Best practice forum (Archived)

Any way to create online form?

We want to create an easy way for staff to put in a request for external training to the Training department. This really needs to be an online form that the user completes with details like department, objectives, budget, contact details etc. The fields might include text entry, Yes/no, drop-down select, radio buttons. Ideally submission should email or alert an administrator and send an acknowledgement email/alert back. Note this is not about booking on internal courses which are on Totara, but to enable the Training department to manage the sourcing and booking of courses from external providers

I have looked at the existing Activities in Totara 1.1 and can't find a suitable format - e.g. database is viewable by all, Quiz doesn't work well for this, survey seems to be fixed questions, forums, chat etc are too open, Assignment with a form to download and then upload again is too clunky.

Is there any way to do this in the existing functions or by adapting them slightly? Or any other simple solution?

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Hi John.
We've had a similar request from some clients in the past.
We are actually about to develop an extended solution for a client with workflow management with several approvers and a report source that'll allow reports on training requests. We're not sure if we will do it as a block or as another component (tab) in the learning plans.
Let me know if you'd like to learn more about that.

You might be able to use database activity to a limited extent - if you do not approve the submitted record they remain visible only to the submitter and the course admin. You'll need to use another field to mark the approval status.

You might want to also check out the 3rd party moodle plugin Dataform as it allows more complex forms and views but is a bit complicated to my taste.

Would be glad to hear how things worked out.

Good luck!
Amir

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Hi,

I am also looking for workflow management with several approvers since I did not find this in Totara or am I mistaken?

I want the solution where first manager has to approve a course/program/plan of a student.user and then the second higher ranked manager must approve a course/program/plan in order t start a plan or a program.

Does Totara or your plugin has this solution?

Regards

Tom

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Hi Tom,

For this specific client the form is only used to manage the workflow and report on the approval status of training requests. It is not linked to Totara courses, programs, competencies or even face-to-face activity sign up and attendance. On other occassions we were asked by clients to support more advanced workflow managemement.

This client needs it as a stand alone solution to manage training request forms.

As I mentioned above this is not yet a plugin, but a planned develpoment for a client we will do.

Also worth link is an earlier disicussion/feature suggestion I started on flexible forms:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=18935

Amir

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Hi John

I may be missing something obvious here - the Feedback activity allows multichoice, text answers and even dependency type questions.

An email administrator and feedback page is also able to be added.

Analysis is able to be automatically available and one feed back can be used in several courses and aggregated.

Craig

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Thanks Craig

The problem I found with Feedback was that if you allow multiple attempts, each attempt overwrites the previous one so you lose the information. People will need to use this repeatedly to enquire about external training and we will need to keep each submission. Is there a way to do this with Feedback that I haven't found?

John

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Hi John

The feedback doesn't have the option of multiple attempts for non-anonymous attempts. The Questionnaire module does allow non anonymous multiple attempts but doesn't seem to be part of core Totara. This may be because there are plans to combine the questionnaire, Feedback and Survey modules for v2.5.

You can download this and see if this meets your requirements.

Craig

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Many thanks Craig.

I didn't realise that Anonymous Feedback allowed multiple submissions - this would probably work for us, if we ask for their name as first question. If not the Questionnaire module looks like it would meet the need.

John

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