Hi,

A couple of people have asked me about using Course tags in Totara, so I thought I would share a few pointers around it as it has changed in Totara 2.2.

What are they?

Course tags enable users to tag courses in which they are enrolled or teaching on with keywords of their own, or to choose from selected 'official' tags which can be created by those with permissions.

How to set them up

Logged in as an administrator go to Site administration > Appearance > Manage Tags

From here you can add 'official' tags, which can later be applied to courses or, for those with permissions, they can also be added to activities and resources in a course.

Also check that Advanced Features - Enable tags functionality is ticked and

Plugins > Blocks > Tags - Show Course tags is enabled.

When editing or creating a course view Edit settings and Official tags can then be selected.

Totara has a block type called Tags which can be added to a course, or elsewhere such as My Learning Page in order for user to view tags in a 'tag cloud'.

How to use them

Course tags (and tags collectively in Totara) allow users to share, categorise, explore resources and like minded users with similar interests. This is a fairly straightforward social capability and Totara has a number of other sociallly minded tools (wiki, Blog, Forum, Chat).

If your organisation is looking to make more advanced use of the capabilities and potential of a social platform, I would recommend reading the attached design brief for Totara Social at: https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17357 It will work as a stand alone product or tie in nicely with Totara LMS. It is still in the early design phase so any comments would be very welcome.

Thanks,