Totara Learn Open Discussions

Adding course attributes to certificate

Welcome to this forum!

Hi,

my company is thinking of introducing Certificate activity on a big number of courses with the intent of our users being able to demonstrate that they attended training to outside parties.

As we create & administer a big number of courses monthly, I wondered if it's possible to include some course custom fields - in this case, Course duration to be picked up by the certificate activity on the course & inserted as text.

To administer a big number of courses we regularly use bulk upload of courses & not having to update manually in the certificate activity how long the training took would be a big plus.

Has anybody encountered a similar challenge?

Thanx!

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Hi Vladimir,

We do it one of two ways.

Set up a course page where completion is then based on users uploading the certificate gained from the course. If you need to bulk load completions then the hours are already set on the course page.

Another option is to add as Other Evidence on the Record of Learning. This can be done in bulk and there are custom fields you can add to the csv file such as hours.

I'm pretty sure information around Source Files and what fields you can use can be found in the Totara Help.

Cheers

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

thank you for the reply. Your ideas sound promising, but I would like to check if I understood what you are suggesting, as I'm not quite sure if we're aiming at the same target :)

Looking at your first suggestion, it seems like the dependent part is course completion and the antecedent is the user obtaining the certificate (which users then upload & which qualifies them for course completion). In my case, I would be interested in the version where after the user completes the course, the completion date & training duration is printed on the certificate - so the course completion happens before the user is able to claim the certificate. I know where to find the available option to print a sort of training duration in the Certificate activity - it's called Credit Hours and the admin can input how many hours the training took. However, this is manual and would have to be done for every course in the future. Having in mind we already do a lot of administration, I was trying to avoid this step.

I know there is an option for the administrator/editing trainer to set Credit hours in certificate activity but wanted to check if there is an option where a certificate present on a course can pick up the value of the course custom field where that activity is embedded.

Your other suggestion seems cool :) Although the certificate wouldn't be on the course page, users would be able to fetch it from Record of Learning. And admin's could administrate this once a month in bulk - that is music to my ears. The issue that presents itself here is the delay - we don't have the resources to do this more often than monthly (which can, but doesn't necessarily have to be a blocker). And another thing - how would you make an evidence piece look like a certificate? Something that (in reality) can be downloaded as PDF?

Thank you for the suggestions, they really helped me look at the problem from a wider perspective!

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Sorry Vladimir,

I originally thought the scenario you were asking about is that you wanted to be able to record in your LMS any training that your staff have attended outside of your organisation. That is what my two suggestions are about i.e. building a course page so the user can upload the certificate from the external course or add the external course certificate to the Other Evidence tab.

After reading your post again I now think you are wanting to produce a certificate for your courses so your staff can produce this as evidence to outside organisations. Is that right? If so you can add the certificate activity to your course and within the certificate settings there is the option 'Print Credit Hours'. Enter the amount of training hours for the course in this field and that will populate on to the certificate.

Cheers

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

No worries, thank you for taking the time to read & propose :) Much appreciated!

Yes, Print Credit Hours seems like the best option available. Would be interesting if we could print out course custom fields, because that would eliminate the need to update the value of Print Credit Hours with every course that we make. It would eliminate footwork as well as possible errors that can ensue in manually updating.

I was prompted to ask this as some important stakeholders want the training happening in the company to add to CPD points that many colleagues are accumulating (as much as I understand, by attending training outside the company). Maybe going outside the scope of this post, but have you faced a similar challenge where Totara would be suited to the purpose of having to provide evidence that can be used for gaining CPD points? And how did you go about solving it?

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Hi Vladimir,

We rely on the Record of Learning on our LMS as the source of truth for PD Hours.

If it is a course undertaken via our LMS, whether it be online or face to face, then it will show in the Courses tab and the PD hours are displayed. If it is a course undertaken outside of our LMS then the user can upload the evidence to the Other Evidence tab including the PD Hours.

Using the Other Evidence tab is an exception for us i.e. an individual has completed an external course. I work for several District Health Boards so if there is an external online course that a large group of our staff require then we would look at hosting that course on our LMS, setting up a course page with an LTI link or set up a course page with a link to the external course and an activity where the learner can upload the completion certificate from the external course.

Cheers

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

thank you very much for a detailed response :)

So you are displaying PD hours in Record of Learning - that's neat. And the users know right away how many hours each training carries.

Since I work in a professional services company, the setup that would probably be expected from myself is to provide users with the option to be able to pull legitimate proof that they've completed training from the LMS, rather than me or local HR being responsible for that. I would be interested to know how are your users doing this? Are they pulling an excel/PDF extract to prove that they've acquired PD hours? Or is someone in charge of the administration doing this for them & presenting it to a third party?

Also, when you mention Other evidence can you advise which version of Totara are you using? Because in T13 with the Evidence Bank although you can set something like a custom field for evidence - there is no possibility to extract values from that field in a report. I saw that this is remedied in later versions...

Thanks again for sharing! For me, this is one of the most interesting parts of being a Totara administrator - being able to see how things can be done differently!

Best regards,

Vlad

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Hi Vlad,

We are using V12.

I work for several District Health Boards. The staff themselves can export their Record of Learning (either excel or pdf) and use as evidence when required to provide evidence to a third party such as Nursing or Medical Council.

The managers or educators of the various departments are able to run reports too on what training their staff have completed.

Cheers

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

thanks a lot!

The request that came to me is to provide some sort of certificate for every piece of training that any user in a system does.

Extracting a Record of Learning & presenting it to a third party would be quite OK for me & some sort of user report based on Course Completion source would then be the most scalable solution. However, will see if that is what is enough for my stakeholders.

Again thanx for sharing & hope that I'll be able to contribute should you pose any questions on the forums :D

Best,

Vlad

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Your welcome Vlad.

A lot of Learners like Completion Certificates so we do have a lot of courses with a Completion Certificate option and this shows the date completed and the PD hours for that course.

Means the user has a choice of either generating a certificate for each course and storing them somewhere or exporting their Record of Learning which would show the same information on one document.

Regards,

Nathan

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