Best practice forum (Archived)

Best way to start again on implmenting prior learning the new totara site

Hello,

I'm creating my new Totara site on development server. I have all of my courses, users, etc., in the new site, and I'm working on getting the Totara features of programs, certifications, learning plans correctly implemented. The site has to be moved to production by Jan 2. So I'm at the point where I've spent over a week getting all my old data and new data into the Totara site on the dev server, but things a number of things haven't gone smoothly and aren't working. And my test server is so close to being moved to production, that it isn't really a test server any more.

One example issue is a critical certification that requires a course be taken every five years. I've tried uploading course-completion prior learning and I've uploaded certification-completion prior learning, but it isn't registering correctly when I go to my users page.) I'm still figuring out what has gone wrong for each of my issues... but...

With problems such as these, what is the best way to try again so that it has the best chance of success and without starting from scratch (since that isn't an option at the moment.)

It seems like I could I delete the course and the certification (or program or plan) and make new ones. But now I've got all of the Alert messages being created for my users.

Of course, I don't want launch a brand new site for my users and have the first thing they see be bunch of alerts. Can I delete all the Alerts in some way? Can I avoid creating more of them?

Best,

Liz

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Hi Liz,

In Site Administration -> Advanced features there is a checkbox "Enable messaging system". Turning that off should stop all alerts and tasks being generated. You could also add the following lines to your config.php while doing the rebuild to prevent any emails being sent out:

$CFG->noemailever = true;

$CFG->divertallemailsto = 'youremail@address.com'

Remember to take them out of the config.php when you move to production :-)

When you say the certification prior learning is not showing up, you need to be careful that the certification/course shortname matches exactly in the CSV file you are uploading. If the system cannot find the course/cert by the shortname then it adds the RPL under Record of Learning: Other Evidence. Shortnames should mostly be just alphanumeric, a-z and 0-9, as other characters like ampersands can sometimes have odd effects. In addition there is a known bug when there are multiple records for the same user in the same program i.e. where user A has previously completed certification X 4 times over their years with the company - there is a patch in review to fix this so that'll hopefully be in 2.5.5, but for now try only having the most recent record for each user in the CSV just to get up and running.

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Thank you. That will help.

On the cert... I'm pretty sure something like the multiple times problem you mention is occurring. Since the course is due every five years, what I thought I'd try next is figuring out which learner records to import. Hence the starting over.

I wish I could get rid of all the alerts I've already created. :-p

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Well as it is a pre-production system you could clean out all the records in

mdl_message

mdl_message_metadata

mdl_message_read

mdl_message_working

That should get rid of them :-)

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Thank you!

Will deleting the Certification and the Course in from from within my site be sufficient? Or since I have loads of prior learning course/cert uploads, would additional steps help?

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Help!

I just emptied these tables and my site is broken. The Totara menus are gone and displaying in a crazy fashion down the page. They are on top so I can't click on anything on the top of the page. I can't pick another theme. I can't change the navigation method. I can't even click the Blocks editing at the top of the page....

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Please ignore. A theme coding issue I was doing at the same time. :-(

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Hi Liz

There may be a number of issues contributing to this problem. One idea is run a cron job after doing all of the uploads! Also check where the historical grades are being uploaded. If they are being uploaded to other evidences it will not complete the program.

There is a way for you to delete the notification messages. Inside the certificate go to the messages tab. Delete the enrollment message. This will help so that messages are not sent out to all users a second time. I know that you have already received some other responses but wanted to respond to you.

John

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