Bett 2013.... expecting more from Totara

I’m just on my way to Bett and reflecting on how things have changed over the last 12 months. I think the largest change for me has been the growth of Totara LMS. Especially over the last 6 months where LMS users are now more aware of the platform and are asking about key features and how it can be applied in their business. Totara is Moodle with a nice layer of features to meet corporate requirements, if you are unfamiliar with it a nice detailed sheet of Moodle versus Totara can be found here.

Users first impressions are that they are amazed by the amount of configuration and customisation that can be applied when using Totara. They are not expecting the high level features from an Open Source platform and the familiarity over Moodle underneath the bonnet. Totara has lots of functionality, but the main things that users have been asking me for from Totara have been;

1. The Learner Dashboard: The learner experience is excellent users can plan their learning with tasks, objectives and learning plans and communicate this with or without manager approval. It also highlights their past achievements with their record of learning with the ability to recognise prior learning.
2. Face to Face Learning: A high requirement for a lot of Training and Professional Development departments. This is fully automated in Totara with the ability for learners to book themselves on training with responses, cancellations, waitlists, and manager approval all managed within Totara. This feature is on the roadmap to receive a raft of improvements in the next release.
3. Audience Management: I love this and I’ve blogged on this feature before. This enables you to group users based on different information in their profile. Once you have them grouped auto-assign them to courses and programs based on their group - easy!
4. Reporting: You can report across the site on all of the information that you have in the system. Users and managers can then access the reports on their dashboard or have them delivered to their email inbox each week.
5. Moodle: Yes, it is still there underneath the Totara LMS feature enhancements. Moodle is now on 2.4 and Totara is set to move to this base in March/April of this year keeping in step with the latest version. You can still bring all of your Moodle courses to the platform.

Get in touch if you are at Bett and I'll go through some of these features or ask about some of the different features. I'm at stand C1

TOP 20 Learning Management Systems

sorry its sooo looong!

An infographic (the web seems full of them lately) showing the top twenty LMS according to customers, users and presence. 

They've also included some stats on Social Media presence. Its worth a look, not really any surprises although there are some that I have never heard of. Moodle is at the top, through the open source nature and high adoption it seems to be the standard in the industry, although it does not seem to have the largest social media presence. 

Edmodo always seems to appear near the top too, a platform that is easily adopted by students with its social networking features. I'd like to have a closer look at this in practice.

And if you are using any of the LMS lower down in the charts and you are happy have a very good look before you leap!

Thanks to Capterra for compiling the list, I would imagine it would have taken some time to get the data together.