Move my courses off LearnDash or WordPress

If your teaching lives in LearnDash, your courses are trapped inside a WordPress install you also have to feed and water. The good news: LearnDash can export the whole library - and bernard can read that export directly. No copy-pasting lesson by lesson (Move what I already built onto bernard covers the other routes, for platforms without an export). Libraries of dozens of courses with gigabytes of video and worksheets have come across this way.

If your lessons play SCORM or xAPI packages through GrassBlade, read Move my courses off GrassBlade and WordPress first: the export below carries your structure, but the teaching inside those packages is a separate collection job.

How it works

1. Export from WordPress - using LearnDash's own tool. In your WordPress admin, go to LearnDash LMS → Import/Export, tick your courses (lessons, topics and quizzes come with them) and include media files if the option is offered, then export. You'll get a single zip file, named something like learndash-export-…zip, by download link or email. One thing to watch: this is not the general Tools → Export screen - that produces a different file the import can't read. If your library is large the zip can run to gigabytes, so give it time to build.
2. Hand it to the bernard team. The import reads your export, rebuilds each course you choose in bernard's own shape - same module structure, same lesson order, sub-lessons nested under their parent lessons (Understand how a course is put together, Organise a big course - modules, sub-lessons, many courses) - and copies worksheets and downloads off the old site into your own storage, attached to the right lessons (Give learners files with each lesson). If a file wasn't inside the zip, it's fetched from your old site instead - include media in the export if the old site is being switched off soon. Each course also arrives with a short summary on its card, drawn from your old course page.
3. You see the plan before anything is written. The import runs as a rehearsal first: a report of every course, module and lesson it found, what it will become, and anything it can't represent - an exotic quiz type, a broken link, a file it couldn't fetch - listed rather than silently dropped. Only after that does the real import run.
4. Courses that split by level split properly. If one LearnDash course served two qualification levels with different assessments, it becomes two clean courses - each with only its own level's assessment material, so a Level 3 learner can never wander into Level 4 instructions.
5. Review and publish. Every imported course is a private draft. Walk it in your courses page - and in the course preview, which renders the real course and lesson pages so you can check every lesson looks right before anyone else can see it - fix any wording that references the old platform, set a price if you're selling on-site (Charge once, or sell a year of access) - or leave it unpriced and enrol students yourself (Enrol a student myself - they paid elsewhere) - then publish when you're happy.

Videos keep playing from wherever they live today (YouTube, Vimeo or your video host) - and can be moved onto your own site later without touching the course structure (Put my own video file into a lesson).

A few honest notes, so nothing surprises you:

• Students don't come across. Enrolments and progress stay on the old system - anyone mid-course finishes there, and your new site starts clean. Plan the switchover so new sign-ups land on the new home.
• Re-importing is safe. Each course remembers where it came from, so running the import again updates rather than duplicates - and if you've already edited a course on your site, the import flags the clash instead of overwriting your work.
• The report is the contract. Anything the import can't represent is named in the report, so you know exactly what needs a human eye before you publish.