to, with student count, class average, and pass rate shown per course. Drilling into a course opens a per-student grid that can be filtered by pass or fail and sorted by grade or by name, and the whole grid can be exported to CSV for a registrar, a compliance file, or a spreadsheet review.

The headline average and pass rate for a course are calculated only from students who have graded activity, and are labelled as “N active” next to the total enrolled count.

That framing fixes a real distortion. A course that just opened enrollment, with 200 students enrolled and three who have actually started a quiz, no longer reports something like a 0.3% class average. It reports the real average among the three students who have work to grade, and shows you separately how many of the 200 have not started yet.

Students get their own view. At Account > Grades, an enrolled student sees their grade for each course they are taking, broken down by source (quiz score, assignment score, SCORM completion), with a clear pass or in-progress badge next to it.

One implementation detail is worth stating plainly because it affects how much you can trust the numbers day to day: grades are computed on read, from the quiz, assignment, and SCORM data that already exists. The Gradebook does not create or store a new, separate score anywhere. There is one source of truth per component, and the grade is arithmetic on top of it, calculated fresh each time it is viewed.

SCORM completion gates: making “mark complete” mean something

The second structural addition in 1.8.0 is smaller in scope than the Gradebook but closes a real gap for anyone running standards-based content. Lessons can now be configured to require a SCORM or standards package to report completion before the student is allowed to mark the lesson complete themselves.

In practice, the “mark complete” trigger that fires inside the SCORM package is what actually advances the student through the course, not a button they click regardless of whether they engaged with the content.

This setting is available in both places instructors build courses: the wp-admin lesson editor, for anyone managing content from the back end, and the front-end course builder. The gate itself lives in free, since it is a lesson-editor setting either way; it is Pro’s SCORM package upload and progress tracking that gives the gate something real to check against.

For any academy running vendor-produced compliance training, onboarding modules, or licensed course content packaged as SCORM, this closes a gap that used to let a student skip straight past interactive content by clicking through the LMS’s own completion button.

The draft-content bug class, fixed

Three separate fixes in 1.8.0 trace back to the same root cause, and it is worth reading them together rather than as isolated bullet points, because the underlying problem was serious. Learnomy was treating draft content as if it were live content in places where it should not have been.

• A draft lesson counted toward a course’s total progress calculation. A student who had finished every published lesson in the course, with nothing left to do, could never reach 100% completion, because the denominator included lessons that were not published yet. That meant the student never received their certificate for a course they had, in every meaningful sense, finished. This is fixed.
• Draft lessons, topics and quizzes are now hidden from students entirely: from the curriculum listing, the lesson list API response, resume links, and next-lesson navigation. Instructors and course admins still see and can preview draft content, so course-building workflow is unaffected.
• A quiz with no questions in it could previously still be started and submitted by a student, producing a meaningless result. It now shows students a clear “check back later” notice instead, and instructors are pointed to the quiz editor to add questions.

Put together, these three fixes mean a course in active production, mid-build, with some lessons published and some still in draft, now behaves the way an instructor would expect: students only ever see and are only ever measured against what is actually live.

A related security fix: unpublished courses are no longer discoverable

Alongside the progress-tracking fixes, 1.8.0 closes a related but distinct issue: draft, pending, and archived courses were previously reachable by the public.

That is now fixed. A course in any of those states returns a not-found response if someone reaches its URL, new enrollment attempts against it are refused, and no search-engine metadata is emitted for it, so it will not surface in search results or link previews.

Students who were already enrolled in a course before it was unpublished are not affected: they keep full access to the course they enrolled in. The restriction applies to new enrollment and to public visibility, not to standing access.

What Learnomy removed, and why that matters more than what it added

The least flattering part of any release note is usually the most trustworthy part of it, and 1.8.0 has a real one: four things were removed or re-labelled because they implied behaviour the product did not actually have.

None of these are additions. All four are the same discipline applied in different corners of the plugin: do not ship a control that promises something the code does not do.

1. The Enrollment Mode setting is gone. It offered a choice between “Open” and “Approval” enrollment, but approval enrollment was never actually built to enforce anything. Selecting “Approval” behaved identically to selecting “Open.” The setting has been removed rather than left in place implying a workflow that did not exist. It will return when approval enrollment is genuinely implemented.
2. The certificate anchor feature is now called what it is. It was previously described as “blockchain anchoring.” It is a tamper-evident certificate hash registry: certificates are hashed and the hash is recorded so tampering can be detected. That is a legitimate, useful feature. It is not a blockchain, and 1.8.0 stops calling it one.
3. Quiz conditional-logic rules can no longer be saved silently through the REST API. The quiz runtime does not evaluate conditional-logic rules yet, so allowing them to be saved via the API gave a false impression that a rule set was active when nothing was reading it. Saving now returns a 501 response, and the feature is presented as a coming-soon card instead of a working option.
4. Course Q&A and course-comments toggles are conditional on the plugin that powers them. Previously, enabling one of these toggles when the supporting feature was not installed produced an empty, non-functional section on the course page. The toggles now only appear when the underlying capability is actually present.

None of these four changes add a feature a course creator can use today. What they do is make every remaining setting in Learnomy trustworthy: if a toggle is visible, it does something.

That is a meaningfully different guarantee than most plugins offer, and it is the kind of decision that costs a release its most eye-catching bullet points in exchange for not misleading anyone running the product on a real academy. For how Learnomy’s exam and content-standards engine developed before this release, see the 1.4.0 exam engine and content standards writeup.

Findability and admin that actually fits on one screen

Two problems that have nothing to do with each other in the codebase land in the same release note because they both affect how usable Learnomy feels day to day: whether a shared course link looks right, and whether the admin menu is navigable once you have turned on several Pro extensions.

Real sharing metadata on every page

Previously, sharing a course link on Slack, in an email, or on social media could surface raw navigation text instead of the course title and description, because the pages were not writing their own meta description and social sharing tags.

That is fixed across course pages, the catalog, individual lessons, membership pages, and instructor profile pages. A shared link now shows the actual title and a real summary of what is being shared.

The admin menu is no longer a scroll-fest

With every Pro extension enabled, the Learnomy admin menu previously ran to 33 rows, enough that lower items were cut off below the fold on many screens. It is now 22 rows.

Pro’s individual tool pages were consolidated into a single Pro Tools launcher rather than each getting its own top-level entry, and menu labels that used to collide or read ambiguously were renamed to describe what they actually do:

• The moderation queue is now labelled “Reported Content.”
• The payment log is now labelled “Payment Webhook Log,” beside “Outgoing Webhooks.”
• The companion installer is “Companion Plugins,” and the Pro catalog is “What’s in Pro.”

Every existing page address is unchanged by this reorganisation, so any bookmark, saved link, or documentation reference from before 1.8.0 still resolves to the correct page. Only the menu’s shape changed, not the underlying routes.

Smaller usability changes worth knowing about

• “My Account” and “My Courses” can now be added to any WordPress menu directly from Appearance > Menus, without a shortcode or template edit.
• Students no longer see the WordPress admin toolbar across the front end. It remains visible for admins and instructors, and there is a filter available for anyone who wants to turn it back on for students.

Everything else that affects day-to-day running of an academy

Beyond the Gradebook, the SCORM gate, the draft-content fixes, and the removals, 1.8.0 carries a set of fixes that mostly show up as “this used to be slow, wrong, or broken, and now it is not.”

Area	What changed
Large course curriculum loading	Loads without issuing a separate database query per lesson, so page speed no longer degrades as lesson count grows.
Certificate PDF downloads	PDF-library warnings were being written into the certificate file ahead of the actual document content, leaving downloaded certificates unreadable. Fixed. The same underlying fix also restores Pro analytics report exports.
Instructor student and report lists	Pagination previously could not reach page two. Fixed across the gradebook, reports, learning paths, and assignments lists.
Learning Paths catalogue	Filter, sort, and paging now work correctly, and the underlying queries use a database index instead of scanning the full table on every page view.
Analytics figures	Now refresh as soon as a quiz, assignment, or SCORM item is graded, instead of showing a number that could be stale for up to a day.
Publishing without publish permission	Now submits the course for review instead of silently leaving it as an unseen draft. Applies to both the standard editor flow and the Pro front-end builder.
Front-end builder Review step	Saving on this step no longer unpublishes a course that was already live.
Currency display	Currency symbols now follow each locale’s normal placement instead of always prefixing the number.
Course “last updated” date	A course whose date was never explicitly set no longer shows a nonsensical date like “November 30, -0001.”

Two of these deserve a sentence of extra context. The pagination fix matters more than it looks, because any instructor with more than one page of students, reports, or assignments to review was simply unable to see the rest of their list before this release.

And the publish-permission fix closes a genuine trap: an instructor without publish rights who clicked “Publish” believed their course had gone somewhere, when in fact it had gone nowhere and nobody, including the site owner, knew it existed. It now correctly enters a review queue instead of disappearing.

Free and Pro update together

Free and Pro 1.8.0 are built to install together as a matched pair; running mismatched versions is not the supported configuration for this release. If you are on Pro, update both plugins in the same maintenance window rather than staggering them.

The Learnomy free release notes and the Learnomy Pro release notes both cover the 1.8.0 change set in full if you want the underlying detail behind any item summarised above.

What this release means if you run an academy today

If you are running Learnomy already, the practical checklist for 1.8.0 is short. Update free and Pro together in one maintenance window.

If you have Pro, go into the Gradebook admin screen once the update is live and set weights for your active courses. Until you do, every course defaults to whatever weighting the plugin ships with, so check it rather than assume it matches your grading policy.

Re-check any course you unpublished recently, since it is now correctly hidden from search and new enrollment rather than quietly reachable. And if you were relying on the Enrollment Mode “Approval” setting, know that it is gone, not renamed, because it never enforced anything.

If you are evaluating an LMS rather than running one yet, the more useful lens is what this release says about how the product is maintained. A plugin that removes a setting because it did not work, and relabels a feature because its old name overstated it, is telling you something about how the rest of its feature set was built.

For a longer view of where Learnomy is headed structurally rather than release by release, see Learnomy and building a future-proof WordPress LMS. And if retention, not just enrollment, is the metric you actually care about, the forgetting curve and course retention covers why a grade that updates in real time, rather than a static completion checkmark, is the kind of signal that lets you intervene while a student can still be saved.

You can get the current free version, or see what Pro includes in full, from the Learnomy product page.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Pro for the Gradebook?

Yes. The Gradebook, along with Assignments, SCORM package tracking, Learning Paths, Spaces, Content Drip, Analytics, Certificates Pro, and Stripe Connect payouts, is a Pro feature. Free covers course structure, membership and checkout, the full quiz and exam engine, and the SCORM completion gate setting itself, but not the weighted grade calculation.

Do I need MemberPress or WooCommerce to run Learnomy?

No. Free includes built-in membership plans and built-in Stripe and PayPal checkout, so course protection and payment do not require a separate membership plugin or WooCommerce. A separate quiz plugin is also unnecessary, since six question types, three quiz modes, and five layouts are native to free.

What happens to a student’s grade before they finish a course?

Any quiz, assignment, or SCORM source that has not yet been completed or graded counts as 0 toward the weighted grade, which pulls the overall average down until the student finishes it. That is deliberate: a grade reflects standing right now, not a projected best case. A source you genuinely want excluded should be weighted at 0%, which removes it from the calculation entirely.

Will unpublishing a course lock out students who are already enrolled?

No. Students already enrolled in a course keep full access to it even after it is unpublished. What changes is public visibility and new enrollment: an unpublished course returns not-found to the public, refuses new enrollment attempts, and emits no search-engine data. Existing students are unaffected.

Do free and Pro need updating together?

Yes. Free and Pro 1.8.0 are designed to install together, and updating them in the same maintenance window is the supported path. Check the release notes for both plugins before updating if you want the full change list for your version.