Best practice forum (Archived)

New Hire Orientation

I am fairly new to the system and trying to find the best way to set up new hire orientation in Totara.

I have a mix of docs to review, docs to sign, videos to watch, learning to complete, activities to do and notifications to be sent.

Help!

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Hi Kim,

Wow! Straight into the deep end huh?! ;)

What you're describing sounds like a Totara Engage Playlist might be just the ticket. You'd be able to create each of these items as Resources within the system - whether they be links to internal items (maybe even within a Totara Learn course), or external resources - and then adding them all to a Playlist. Creating each item as a Resource would mean they could be reused across other Playlists and Workspaces (such as a refresher for returning staff) and curating all these items together in an Engage Playlist would allow folks to comment, rate and (internally) share the information they work though. You can also pepper in quick Surveys to see how people are relating to the content and generally feeling about their onboarding process (we <3 continuous improvement!).

If you're just thinking about exclusively using Totara Learn let me know and I (or our fabulous Academy Team) could offer some suggestions on how to create a dynamic, engaging orientation course.

Kind regards,
Meredith

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Engage seem like the place to do it however currently we need to do it in Learn.

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Understood Kim :)

There are plenty of ways to make a great orientation course and it'll of course depends on the type of learning and activities you mean as to how best approach it, however, folks new to Totara Learn might not be aware of a couple of neat features they can utilise.

1. You can control the user journey in terms of view and access using activity completion tracking alongside restrict access. This will allow you to hide some content from staff as they work through the course, so they're not overwhelmed when they first enter the orientation course.

2. Orphaned activities - you can use the Label tool to add images to a course page, then link those images to other Totara activities which are in a topic that's not currently showing because the number of topics has been reduced in the course settings (versus hidden). This means you can create a visual/graphical navigation within the course. You'll see this a lot across the Totara Community. Here's a lil video where I explain/show orphaned activities.

3. You can also use the Label activity with manual completion switched to create checklist

4. Badges are a great way to motivate some learners to engage with the site and material within a course. Setting a Badge to be awarded to learners when they update a profile field like their avatar or interests is a good way to connect folks to the system and help them gain confidence in using the system. You can also use custom user profile fields with badges and use those to create dynamic audiences and more targeted learning recommendations. The webinar on gamification might be helpful too.

5. Another idea is to create a user tour for your orientation course - this will allow you to high light how the course works as well as show them around Totara Learn a bit.

6. Consider using the Assignment activity for users to submit their signed forms back (by uploading an image from their phone etc)

7. For the videos, you can embed some media and it looks great on a course page (you'll see this in the Totara Academy courses)

8. For notifications, depending on what/who/where these are going, you might be able to use the Event Monitoring tool to receive alerts.

Good luck and have fun!

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