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.
