Totara 2.4 released

Totara 2.4 has been officially released. The release contains numerous improvements and introduces some significant new features.

Open badges support

• Create and issue verifiable digital achievements
• Define criteria to automatically issue badges
• Link to an external “backpack” to import and export badges
• Badges compliant with Mozilla Open Badges standard

Major improvements to Face-to-face including:

• Ability to create and assign rooms to sessions
• Room, trainer and user conflict management
• Activity and session wide notifications
• Notification templates

Support for user-supplied evidence in Learning plans and Record of Learning

• Create evidence of learning outside the LMS
• Link evidence to items within a learning plan
• Admin can create evidence types to support categorisation of evidence

Learning plan improvements

• Ability to allow users to select from multiple learning plan templates
• Ability to bulk create learning plans for all users within an audience

External database plugin for Totara Sync

• Ability to connect to a separate database to sync users, positions and organisations

Performance settings for Report Builder:

• Option to cache reports
• Option to generate reports from a separate reporting database
• Option to prevent loading of report until filters are applied

This release updates Totara to be based on Moodle 2.4, which includes the following improvements:

• Improvements to file picker (including usability improvements, drag and drop in supported browsers, file aliases)
• Improvements to course editing (including drag and drop to add content in supported browsers, new activity picker, moving blocks, sections and resourses by dragging)
• Repository improvements (including EQUELLA repository support, aliases within repositories, access to server files for more activities)
• A new assignment module
• Improvements to the quiz, SCORM and workshop modules
• Performance improvements (including new ‘Moodle Universal Cache’)
• Course format plugins
• Improved icon support
• Improved TinyMCE editor integration (including customising the toolbar icons via settings)
• Integration of external calendars (allows streaming of external calendar events into Totara via iCal)
• Full support for unicode filenames in zip archives

For more details on the Moodle changes see:

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.3_release_notes
http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.4_release_notes

See INSTALL.txt for the new system requirements for 2.4.

API Changes:

• Moodle API changes as detailed in the Moodle release notes
• Report builder activity groups are deprecated. The menu item has been removed from 2.4 and code will be removed in a subsequent release.