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.

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!

Great Moodle 2.3 changes for Teachers/Course Creators

Moodle 2 is already up to 2.3.1 and this release has seen some big changes. One of the key areas that has substantial changes is in the actual course design interface. I'm going to outline 5 of the changes that stand out for Teachers/Course Creators. *Warning some of these will cause experienced users to punch the air!*

1. When going to add a resource or activity you are no longer faced with two drop down menus, instead you face a new interface with selection made easy on the left and an explanation of the resource/activity on the right. You can turn this feature off, which may suit experienced users, however new users will enjoy the extra help.

2. The Assignment module has been re-written and consolidated into one activity. Users who have used the assignment activity before will know that there have been many different types of assignment that you could chose for your course. These are now options within the one Assignment activity module.

3. The ability to make an Alias to a file has also been added. This is similar to making a shortcut (why didn't they call it this?) on your computer. The same file can sometimes be used throughout the Moodle site and the problem with this is that you may edit it you then have to find them all again. Create an Alias and you only need to update the original. *punch the air*

4. Drag and Drop has also made it into this release. Some of you may have seen some of this through Davo Smiths block which allows you to drag files straight from your desktop and drop them into your course!! You can also drag folders and SCORM packages to your course and Moodle will prompt you with suggestions of what you want to do with it *punch the air*

5. New users will expect this and experienced users will be nodding with appreciation. The ability to Edit the Title of the resource/activity on the page has been added so you no longer have to go into the activity/resource settings to change the title. 

Mahara 1.5 - 'theme changes'

The social eportfolio tool Mahara has released version 1.5 this month with lots of updates and new features. Myportfolio has used some of these features for a while so I'm pretty familiar with most of them.

The ability to customise your institution theme is a nice little feature where you can select colours and a logo/crest to upload. I was training some new users last year and saw @kieranphilip build a nice looking theme for his school in 3 minutes.
Along with theme customisation you can now also select the 'primary theme' which takes away the standard 3 boxes and introduces a nice UI for Primary school pupils.
Great for engaging younger users as they can click on the pictures to access different areas. (see picture)

Dropdown menus are a new feature that you can turn on in Mahara 1.5 that will help users visualise and find different areas when using Mahara.



 If you know enough about coding and design then you can still apply your own skin.

Reflections on Bett 2012

Wow what a few months I've had.

I've moved from NZ to the UK and for the passed few months I've been talking to Synergy Learning about how we can work together. They suggested we meet at Bett in London.
I had been warned, but it is massive. The night before I helped set up the stand and realised that the hall I was in had more exhibitors than participants at L@S and Ulearn. And then there was another hall that was bigger!
The guys at Synergy Learning are great they've really got some awesome Moodle and Mahara experience with what sounds like a team of developers in the engine room who can make magic things happen.
The scale of the Moodle community was evident on the first day as I spoke to lots of DIY enthusiasts, users and potential users. There was lots of interest in Mahara, but not lots of existing users. I really appreciated my NZ experience with myportfolio and loved sharing this with them.

Bett is great - I had a few hours walking around and could have spent a few more. I'll just take some comfy shoes next time!

Bring Your Own Device

Wireless is one of those unmeasurable benefits to learning, but when going into schools I'm often asked about it or told what the school are doing. There is certainly lots of buzz around it at the moment.

Last month I attended ULearn and attended one of the key sessions on Bring Your Own Device with 5 schools that had already worked through implementing their own policy. They had been through the same issues of security, inclusion, support and planning but had developed policies for students to use their devices in school.

Personally I think its a no brainer - students get to use their computer, the school doesn't have to buy as many and we can start to utilise our devices as school.

Here are some examples of policies;

• Rangitoto
• Burnside High
• Orewa College
• Kristin