Totara Learn Open Discussions

Various ways of recommending courses to Audiences

Welcome to this forum!

Hi all,

we are soon to be migrating to Totara Learn 13 and wanted to ask the community how are you managing recommendations for the audiences in your LMS (for example, members of a department). Ideally, this would be present on the dashboard, but as much as I can understand Recommended learning block is only available for those who have purchased Engage as well.

I can see that there is a featured links block, but that would enable just site-wide recommendations or promotion of courses, not personalized recommendations (which would be very nice to have).

Also, I am not sure is there any widespread use of matching between user interests & course tags that could be useful. What I would like to aim here is to match certain skills with available content to develop them.

It doesn't have to be too developed of an idea, just interested to see if anyone is going in this direction & what could be the various way to get there.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Vlad

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Hi,

just adding to the previous question something that I noticed on the Sandbox site for T12 for Featured links block - as admins, we cannot set any visibility rules for the tiles?

Is this something that is disabled only on the Sandbox site?

Best,

Vlad

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Hi Vlad,

Which Sandbox site do you mean?

cheers,

George.

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Hi George,

thank you for the quick reply.

I mean the site/page which is on offer to all Totara Academy Learners: https://totara.community/course/view.php?id=169

I used T12 Sandbox.

Thanks!

Best
Vlad

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Hi Vlad,

I got it to work ok - can you try?

cheers,

George.

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Hi George,

thank you very much! Now it works :)

Can you please confirm if the visibility of the tiles in Featured Links block can be accessed with Totara Learn 13 only? In other words, does a user has to have Engage as well to set visibility for tiles?

Oh, and was that something on the demo site that was missing in some system settings for me to access visibility of the tiles, or something else? I suppose this is something I would probably end up using :)

Thanx as always!

Best,

Vlad

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Hi Vlad,

The behaviour of the visibility settings appear to be inconsistent - Im going to ask our dev team to look into it, also I'll ask our Technical writers to give the functionality a proper write-up in our help docs - we'll get back to you shortly.

cheers,

George.

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Hi George,

thank you for looking into it, we are just thinking about which functionality we would like to use in our future LMS & it would be important for planning to know if Totara Learn 13 supports this option or not.

Thanx!

Best,
Vlad

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Hi Vlad

Just to add to this, visibility settings on featured links blocks is available in v12 and v13 without Totara Engage (it's a platform feature). In v12, I believe you can set the visibility of featured link tiles on the front page and courses, and in v13 we've added the ability to use audience visibility on tiles in dashboards. If you'd like to know more about this, you might be interested in our Academy course on Dashboards and basic theming which includes a video on setting up a featured links block.

Hope that's useful!

Rachel

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Hi Rachel,

thank you for jumping in with that info so important to me :)

Yes, I did check out the video on Featured links in the Totara Academy and went to try it out on the Totara Sandbox site for T12 and that's when I started thinking maybe if this is something specific for Engage.

And yes, being able to use audiences for tiles is fantastic! Are there are any plans to include user interests as an input field for audiences?

Also, from where I'm looking, linking user interests with course tags would be a great way to enable recommendations for users & achieve more personalization. Especially that Totara now has tag collections that work as a hierarchical organisation for tags (at least in T 2.9 that we are currently using these are absent).

Thanx again for the info! Looking forward to exploring these Featured links some more.

Best,

Vlad

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