Finding content on your Totara site
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The Totara catalogue is one of the main ways users can find content on your Totara site.
From formal learning such as courses, programs, and certifications, to user-generated resources and playlists, and workspaces, the catalogue is a one-stop shop to help your users find the right learning at the right time.
The catalogue is highly customisable, allowing you to decide what information your learners see.
By default, the landing page includes a catalogue block showing the most recently created learning items.
This curated landing page is optional. If no blocks are configured or they are hidden, the catalogue will display all available items by default.
Additional blocks can be added to the catalogue to showcase specific learning content, or to create tailored experiences, like a Beginner catalogue block for new hires, making it easier for learners to find content relevant to them.
Each tile item in the catalogue represents a learning item, such as a course or playlist, combining all learning types into one view.
You can hide specific learning types from the catalogue. For example, you may want learners to see only courses and resources. Or you could allow learners to do this themselves using a filter.
Speaking of filters, the catalogue is designed to help learners find the right learning for them as easily as possible.
For filters, you decide what your learners see. You can use tags to set up any kind of filtering you want.
This dropdown can be configured based on a range of criteria. In this case, we’ve chosen the default, which is to browse by Category. But you could also choose a custom field, for example, Time to read, to allow learners to filter items based on how much time they have to spend.
Users can also use the free text search field to search for content. Entering a keyword in the catalogue searches across courses, certifications, programs, playlists, resources, and workspaces. Tags can be applied to all these items, making them easily discoverable in the catalogue.
For courses, programs and certifications, the search also includes the content name, short name, summary and text-based custom fields. For user-generated resources, the search covers all text content. And playlists and workspaces are searchable by their titles. The search supports wildcard searching using an asterisk to replace part of a word.
When learners have found the items they’re looking for, they can share a link to the filtered catalogue with other users. Note that people who you share this URL with may not see the same catalogue items as you, due to differences in visibility and permissions.
Each item in the catalogue is based on a template you define. In this example we’re showing you a progress bar tracking completion of formal learning items, the title, the content type, the category it sits within, and the image.
You have the option to set a default image for each learning type, as we’ve done here, at the site level, or to give each item its own image. You might also want to highlight certain content using the Featured learning function.
This can be enabled using a set of criteria. For example, you could mark all content within the Leadership category as Featured in the catalogue.
You can decide at the catalogue level whether selecting catalogue items takes the user straight to the item or whether you’d rather display more information to help them decide. This information is called the tile detail. Again, you decide what to include here if enabled. Note, however, that summary details can only be included for courses, programs, certifications, and workspaces.
Configuring the catalogue is a case of deciding what to include, and which options to enable, setting up your tile item and detail templates, and then determining what information is used to populate those templates.
Finally, set up your filters, which can include custom fields, and you’re ready to go!
So that’s a quick look at the Totara catalogue. How might you use it to improve your users’ experience?