Managing users in Totara (and Moodle?)

Getting users into your LMS is a pretty straight forward procedure(!) Getting them where you want is another matter. Cohorts in Moodle are a nice feature for managing groups of users in your site, they can either be assigned a course or synched to courses. Creating the Cohorts can be time consuming manually although this has been improved in 2.2 where you can bulk assign members to the cohort.

Totara 2.2 has added Audiences, which are a little like Cohorts on steroids. There are two types of Audiences; Set Audiences, which are fixed and Dynamic Audiences which we will have a look at in this post.

Once you have created a Dynamic Audience you can create Rule Sets based on the information that you know about your users to divide them into groups. These rules have to be based on the profile fields that you have imported or on some of the Hierarchy features that you have created in Totara. (see right)

Reasons Audiences rock!

• Adds new users to audiences based on fields and hierarchies
• Use many rules to really customise the audience
• Use the And/Or operator in the rules
• Assign users to courses as soon as they enter the system based on Audience membership
• Users can belong to many audiences
• Can have times to begin and expire
• Report on an audience
• they make my life easier ;-)

You can add as many rules as you like to build your audience to channel users exactly where you want them to be in the system. (see Ruleset #1 below)

Fingers crossed we'll see this powerful tool in Moodle soon!