I often work with people who are just getting ready to pursue their dreams. Whether it’s starting a company, just starting to take a hobby more seriously, dreaming about being on their own again, or being hip deep in a new tech start-up, I’m game to help if people want the advice and are willing to do the work. For the last few years I’ve been developing course material for a program I call “Leveraging Trust” and it’s all about finding the center of who you are, and your experience, so that you can develop products and services from the position of a trusted advisor.
Recently, I’ve started thinking about putting this program online at a cheaper rate, so that some people could walk thru the program on their own before meeting with me. And this is, in short, what an e-learning course would be. A simple way for people to:
So here are my 20 steps.
I’ve written about memberships a bit before, and so many great people write so much about them that I don’t really focus there. But here’s the main thing you should know. Other than Justin Tadlock’s version, most others are overly complex – even when (and maybe especially when) they’re free. But to satisfy the curious, let me make sure you know the ones I own and have tried:
So we’re clear: I bought each of these (that had cost) and tested them all out. Just for you. Ok, back to the message….
And the last one and maybe only one you need:
You can see that with only 5 tabs, this must be the easiest membership plugin known to mankind. Most of them have 10-15 tabs, which can be daunting. And what’s nice here is that you can create a membership level that acts like a course. So each level can function as a course you are selling. Some plugins don’t work this way. This post isn’t about those other plugins, but let me just say, Paid Membership Pro works exactly as I hoped it would – letting me charge people to get access to my content. You see here that you can fill in some quick basics and then put down a price (note: this price is a sample – at 10% the normal cost of the program). It also lets you mark it as a subscription course if you like, and determine if it membership will expire.
Did you like that? Sure, I could have said you had to create pages that would support your membership program, but that takes a lot of space and Paid Memberships Pro does it for you. I like this approach, so I just went to the bottom of the page and clicked “save”.
I know we’re only four steps in but have you noticed how each step is taking literally seconds? That’s why I’m positive that you can create this entire course in less than 20 minutes if you have your content ready.
I’m not sure you even need a lot of words other than – fill in your name and email. I bet you can do it in 20 seconds!
Whenever someone doesn’t have access to the course, you’re going to want to tell them something. Here’s your chance. Edit the message if you like. For me, it was almost perfect. No time wasted at all. I did, however, decide to make sure that a non-member couldn’t see anything, not even an excerpt. That’s one of the drop downs below.
If you think you’re going to see my discount codes so you can get this program cheaper, you have another thing coming! For you, sure I’ll get you a code. Just sign up on the right, so you are getting my notices sent to your inbox and you’ll see when I do specials. Plus, I like you. I really really like you.
Notice that I didn’t mark anything or hit save. Alas, that is a fake code. But what I like is that Paid Memberships Pro auto-creates ones for you. Nice.
By now you’ve noticed that you’ve created an entire membership site on your site without spending a penny. So now it’s time to make you pay up. But here’s the thing, , is priced at $67 for a single site. That’s a deal for what you’re going to see.
Once you buy it, upload it to your site (Plugins > Add New) and activate it. That simple.
We’re finally getting to the good stuff. But guess what? This is as easy as the other steps you’ve taken already.
You’ll need a name for your course and a description. Now, I like the “Only Completed/Next Units Visible” because it means sequential delivery (of sorts). But you can pick either approach. Also, I mark “automatic” for all users to get access, since I don’t need this plugin to do access for me. will do that when we give the right user access to the right launch page.
If you were to break up your course into steps, phases or parts, this is what a module is. It’s a name and it has a course it belongs to. It’s also the container for your teaching units. Since Leveraging Trust has 9 parts, I started creating some of them.
This is literally what you’ve been waiting for. Now is when you create a unit – don’t worry that you don’t see any way to connect it to your modules or courses. Just create your unit like you’d write a post.
Are you timing yourself. By my watch, we’re only 15 minutes into this (the longest being the time it took to go buy that plugin).
This is the point in the 20 steps where you’ll connect Paid Memberships Pro with WP Courseware. It’s really simple. You start by creating a page, just like any other time. Only on this page, you’re going to want to drop a shortcode that automatically places your course curriculum on it. This page’s url is the one that you’d send out in the confirmation email from PMP for this membership level. It’s a page that you’ll also protect (look on the right and check the box so that WordPress knows this page needs to be protected). Seriously, e-learning on WordPress has never been this easy before.
Smart people check their work. You’re smart. What can I say? But you likely haven’t added yourself to this membership group that you created, so here’s what you’ll see.
Don’t you love testing. Now you know it’s working. So go to your user, and in the user details, you can add yourself to this membership level. Then go back to that page. Here’s what you should see.
Notice how only the first unit has a link. The rest aren’t linked up yet because of that setting that I marked to sequentially release the units. But you could change your setting if you want.
Additionally WP Courseware comes with a widget that lets you put course progress in the sidebar if you want.
So log back out, and go to the url. You’ll see that earlier screen from Step Fourteen. Click on the registration, and you&#x
This post was originally given as a conference presentation at “Scriptures in Medieval Iberia: Language, literature, and sacred text in a multi-religious society” (Monday, 6 June, 2011, Iona Pacific Inter-religious Centre, Vancouver School of Theology). I’ve also posted a , including full versions of the texts referenced, along with their translations.
The idea of intertextuality is very useful for understanding the importance of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh in Spain’s medieval Hebrew literature. Intertextuality is the site of a good deal of theorizing, and while time constraints do not allow a full accounting of this discussion, I would like to borrow from Michael Worton and Judith Still’s understanding of the term in its most basic sense as it has been used by various literary critics and theorists. They write that “the writer is a reader of texts…before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations, and influences of every kind.” This means that each work of art is a sort of group discussion, a collaborative process in which various texts, authors, experiences, and readings participate. The text is a fabric, a weave of a number of threads which in turn are pulled from other texts. Today I would like to talk about the processes by which this pulling and weaving happenin medieval Spanish-Hebrew texts, paying specific attention to the role of Biblical language and source texts.
Reading in the medieval period, especially of literary and poetic texts, was a very different experience from what is generally understood as reading in the modern age.
In this image, a miniature from a mansucript of the maqamat of al-Hariri of Basra, who wrote in the eleventh century, illustrates a literary gathering, where a popular preacher regales a crowd of listeners with his displays of rhetorical prowess.
By ‘scriptural textuality’ I mean the ways in which scripture is practiced and experienced by the community. This includes the visual reading of the text but also extends to the physicality of the text, its support and packaging, the physical and social contexts of its practice, and the aural-visual memory of its practice.
All of these contribute to biblical intertextuality in medieval Spanish-Hebrew literary texts, as we shall see.
Michael Sells has written about the ways in which Muslim communities experience the Qur’an and describes what he calls the ‘sound vision,’ the relation of sound to meaning, or the combined experience of seeing, hearing, and understanding the Qur’anic text in recitation.
Such recitations form part of the soundscape of a Muslim community, just as public recitations of the Tanakh form part of the soundscape of the writers whose texts we are about to examine.
Here is a demonstration of the idea of a sound vision of a text. This is Surat al-Qariah , “the Day of Reckoning” from the Qur’an, in a traditional modern printed edition. Take a look at the text.
Now, when the recitation and text are experienced together, the impression is quite different. And if the listener comprehends the text, the experience is one of layered visual, auditory, and narrative apprehension. This is the ‘sound image’ that Michael Sells is talking about – the multisensory record of the experience of hearing the text recited.
This understanding of reading as a verbal experience or embodied sensory event is recorded even within the Hebrew Bible itself, where according to Daniel Boyarin, the act of reading is nearly always described as a speech event meant to elicit action. A king reads from a scroll and people act upon the words. Prophets recite to exhort proper behavior from errant fellow Hebrews. Reading is not merely scanning a text but participating in a community, whether political or religious.
By way of demonstration I would like to try to illustrate or at least suggest the various forms of intertextuality that might obtain in any given reading of a biblical text. I’ll take the example of the Hebrew Shir HaShirim or Song of Songs. This text is a frequent source of language and imagery for medieval Hebrew love poetry, and also forms part of the liturgy for the Passover holiday, or Pesah. Here is an image of the opening verses of chapter one as they are written in a modern Torah scroll. The person reciting the text would be using this type of document as a visual support and would supply the vowels, which are absent from this text, and cantillation marks, or trope, from memory.
Any reference to the words of the Song of Songs in a poetic context would evoke, certainly for the poet and most likely for much of his or her audience, this text and its traditional recitation, the sound image similar to the Quranic example we have just seen.
For the poet and his audience that understands the meaning of the Hebrew text, the allusion would also rely on the literal meaning of the text in addition to the sound image of its recitation. This would seem to be obvious but is worth pointing out when one considers that the majority of the audience of such a recitation would likely consist of worshippers who might recognize the sound of the Hebrew words but would not necessarily understand their meaning. There are some billion Muslims worldwide who learn to recite the first chapter of the Qur’an, but only a relatively small percentage of them understand the meaning of the classical Arabic text.
In addition to the sound image of the recitation and the accompanying sensory memories of the gathering in the synagogue where it takes place, the allusion would also carry with it associations with the traditional exegetical interpretations of the passage. In this case, I bring examples from the commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra, a Sephardic rabbi who lived from the end of the eleventh century to the beginning of the twelfth. The traditional rabbinic interpretation of the Song of Songs is that, far more than a mere love poem, the text is an allegory of the love between God and the community of Israel.
To the sound image, literal meaning, and exegetical meaning, we might also add the liturgical context of the texts recitation as part of the Passover liturgy, with all the affective cathexis that attends the celebration of a major religious holiday: the specialness of the occasion, the hope for a good growing season, the spring fever that inevitably strikes the youth any community at this time of year. In this particular photo we see Samaritans celebrating the Passover in the West Bank.
In the same vein, the Song of Songs might well recall for poet and audience the social and familial context of the celebration: the foods, songs, and customs related to the celebration of Passover, the gathering of relatives and friends, the Seder or traditional ritual meal, the new clothes. In this photo we see a scene from a Passover Seder of the Jewish community of Manila in 1925.
All of these associations come bundled with poetic allusions to a biblical text: the textual image, the sound image, the literal and exegetical meanings, the lived experience of liturgical and social events related to the text. All of these may be indexed, consciously or otherwise, when a writer deploys biblical text in an original poetic composition, as well as by readers and listeners of that composition.
Let’s see how this intertextuality obtains in a specific example from a strophic poem, a muwashshah, by the same Abraham ibn Ezra who wrote the commentary on the Song of Songs that we have just seen. As you probably are aware, Ibn Ezra, like many of the prominent Jewish intellectuals of al-Andalus, was a gifted polymath who is also a noted exegete. He was highly educated in rabbinics as well as in secular Arabic poetry, lore, and science. The worlds intermingle in 2019;ll see the list of memberships (or course) that you can buy. Click on the “I want…” link for the next step.
Now that you’ve clicked on “I want…” you’ll get to the registration screen. You’ll be creating a new user, as well as giving them the membership role needed to get access to the course.
I love how you’re flying thru these steps. It takes me longer to write them and you to read them, than for you to do them. But let’s do this…(on your own site)…Fill in your payment details and sign up. If you’re using Stripe, it doesn’t take you off the page. I already wrote , so if you’re not using Stripe, go get yourself an account.
If you’ve done everything right, you should be able to see the confirmation link that takes you to the launch page that lets you see unit one that has a link that lets you in to see the special video content that can only be seen on this page. Say that fast without breathing. It makes you giddy. As it should!
Assuming that you’ve finished your own unit one, and marked it complete, there’s one more cool thing to check out. That’s when you go to your user screen. Now you’ll see all the students and exactly where they are in the course journey.
Check your watch. Did it take you more than 20 minutes? If it did, try the steps again, now that you’re a bit more comfortable. I bet you can do it in less than 20 minutes. It did over here. But my point wasn’t just about time. It was to show you that e-learning on WordPress didn’t have to be complicated with a bunch of coding effort.
Could you do more? Absolutely. Both and let you create quizzes – though Gravity Forms hasn’t released theirs yet and FormidablePro doesn’t do as much as Gravity Forms. But is looking at adding even more to it’s plugin. So it’s an area to keep watching.
But now you know. So what you do is up to you.