LearnDash ProPanel Review (2024): What is it & how does it work?

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LearnDash ProPanel is LearnDash’s own reporting plugin. It is a separate plugin that needs to be installed & activated just like any other WordPress plugin. Once activated, it displays 5 reporting widgets on your Dashboard in the WordPress admin area.

ProPanel is included if you purchase a subscription to LearnDash Cloud
Legacy customers of the LearnDash plugin (PLUS & PRO) plans also have access to ProPanel
With LearnDash’s new/current pricing, ProPanel is no longer included, and is a separate $49/yr. add-on

This article is part of our LearnDash reporting series.

Let’s break down each reporting widget, and explain exactly what type of LearnDash reports ProPanel provides.

NOTE
You must be using LearnDash to use ProPanel. Check out our article on LearnDash pricing explained or buy LearnDash here.

How to Access LearnDash ProPanel Reports

ProPanel reports are accessible in three main ways:

Dashboard

By default, ProPanel reports are only visible in the admin area to Administrators & Group Leaders.

Editors, Authors, and Contributors will not see ProPanel reports.
Administrators will see all data
Group Leaders will only see data relating to the groups that they manage

Side note: Speaking of group leaders, check out the LearnDash Instructor Role plugin.

Login to your WordPress admin area and navigate to Dashboard > Home. ProPanel adds 5 dashboard widgets to this screen:

ProPanel Overview
ProPanel Filtering
ProPanel Activity
ProPanel Reporting
ProPanel Progress Chart

LearnDash ProPanel all dashboard widgets — All ProPanel widgets on the WordPress Dashboard page

If you don’t see the widgets, click on Screen Options in the top-right corner, and check the boxes next to all ProPanel widgets.

Extend ProPanel Access to Other Users

If you’d like to provide access to the ProPanel dashboard widgets to another user or user role, you can use the User Role Editor plugin, and assign the propanel_widgets permission to a user role or an individual user.

ProPanel Shortcodes

There is a corresponding shortcode for each of the 5 ProPanel widgets. You can use them in combination with the WordPress block editor or any page builder to create your own reporting page. You can even use other tools/plugins to show & hide these shortcodes so that only certain users or user roles can see them.

The widgets work exactly the same as the Dashboard widgets, only they are available on the frontend of your site.

ProPanel URL Parameter

You can append /?ld_propanel to any URL on your site and it will display all of the ProPanel widgets on the page. However, none of your site design is included on this page. There is no header, footer, or styles of any kind.

In most cases, I would recommend using the shortcodes over this method.

1. ProPanel Overview Widget

The first ProPanel widget we’ll discuss is the Overview widget. This is the most basic of all the ProPanel reporting widgets. It displays four simple pieces of information, along with links that take you to the corresponding page in your WordPress admin area.

Total Students (links to the WordPress Users page)
Total Courses (links to the LearnDash LMS > Courses page)
Assignments Pending (links to the LearnDash Assignments page, showing only unapproved assignments)
Essays Pending (links to LearnDash LMS > Quizzes > Submitted Essays, showing only ungraded essays)

Example of a LearnDash ProPanel Overview widget

And that’s it. The Overview widget does not respond to any filtering you might do and has no other functions.

2. ProPanel Filtering Widget

The ProPanel Filtering widget lays the groundwork for some of the other ProPanel widgets. If you don’t apply a filter, some of the other widgets won’t display any information. They require you to set a filter first.

ProPanel Filtering widget for LearnDash — Example of a ProPanel Filtering widget with a course selected

Available Filters

With the ProPanel Filtering widget, you can filter your reports by the following:

Course (only one at a time)
User (only one at a time)
Status (not started • in progress • completed – multiple statuses allowed)
Start Date *
End Date *

* Start & End Date only seem to apply to the ProPanel Activity widget

How to Set a Filter

A filter must be applied before any information shows up on…

ProPanel Reporting
ProPanel Progress Chart

The ProPanel Activity widget will show ALL activity, from every user, and every course, by default. Use a filter to only display the data you want to see.

To set a filter…

Choose one or more filters from the available filters mentioned above
Choose your “per page” preference (applies to Reporting & Activity widgets)
Click the blue Filter button

That will populate the three ProPanel widgets with data, based on your selected filter (all except for the Overview widget, which does not change).

Change a Filter

To change your filter to look at a different dataset, simply adjust your filters in the ProPanel Filtering widget, and click the Filter button again.

Remove Your Filter

To remove or reset your filter parameters, simply click the Reset button right next to Filter. That will remove all filters and refresh the page.

Full Page

There’s a Full Page button in the top corner of the ProPanel Filtering widget. This button will take you to a dedicated page (in your WordPress admin area) that only displays the Filtering & Reporting widgets. If you have a lot of other Dashboard widgets, or just want to take a closer look at the Reporting widget, consider trying the full page feature.

There is a button on the full page that says Dashboard that will take you back to your WordPress Dashboard.

Email

Next to the Filters tab you’ll see a tab for Email. We’ll cover this in the next section below.

Email Students

Also included on the ProPanel Filtering widget is an Email tab. This tab provides an easy way to manually send an email to a subset of your students.

As you might expect, you should first apply a filter to narrow down who will receive the email. Select your filters and click the Filter button. Then switch over to the Email tab.

On the Email tab, you can enter two different pieces of information:

Subject Line
Message Content

WARNING
Double-check you have selected the correct filter, and there are no errors in your subject line or message. Once you click Send, the email will be sent and there’s no turning back.

HTML Allowed

The following HTML tags are allowed in the message content:

<b>
<strong>
<em>
<small>
<a>
<img>

More tags might be allowed but these are the ones we tested & confirmed.

If you’d like to add an image to your message, you can do so like this:

<img src="https://yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/filename.jpg" width="400" alt="describe the image" />

Replace the src attribute with the URL to your image
Replace the alt attribute with a description of your image
Change the 400 to whatever width you’d like to display your image. Keep in mind some users might be viewing this on a mobile device.

If you want to link your image to a URL, you can wrap it in an <a> tag, like this:

<a href="https://www.google.com/"><img src="https://yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/filename.jpg" width="400" alt="describe the image" /></a>

Reset Button

Clicking the Reset button will erase the subject & message and allow you to start from scratch.

One-Time Emails Only

This feature is only for sending one-off emails at the time you press the Send button. There is no way to schedule or automate emails using this tool. And you’ll need to set the filters each time you want to send an email to a different group of users.

For sending targeted emails to a group of students, considering connecting LearnDash with an email marketing platform by using Uncanny Automator.

3. ProPanel Activity Widget

The ProPanel Activity widget displays all the LearnDash activity on your site. By default, it shows everything for all courses and all users, but you can filter it by using the ProPanel Filtering widget. This allows you to drill down and only view specific LearnDash activity.

The following information is included in the ProPanel Activity widget:

Name of the user
Date & time of the activity
Course in which the event took place
Lesson, topic, or quiz which was completed
(Quiz) If the user passed or failed the quiz
(Quiz) The percentage score
(Quiz) Points received vs. total points available

You can click on the course name to go to the course page, as well as click “edit” to edit the course in the backend. You can do the same with lessons, topics, and quizzes, as well as click the user’s name to go to their profile in the backend of WordPress.

Per Page

By default, the ProPanel Activity widget shows 5 events at a time, but you can use the “Per Page” option in the Filtering widget to adjust this. Simply choose another “per page” value, and click Filter. This will update the Activity widget with more entries per page.

You navigate to additional pages of activity using the arrow buttons at the top.

Reports

There are Course and Quiz buttons in the Activity widget as well. These download the same .csv files that you get from the LearnDash LMS > Reports screen.

4. ProPanel Reporting Widget

BETTER OPTIONS
The Reporting widget is pretty basic. To gain access to better reporting, I recommend checking out Tin Canny Reporting or WISDM Reports for LearnDash. For the most in-depth quiz reports & student report cards, try LearnDash Gradebook.

By default, the ProPanel Reporting widget doesn’t show any information. You need to set a filter in the ProPanel Filtering widget before any data becomes available.

Once a filter has been applied, you can see the following information in the Reporting widget:

Name of the user
Link to the user’s profile page in the WordPress backend
Email address of the user (with a direct link to email them with your default email provider)
Course progress, shown as a percentage

Course Progress

There are a few quirks about the course progress display.

First, it’s important to note that there is one row for every user/course combination. So if a user is enrolled in 3 courses, you will see that user displayed 3 times in the Reporting widget.

Unfortunately, ProPanel doesn’t show you which course each row belongs to. So you’ll see three different course progress percentages, but you won’t know which ones relate to which courses. This is a pretty big oversight in my opinion.

The progress is shown as a horizontal progress bar with a numbered percentage also shown. This indicates how many steps they have completed vs. how many total steps are in the course.

Search Users

Even after you’ve applied your filter(s), you can additionally search for specific users within the Reporting widget itself. Simply type a user’s name in the “Search Users” box at the top. This will automatically filter the Reporting widget based on the text you enter.

Checkboxes

There are checkboxes next to each row in the Reporting widget. I have absolutely no idea what these are for and could not find any information on what they might do. I don’t see any new options that are available when clicking them. I would simply ignore them.

Navigation

You can also move between additional pages of information using the arrow buttons at the top of the widget.

5. ProPanel Progress Chart Widget

The ProPanel Progress Chart widget contains two different pieces of information:

Progress Distribution
In Progress Breakdown

This is another widget that won’t show any information until you choose a filter from the Filtering widget.

Progress Distribution

Progress Distribution refers to the amount of people whose course status is “completed,” “in progress,” or “not started.” They are represented in a donut chart, with the raw numbers displayed when you hover over the slice of the chart.

Not Started: User has not completed a single step
In Progress: User has completed at least one step, but not all
Completed: User has completed all course steps

In Progress Breakdown

The In Progress Breakdown shows you the number of users who are within a certain percentage of course completion. The labels are somewhat confusing, and I’m not 100% sure what they mean because I couldn’t find documentation on it. But let’s talk about what they likely mean.

NOTE
This is only looking at users who are “in progress” with your course. If they have not started or already completed the course, those users are not represented here.

You’ll see up to 5 different categories that a user could fall into.

< 20%
< 40%
< 60%
< 80%
< 100%

You might see only 3 users in the < 100% category, but 5 users in the < 80% category. This doesn’t really make sense because if they are less than 100% complete, they are also surely less than 80% complete. Therefore, what I think these numbers likely represent are:

1-19% complete
20-39% complete
40-59% complete
60-79% complete
80-99% complete

If I’m correct, this would mean we can assume that no user is counted twice in the raw number counts.

Filter Tip

If you want to see data on your entire site, you can leave all the filter options blank and simply click the Filter button. This will populate the Progress Chart widget with data without applying any filters. 😉

If you have any questions about LearnDash ProPanel or aren’t sure how to use it, let us know in the comments. We’d be happy to help.

ProPanel is only one of several LearnDash reporting tools that we’ve highlighted on ldx.design. While it is the official reporting plugin provided by LearnDash, it is arguably the least capable of the ones available. I recommend you also consider:

Tin Canny Reporting (premium only)
WISDM Reports for LearnDash (free + premium)
LearnDash Gradebook (premium quiz reporting)
Easy Dash for LearnDash (free + premium)

LearnDash ProPanel Review: What is it & how does it work?