Introducing TalentLMS Subscription Payments and the Integrated Calendar

The new TalentLMS release, which has been rolled-out transparently for all our users, brings with it the usual suite of enhancements, workflow improvements and bug-fixes. What we’re mostly enthusiastic about, though, are the two major new features it brings: integrated calendar and support for subscription payments. In this post we’ll walk you through those two features, so you get a good feel of what they now make possible in TalentLMS.

Integrated LMS Calendar

TalentLMS now offers a built-in calendar system. If you’ve ever used Google’s calendar or perhaps MS Outlook’s one, then you know exactly what we’re talking about. What makes ours special is that, by virtue of being integrated to our LMS, it enables you to create and share events related to your e-learning courses to your students, while taking full advantage of the users and groups that you have set up. And, of course, it also has support for course related events out of the box.

From the new Calendar panel, TalentLMS instructors can create and manage events related to conferences or some general topic and set their dates and target audience. They can also mark certain events as recurring (daily or weekly), a nice workflow touch that cuts down on repetitive actions. We believe that you’ll find the new calendar functionality a great help in co-ordinating student activity and course related events. Once you get to use it, you’ll probably agree that it’s one of those “how could I ever live without it” features.

Subscription payments

TalentLMS has long had support for e-commerce and collecting payments for courses through PayPal and Stripe, but in this update we’re stepping up the game. While calendar support is “just” a great workflow addition, subscription payments, the other big change in this update, is a TalentLMS-only feature that opens up the opportunity for a totally new business model for your commercial e-learning services.

Subscriptions allow your end-users to have access to all of your paid courses by paying a single monthly fee, as opposed to the (existing) per course one‐time purchase. Students have access to their payment history and can control their subscription by clicking on the “My payments” option from the sidebar menu. They can also cancel their subscription at any time, in which case they lose their access to your paid courses. Currently subscriptions can only be configured with the Stripe payment processor, but we’re working towards adding PayPal support in the future too.

You’ll find that the subscriptions system is quite flexible, allowing you, for example, to define different subscription settings per branch (e.g. have a branch with subscription based courses and another with per-course purchases). You can even provide the same course as an one‐time purchase though a branch and as part of a subscription in another. So, there you have it ― two great new features added on TalentLMS without any installation or deployment needed on your part. Ain’t cloud software great?