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C

Catalogue search

You want learners to be able to find content in your catalogue when they search for it. Make sure the key terms they are likely to search for are included in the searched fields: Name, short name, summary, tags and text-based custom fields.

Certificates for programs and certifications

You cannot add a certificate directly to a program or certification because the certificate activity exists at a course level. But there is a way around this. Create a single-activity format course which just contains the certificate required. Add this certificate as the only course in a final set in your program or certification, and use ‘THEN’ logic to ensure that it can only be accessed when the completion criteria has been met in all other sets.

Certification expiry date

When using certifications, make sure your learners understand what the certification expiry date really means. It doesn’t mean that they must recertify after that date, it means they must have recertified by that date. If a learner doesn’t recertify by the expiry date, they will have to redo the original certification path and will not have the option to complete the recertification pathway.

Change activity completion conditions and keep existing completion records

If you change the activity completion conditions you can choose to keep the existing completions or delete the existing completions and recalculate with the new conditions.

Learn more about Activity completion in the Help documentation.

Clone existing programs and certifications

You can clone a program to copy its details, content, and notifications, instead of creating a new one from scratch. This can save time when setting up similar programs. From Totara 19 onwards, certifications can also be cloned.

Coaching in Totara

As a manager, it’s your job to help your team perform to the best of their abilities. But there are different ways to approach that. One way could be through coaching. The UK CIPD define coaching as ‘the use of one-to-one conversations to enhance an individual’s skills, knowledge or work performance’. Coaching is often linked to mentoring, and the two share many of the same skills.

You will need a tool in place which enables managers and team members to identify an appropriate coach, such as a database of coaches and their skills. This could be anyone in your organisation who has received coaching training and has identified their key skills and areas of experience. You will also need to have structures in place that coaches can use, such as goals, competencies and agreed communication tools.

Take a look at how you could use Totara to support coaching in your organisation.

If you’d like to learn more about coaching then take a look at this dedicated Academy course on Effective coaching for managers.

Collaborating in workspaces

Workspaces are powerful collaborative areas where social and informal learning can flourish. In workspaces, learners can add resources, collaborate with their peers and set up personalised notifications so that they’ll never miss anything important happening within a space.

In this video we’ll take a look at how your teams can collaborate in workspaces:

This video is taken from the Totara Academy course Workspaces. You can also access Help documentation on workspaces, or download an eBook on 'How to drive learner collaboration with digital workspaces in Totara’.

Combining dynamic audiences and HR import

When you upload a large group of users you can combine dynamic audiences with HR import. This allows you to automate adding users to your site, placing them in the correct audience and enrolling them in learning (based on their audience), without any manual intervention. See our Audiences course to find out more.

Courses in recertification pathways

Be careful when including courses in a recertification pathway that also appear in a separate program. Once the recertification pathway is active, the learner’s progress on the course will be reset. If program completion depended on this course completion, the program would become incomplete until the learner has recompleted the course as part of the recertification.