Product Updates

Latest API and Webhook Updates: A Leap Forward in eLearning Technology

8 min
WebHooks LearnWorlds

Your academy doesn’t live in isolation

When you design your online academy, you should be able to connect it directly with your existing platforms, such as your ERP or CRM systems. Taking this one step further, you might want to integrate your academy with an external system that isn’t already in place or even automate a time-consuming administrative task (let’s face it, those are the worst!).

And, you wouldn’t want to implement a custom operation for each project, right? Instead, you need data and functionality to be simply, repeatedly, and scalably available to developers for new uses.

For all that and a lot more (later on in the post, bear with me), LearnWorlds offers the most extended API & Webhooks in the eLearning industry! Tens of API calls and countless real-time events are waiting to be transmitted from and to your organization’s back-end tech stack!

Webhooks: Now More Powerful and Flexible Than Ever 💪

Our webhook capabilities are a vital part of the LearnWorlds platform, offering real-time data transfer for key events. You can set up webhooks for a variety of triggers, such as user registrations and updates, product purchases, course enrollments, and more.

These webhooks are designed to automatically send specific JSON payloads to a selected URL, ensuring that relevant data is delivered efficiently and immediately upon events occuring.

But you know, at LearnWorlds, we always strive for more 😉

Introducing Significant Enhancements

We’re thrilled to announce significant enhancements to our webhook capabilities, making them more flexible and powerful than ever. Now, you can initiate new webhook events through User Automations. This means not only do you have access to a wider array of events, but you can also customize these triggers to be more event-specific.

a screenshot from the LearnWorlds Webhooks feature

What’s more, you can add multiple conditions in automations, allowing the webhook to fire only when these specific conditions are met. This level of customization is unparalleled and is sure to elevate the functionality and efficiency of your eLearning platform.

And there’s more: when sending a webhook via automations, you now have the option to add additional key-value data pairs to your payload. This custom solution enables you to tailor the information to your specific needs, ensuring that your integrations are as informative and relevant as possible.

This functionality provided a robust foundation for automation and integration, allowing school owners and administrators to seamlessly connect their eLearning platform with a wide range of third-party applications. The goal is to simplify the transfer of important information and build meaningful connections inside your digital ecosystem.

:jigsaw: Meet Your Extended & Enhanced API Collection

Streamlining your organization’s operations by delivering value through connected, integrated experiences is not an option anymore but a business requirement. Thankfully, the new LearnWorlds Restful API is enriched with twenty-six new calls to expand your school functionalities. You can leverage the power of our API to fit your business needs & connect your LearnWorlds school to your enterprise software via our fully documented public API. It’s sorted neatly into over 15+ categories, kicking off with Courses and covering everything from Use Groups to Multiple Seats, and more:

LearnWorlds API categories

From there, you can leverage the various LearnWorlds’ API endpoints and take advantage of the handy features to generate reusable source code snippets in various programming languages.

So, you first decide on what API calls your needs and then generate the desired code snippets!

Supported languages include Swift, Ruby, R, Powershell, PHP, Kotlin, Java, C#, Objective-C, C, Python, Node, JavaScript, Shell, cURL, and many more.

Why an API and Webhook-first Strategy is Ideal For eLearning

LearnWorlds’ latest API enhancements are a testament to our commitment to empowering the flexibility of your eLearning ecosystem. These updates are crafted to streamline learners’ insights & multiple users management for educators and administrators, offering a more efficient and responsive eLearning platform operation. For developers, the expanded API opens up new avenues for building custom integrations and automating workflows, significantly enhancing the functionality and interactivity of eLearning environments. This comprehensive approach ensures that our API serves as a versatile tool, adapting to and fulfilling the varied requirements of your business.

Enhancing Multiple Audiences Management

Streamlining User Progress and Communications

Advanced Assessments and Data Insights

Why an API and Webhook-first Strategy is Ideal For eLearning

Are you still wondering why to inject API’s & Webhooks’ magic into your organization? If you have not yet been convinced that learning should be an integral part of your enterprise tech stack, then keep reading: we will explore the reasons for adopting an API- and Webhook-first approach.

There are four main functions that APIs & Webhooks can perform:

Taking this a step further, we will describe one by one how those main functions streamline innovation in your organization. Here we go!

Streamline operations & innovation

APIs and Webhooks transform bespoke integration projects into a thing of the past. They facilitate reliable access to internal services, making them consistently reusable.

This change isn’t just about integrations; it’s about empowering your business processes with real-time data and intelligent automation.

In a world where digital tools are manifold, these technologies connect and streamline your operations, ending the chaos of disparate data sources.

Enhancing learner data and tracking

The true test of online learning effectiveness is learners’ performance. True, False, or is something missing from the sentence?

💁 Let’s make this more clear with an example: Your cool colleague Evan just completed his training course. He passed an eLearning module with 100%! Gold star? No… that’s not enough. You need to know more. You need to understand how his job performance benefited from what he learned.

APIs and Webhooks offer insights into learner activities, allowing for personalized and relevant learning experiences. 

Maximize Your Training ROI

Get a clearer picture of training ROI than ever before… by tracking more than ever before. L&D departments are constantly fighting battles with upper management to preserve and protect their budgets — and too many of those are losing battles.

With these technologies, you have the opportunity to monitor every aspect of your online training. Its power lies in the diverse tracking and reporting capabilities. HR & L&D departments will finally have the hard facts and data they need to justify their budgets to higher-ups. The numbers will prove it instead of just assuming people had positive results from a learning initiative.

A Matter of Privacy

Protection rests with two things: authentication and authorization. The use of an API & Webhooks help enforce security restrictions to prevent unauthorized access.

LearnWorlds API use of the OAuth 2.0 framework exemplifies our commitment to securing all data interactions, guaranteeing that only authorized entities have access.

🤗 One step back: What is an API & Webhook?

Caught yourself asking Siri for the weather forecast in the morning? Searching for a store location found on a Contact Us page using Google Maps? Signing into Spotify using your Facebook credentials? APIs are everywhere you look – and you might not even realize it.

Think about API as a waiter at a restaurant, communicating orders between the diner (which might be an internet browser) and the kitchen (the back-end services the diner is trying to access).

The API takes this order to the kitchen and brings the requested dish back on a neatly organized plate. This system is good for the diner (who doesn’t need to walk to the kitchen/load a new webpage), and it’s good for the restaurant (which doesn’t want customers looking at its secret recipes/proprietary code).

The easiest way to digest what an Application Programming Interface (APIs) does is to know that it is an interface that allows one application to communicate with another via commands designed by programmers. It’s an instruction booklet describing how you can talk to one system through another system.

APIs, either public or private, serve as instruction booklets that allow different systems to communicate using predefined commands. They are essential in creating interconnected, versatile digital services, especially in eLearning, where accessibility and integration with various digital tools are paramount.

RESTful APIs, that are applied in LearnWorlds, are favored in eLearning due to their format inclusivity and browser-agnostic nature. They operate on HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to perform essential actions: Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD). 

While APIs are about requesting and retrieving data, Webhooks add another dimension to this interactivity. Imagine Webhooks as a notification system, alerting your application in real-time when something happens. Unlike APIs that require you to request information, Webhooks automatically send data to your system as soon as a specified event occurs.

This ‘push’ mechanism means your platform can immediately react to events like user registrations, course completions, or payment updates without constantly checking (or polling) for changes.

For eLearning platforms, this translates to more dynamic user experiences, as information like course progress, new enrollments, and other critical data are updated in real-time.

Symbiosis of APIs and Webhooks

In the digital ecosystem of eLearning, APIs and Webhooks are integral components that work together seamlessly.

While APIs are versatile tools that not only request and retrieve data but also enable the integration of different systems and services, offering a wide range of functionalities to enhance user experience, Webhooks complement this by keeping your system informed with real-time events.

This combination of API’s broad capabilities and Webhook’s real-time updates ensures a more responsive, interconnected, and efficient digital learning environment, which is vital in today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape.

How to Get Started

If you have a LearnWorlds school with a Learning Center or higher plan, you can seamlessly connect your academy with any enterprise software with the most extended API & Webhooks in the eLearning industry.

What are your next steps?

💡 Keep a note

If you are already using our previous API version (v1), your existing integration with it will not be affected at all!

But, we highly recommend getting ahead with our new, extended API version though, since it unlocks new functionalities for integrating learning across your organization. Therefore, we encourage you to discover and engage with the new API version as this will be the center of all future innovations.

Before the End

Are we living in an API-centric world?

The answer is YES! Our world is becoming more and more interconnected: just imagine a scenario where hundreds of thousands of data points – from many different, divergent yet interconnected sources – are available for each individual learner in your organization. What does that mean in terms of performance and talent management?

An API-driven approach can have a profound impact on how we manage and deliver learning. If we can select three words, then it will be: innovative, agile, and user-centric. Why? Because those three words describe in the best way the three letters that can disrupt the learning tech space: API!

As Forbes puts it, “How a business wins or loses is increasingly dependent on how well they connect to external party apps, devices, and services.” This is why it is the right time for you to explore APIs and what they can mean for your enterprise, no matter your company’s size or industry.

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Jo Milonis
Product Marketing Manager at LearnWorlds | Website

Jo is a passionate Product Marketing Manager on a mission to revolutionize the eLearning industry, bringing to the forefront the most powerful Online Course Mobile App Builder created by LearnWorlds. She has extensive experience in the tech SaaS industry, focusing for over 5 year on driving growth through digital channels. Her studies are mainly focused on Integrated Digital Marketing Communications.