Totara Learn Open Discussions

Hi Ran, 

Thanks for your question and for exploring this issue. Capturing recurring completions of a course is quite critical for our business.  I work in the Human Services sector and we have a number of courses that need to be completed annually or biannually for compliance purposes. I'm sure the Human Services sector is not alone with these types of compliance requirements.

We absolutely need a feature that can capture recurring course completions however I have yet to find a straightforward and automated way of doing this through Totara Learn. I would love to see the Totara team invest time in improving how we can automate and track recurring course requirements as this is a significant pain point for us at the moment.  

I have tried to use recurring courses at my organisation but they have not worked as I thought they would. Here are my two main concerns with the program's recurring courses:

1. We have staff starting at our organisation year round so having a course that duplicates itself based on a fixed date is not ideal. For example, if you have a course that needs to be completed annually, and a new staff member starts 9 months after the original course creation date, they will be asked to complete the course when they start but also in 3 months when the course duplicates itself. I think we need more options here (e.g. due date based on prior course completion date) like we have with certificates. 
2. Every time the course is due for recompletion, a new course is created. This adds further complexity for reporting and auditing purposes. For example, let’s say you have 10 courses at your organisation that need to be completed annually. Over 5 years you will have 40 duplications of the original 10 courses. I just can't see how this wouldn't become very logistically challenging both for adminstatrators and managers. 

We have also explored certifications but these seem to have their own limitations. For example, the expiry date period feels quite restrictive. Some folks on this forum have flagged that if a person completes training outside of the designated due date period, the date is not recorded in their record of learning. 

I would love to learn how other people are managing recurring courses and how they integrate these into live reports for managers. Are the majority of organisations using the Certification feature or managing this manually?  The team and I have spent a lot of time reading these forums, exploring Totara Help and Academy to identify how we could better automate this but have not yet found a solution. Any suggestions or resources you have would be very much appreciated.