The Complete Guide To The LearnDash Video Progression Feature

(Updated August, 2026)

If you intend to build out a WordPress website complete with a course, using the LearnDash LMS plugin is a popular choice and for good reason. It’s robust and affordable.

Because Spotlightr is listed in the LearnDash documentation as a supported video host for their video progression feature, we’ve put together this full tutorial and informational guide on using Spotlightr with LearnDash. LearnDash does provide some instruction on their support page, but it is nowhere near as complete as it can be if you decide to choose Spotlightr as your video hosting provider.

Spotlightr provides security, branding and marketing feature not available with any other video hosting provider. Reviewing this article is a good way decide if Spotlightr is right for you. This piece also includes information on using our WordPress plugin in conjunction with your LearnDash set-up.

LearnDash Course & Video Set-Up – Linear Progression Explained

Before we get into this important LearnDash feature, let’s touch on the LearnDash architecture for just a moment in case you aren’t familiar with it.

In LearnDash you create courses which contain lessons, topics, and quizzes.  Lessons are what create the bulk of the course and are the heart of LearnDash, while topics and quizzes are optional.

Within a lesson you can add various learning materials such as videos, text, PDFs, audio, etc.  The vast majority of online learning is done via video, so of course LearnDash is going to put video at the forefront of it’s learning methods.  You can add one or more video to every lesson you add to LearnDash.

Creating a lesson inside of WordPress is like creating any other WordPress post, except you have additional LearnDash features. To add video to your lesson. Adding video is the same. You can add video into the lesson post like adding video to any WordPress post, or alternatively you can use their video progression feature.

What is linear progression?  Using this feature requires that students must progress through each lesson/topic/quiz one at a time in the order they presented and cannot skip around.  The other option is “free form” which means students can skip around to any lesson or topics they want throughout the entire course.  Setting is as either “tree torm” or “linear” is done in the COURSE options.

If you want to use Video Progression then your course must be set up to use linear progression here:

Just one more quick note on requirements. These features only work for logged-in users. So if your course access is set to open, meaning there is no registration to access, then they can’t be tracked and progression won’t work. So when you set your course access, linear and video progression will work with any mode except open.

Linear Progression Is Set – Next Is Video Progression

Video progression, working within a linear progression course, means the same thing. Students must watch the entirety of a video before they are able to click ahead to the next lesson.  This encourages students to watch the whole video, so they don’t just click through to the next lesson without watching anything.

Should You Use It?

If you feel the need to encourage your students to watch the video material, as opposed to just marking the Lesson complete without having watched anything, then you can take advantage of this feature.

One thing to keep in mind:  your student can simply scan the video forward till a few seconds before the video ends and just watch the last few seconds.  This will in essence “cheat” this Video Progression feature.  However, there is a way to mitigate that which we will show below.

What Are The Drawbacks?

There are a few:

– It could be frustrating for some students if you require them to watch an entire video before moving on if they are very familiar with the material already.

– We’ve also found that video progression overall can possibly cause random issue with your video player features or functionality due to conflicts with other plugins or even LearnDash bugs or errors.  It’s rare, but it happens.

How To Use It?

When you are configuring your lesson, you just need to go to the settings tab and you will see the video progression option.  It’s turned off by default.  Just enable that:

Be aware that adding a video like this will add the video to the top of the lesson page.  

Video Progression With Spotlightr

First install our free WordPress plugin. It’s straight-forward and easy to use. For instructions and some tutorials check our help doc on it.  Then when you enable the video progression option you will see an option to use a Spotlightr video:

Just click the button to select video and you will be presented with your projects from your account. Then browse to the video and click the button to add the video:

Click on publish video button:

 You’ll then see the embed code automatically added to the appropriate field:

Video Progression Settings

Let’s now review some other options you have for video progression.  We’ll first start with the display timing and then the final 4 optional player settings:

Display Timing

Before completed sub-steps – This is the default setting.  This means that the video will be shown right away and must be watched in completion before the student can access anything else related to the lesson, like topic or quizzes.

After completing sub-steps – This means that the video will be hidden from the student and till be visible after the student has completed any topics or quizzes related to the lesson.  Once those are completed, the student will have access to the lesson video.  Keep in mind that the student still has to complete the video in order to mark the lesson as complete.

What you decide to use here is completely up to how you have your course organized.  Most people use the default setting, as they want the main Lesson video to be watched first and then followed up by the topics and/or quizzes.

Autostart

This will start the video automatically when the page loads.

In general we do not recommend setting your videos to auto-play.  However if you do require this, then we recommend this be done inside of your Spotlightr settings.  We have a few features that LearnDash does not for auto-play.

Note that due to browser policies, if you set the video to auto-start then the video will start out muted.  There will be an ‘unmute’ button on the player that the user must click in order to enable the audio of the video.

When you click that ‘unmute’ button the video video has already started, so you miss the audio of the first few seconds of the video.  That’s why one very popular Spotlightr feature resets the video to the beginning once the ‘unmute’ button is clicked.

Here is a demo video of how that works.

You can configure all of this inside the Project theme and all videos that have that theme applied will auto-start. You can find this feature inside of your Spotlightr Theme >> Player Settings >> Autoplay.

Video Controls Display

By default, when you enable autostart in LearnDash then the controls are removed by default. So what this ‘Video Controls Display’ setting does is it over-rides that and displays them if you want them displayed when autostart is enabled. LearnDash documentation claims that this only works with Youtube and local videos though, however we have found this also affects Spotlightr videos.

This feature is normally only used if the LearnDash Autostart feature is turned on. In general, we don’t recommend you autoplay videos inside your course. If you do decide to autoplay, our recommendation is to configure that inside of Spotlightr to auto-play your videos. When done in Spotlightr we do not hide controls automatically so this setting is moot.  We get into this more in our recommended settings at the end of this article.

Video Paused on Window Unfocused

The goal of this feature is to assist students in staying focused on the material and helping them to not skip any important parts of a video if they scroll the page or switch the page.

We call this feature SMART playback, and recommend configuring this inside of Spotlightr if you want this feature enabled.

It can be configured to pause the video when the students scrolls down away from the video and/or when the student goes to another browser tab or page.

You can find this feature in your Theme >> Player Settings >> Advanced >> SMART Playback.

Video Resume

If the student closes the tab/window and comes back at a later time, this feature will ensure that the video starts from where it left off.

Again, if you require this feature then we recommend setting this via your Spotlightr Project theme.  This will ensure every video you add to that Project will have this setting enabled, so you don’t have to enable every time you add a video.

Here’s a demo video of how this works.  Play the video and after 15 seconds or so refresh the page.  When you play it again, the video will begin where you left off.

It can also be found in your Theme >> Player Settings >> Auto-Resume

Spotlightr Video Progression Recommended Settings

LearnDash is contantly updating it’s plugin and this can affect the way it interacts with our player.  If you have any issues then contact our helpdesk and we will help.

The goal of any coach or teacher is for their students to learn the information provided and complete their lessons.  This is why we do recommend you use the Video Progression feature of LearnDash.

However we recommend you leave all LearnDash video options (Autostart, Video Controls Display, Video Paused on Window Unfocused, Video Resume) turned OFF.  Keeping these off results in less conflicts with the Spotlightr player.

If you want to enable any of these features, follow our instructions above for each feature on enabling them inside of Spotlightr.

In general, here is what we recommend for all videos:

1 – Add your videos to your lessons in the Video Progression options using the Spotlightr plugin

2 – Enable “Disable Forward Seek” inside of your Spotlightr theme.

That’s it!

This will display the controls and timeline to your students so they know where in the video there are, how long the video is going to last, and can rewind to re-watch anything they might have missed or need to watch again.

This will also prevent them from fast-forwarding to the end so they can quickly mark the lesson complete.

If for some reason, when you turn on our “Disable Forward seek”, video controls do not appear at all, then we recommend turning on Video Controls Display inside of LearnDash.  This seems to be a bug in LearnDash that occurs in some set-ups.

We do have a few more video controls options that you may be interested in…

If you do not want any controls at all displayed to your students, then this is also possible.  Spotlightr has an option to hide all player controls in your Theme.  This allows you to completely hide all of the controls at the bottom of the player.  The user can still click the player to play the video and click to pause it, and that’s it.

Here is a demo so you can see how that looks:

This can be enabled in your Theme >> Player Settings >> Advanced >> Hide All Controls.

You can also hide the timeline only.  This will still keep the play/pause button and any other buttons you have configured for your player controls but hide the timeline so that students can’t skip ahead.

Here’s a demo of how that looks.

This can also be found in your Theme >> Player Settings >> Advanced >> Hide Timeline

What’s Next?

That wraps up our guide to the LearnDash Video Progression feature.  We will update this article as LearnDash changes and updates their plugin if there are any changes.

If you don’t yet use Spotlightr, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial and see how quick and easy it is to get your videos uploaded, branding, and protected.

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