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What you need to know about Totara

Totara is an open source distribution of Moodle and perfect to meet the corporate sector’s need for a learning management system. At MLS, we have written several articles on the importance of aligning learning objectives to business strategy. Totara makes this even more achievable by providing an engaging learning portal that is built for corporate, industry and VET training environments links the knowledge, skills, and experience of your staff.

Benefits of Totara

  • With Totara, you can rapidly develop blended learning content easily; through the engaging learning portal learners can access instructor led training, self-paced e-learning and webinars.
  • Totara can help you track your elearning course ensuring it complies with your business policies.
  • Social learning is supported by Totara; we know that social is the most effective tool for adult learners, particularly as social learning is best utilised within a collaborative environment. This is
  • Like Moodle, Totara is free and open source, which brings cost effective benefits to corporate users.

Another significant feature of Totara is its competency structure aligned to staff performance and abilities. Trainers and assessors as well as L&D professionals using the VET framework for their learning material will find Totara a compatible tool to use in ensuring that HR and managers can manage their talent within the organisation. We’ve already noted how important it is to align staff development with business objectives; Totara makes this an easy task with its ability to customise competencies to improve work performance or teach new skills. This is the ultimate tool in creating just-in-time e-learning that can be rolled out either face-to-face or online and the added bonus is that staff can track their own progress allowing them to take ownership of their own learning performance.

How does Totara do this?

Instructional designers can create individualised learning plans from Totara templates; these can be either individual or multiple learning plans for groups. Competencies can be mapped into the learning plans in order to meet the learning outcomes.

By developing a personalised plan from either performance objectives or even the skillset of a new position, learning plans can be customised by management to meet a specific development need. Personal plans can become a flexible performance plan that changes along with priorities and deadlines. Learners and managers can add learning activities and additional competencies to map their progress and professional development.

Totara and content creation

Content curation and authoring your own learning material can be at times overwhelming, but Totara makes managing this much easier. Totara combines the best of authoring software and learning management to enable you to use the right authoring tools for what you want to achieve. You can use an incredibly broad range of content whether it’s web content or learning activities. Like Moodle, you can use lessons, wikis, forums and assignments as you would in any other authoring tool. What makes Totara different is that you can integrate this content into your courseware without prior consultation from the vendor – Totara lets you do it as and when you want to.

Contact us when you want to test drive Totara or see a demonstration. Check our website for regular features and tips on Totara’s features and benefits to your organisation.