Why It's Important to Upgrade to Totara 13!

Why It’s Important to Upgrade to Totara 13!

Enovation Admin | Blog, eLearning, Enovation News, Featured News, News | 30 September, 2020

Totara 13, enhanced multitenancy, a mobile app and the evolution of key features.

Totara Learn 13 provides organisations with new tools to connect with their learners and take their online, blended and offline learning to the next level. This major release includes enhanced multitenancy, a native mobile app, and significant updates to seminar and reporting functionality.

Totara Mobile App:
Providing learners with continuous access to their learning management system, and the flexibility to learn on the go has been extended beyond a fully responsive default design, to include a native Totara Mobile app. Available for Android and iOS devices, users can sign in to your Totara Learn site through the app via a branded login page. with offline access to SCORM activities and direct access to their courses, programs and certifications from personalized current learning navigation, learners can access their learning, whenever and wherever they want.

Enhanced Multi-tenancy:

Offering learning opportunities to both your external and internal learners connect your stakeholders with your core business values and processes. This helps build and maintain knowledge and engagement across your broader organization. Building on Totara’s existing multitenancy functionality, Totara Learn 13 provides a powerful extended enterprise solution for organisations offering a variety of training models. Your customers, departments, sub-organisations, subsidiaries, partners and resellers can now be added as tenants within the system, creating a separate or shared learning environment. Tenants can be given autonomy over their learners and training content with new user and course administration permissions, alongside dedicated and personalised tenant dashboards.

Next-level Seminars:

The seminar activity has seen numerous improvements to both functionality and usability within Totara Learn 13. New features, improved navigation and enhanced reporting creates opportunities to extend your current blended and offline training activities to more adaptive and granular learning events. Attendance can now be tracked at the session level, with or without a manually assigned grade, separating learner attendance from learner engagement. A range of new seminar-based training models is now available with support for multiple rooms and facilitators per session. Additionally, users can be marked as “unable to attend,” providing an approved cancellation status. Facilitators and instructors can also now be linked to user accounts and training sessions, and attendance at larger, external events can be uploaded
in bulk through a simple file upload.

Report Builder Interface Updates:

Creating and sharing reports is now easier in the Totara report builder. Building a new report starts with a new graphical interface alongside a range of reporting templates for administrators, managers and learners. Now with over 70 report sources available, templates and sources can be selected through a searchable, filterable interface. The updated reports dashboard page also provides users with a simple tile-based overview of all their accessible reports. Totara Learn 13 also includes a new graphical report generator and new graph types, so your custom and embedded reports can be timely, relevant and visually appealing.

Open Badges 2.0:

The Open Badges 2.0 Standard has been integrated into Totara Learn 13 and includes a range of new features to help reward, award, engage and encourage your learners. With badge versioning and support for multiple languages, administrators and trainers can create and issue distinct, but related, badges for different groups of learners. Third-party endorsements can now be associated with each badge, allowing external agencies or subject matter experts to verify the value of the digital award and the achievements of the learner.

User Experience Improvements:

Accessibility, user experience and navigation improvements have been a particular focus for Totara Learn 13, and a range of new options and workflows are now available.
A range of improvements has been made to our accessibility testing and design processes. This includes using industry-standard tools to test accessibility during and after development, with the aim of achieving WCAG Level AA standards and improving the overall user experience for assistive technologies. Navigation when viewing learning plans and creating user accounts has been streamlined, and users can now be directed to your course catalog as a default homepage. Administrators now have even greater control over the experience for visitors to your learning management system, with guest users now able to access specific dashboards. The user profile page has also seen significant improvement, with the content and visibility of user information configurable via block regions.

New Dynamic Audience Rules:

Totara Learn 13 also features a range of new dynamic audience rules, allowing you to automatically enrol users into the most relevant learning items for their current role and ongoing development. These rules include criteria such as previous course and program enrollment, whether a user has been appointed as a temporary manager, how many direct reports a manager might have and when the user’s account was created.

Oauth2 Authentication:

Users can now enjoy a seamless login experience with the new OAuth2 authentication plugin. Individuals can sign into Totara Learn with an existing account from a Google, Microsoft or Facebook application, to create a truly integrated learning suite experience.

We are also excited to welcome Totara Perform and Totara engage to our suite of products, here’s what you can expect!

Totara Engage:

Totara engaged is designed to engage, unite and upskill your workforce to deliver peak performance. Totara Engage is a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) that will empower you to: