Totara Learn Open Discussions

Course pathways or collections

Welcome to this forum!

Just wondering if anyone has a good idea for how to display collections. By that I mean a set of courses that doesn't always sit neatly in a category. Or they are a special subset of a category. E.g. Leadership, has various levels and pathways to follow depending on your role.

Options:

Courses - Currently we create what I call 'dead uber pages' - dead because they have actually no learning and can never be completed, just a set of links, they mess up our reporting and aren't differentiated from other courses.

Programs - too restrictive and don't work (plus look bad) so not an option unless someone can prove me wrong!

Categories - as you can't add courses to multiple categories, this doesn't work.

Course custom field - we have a field 'collections' we use for reporting, but can't figure out how we might display courses using this.

Dashboards - viable option, as it gives flexibility on display. I'm worried about having too many and how they would be accessed.

Saved searches? - our search has lots of filters so may be possible. But only provides a list of courses, not a pathway

So wondering if there are any clever solutions or ideas out there? How do you manage your collections?

Permalink | Reply

Hi Tina,

Interesting question! I think dashboards is a good option here. Here in the Totara Academy, we present our programs as dashboards, which function in a similar way - presenting a set of courses in a recommended order, to a particular audience. To make sure people could find them, you could either have a 'dashboard of dashboards' which is the central place users go to find their collections, or perhaps a collections menu item with other sub-items below for each dashboard, depending on how many you have of course! You can see an example of one of our programs here.

If you're using Totara Engage, an alternative would be to use playlists which allow you to string together a set of resources in a set order and again, share it with the appropriate users. The nice thing about this option is that you can also allow for commentary on the resources (you would set up a resource for each course in this example). Here's an example of a playlist here on the Community to give you an idea of what this looks like.

I'm sure there are lots of other good ideas too - I'm looking forward to hearing what others suggest. Do let us know what you decide to do too!

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Kia Ora Tina

Similar to dashboards, we have used a course page with featured links blocks. Probably similar to your "dead uber pages".

Staff access the course page with Guest Access and then the groups of courses are displayed with the featured links blocks.

For reporting, once staff complete a set list of courses, they then get added to a dynamic audience (audience rules are "include those who have completed course A, Course B etc") and then assigned to a program - and then we can report on program completion. Does not show who has only partially completed the program, but we are mainly concerned with full completions anyway.

Ngā Mihi

Neil
Te Whatu Ora, Waitaha Canterbury
^{Health NZ}

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Thanks for the post Neil, that sounds a clever workaround for programs. Do I assume then that users don't ever go to the program? Assuming that programs work for your content (ie you don't change them frequently)? thanks Tina

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Tina

In this context learners may not even know there is a program attached until they have completed the courses, and it appears in their record of learning. We do have educators who can manage learning plans for staff in their area, and they add the program to a learning plan for staff, but that is usually not done by learners either.

What is especially helpful in this model is making sure the show progress option is ticked, and then staff can see how far they have progressed through the different courses.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply