What's new?

There are many changes for Totara 13 including the launch of two new products, Totara Engage and Totara Perform. You can read more about the new products and how they interact with Totara Learn on the Understanding Totara products page. 

Totara core platform

Here are some of the new features available across Totara.

Multitenancy

Totara's new multitenancy functionality allows you to set up a number of tenants to organise your users into distinct and separate groups. You can assign users to either be entirely contained within a tenant, or participate in multiple tenants. 

Front-end

There is a new front-end framework for Totara 13 called Tui. Although this new framework is optional for Totara Learn, it is used across most of the user experience for Totara Perform and Totara Engage. You can find out more about Tui and how to customise the look of your site in our front-end developer documentation. 

Reporting

Report builder has seen a number of improvements in Totara 13 including a new visual tile-based display. There are also enhancements to privacy with the ability to control access via a user's profile page. More information is available in the report builder documentation. 

Evidence

They way evidence works in Totara has changed in Totara 13. The feature previously called Other evidence is now called the evidence bank and sits as a block in the Record of learning. It can also be accessed via Develop > Evidence bank from the top menu bar. Evidence types have been extended to allow for custom fields to be defined per type. You can use this to form a template for capturing evidence items.

Totara Learn

In addition to the new products, we have made a number of updates and changes to Totara Learn.

Seminars

A number of improvements have been made to the seminar activity in Totara Learn 13. This includes session-level attendance tracking, bulk upload of attendance, the addition of facilitators, the ability to have multiple rooms per session (such as breakout rooms) and the ability to separate grades from attendance. You can read more about all these improvements in the seminar section. 

Virtual room plugin

The new virtual room plugin allows users to create virtual rooms in Microsoft Teams and Zoom without leaving Totara.

Current learning tile view

You can now configure the Current learning block to display in a tile format, as well as the existing list format. In the tile view the block will display each learning item as a tile, similar to the grid-based catalogue.

Custom report colours

As of Totara 13.3 you can customise the colours used in reports across your site. Find out more in the advanced settings developer documentation.

Calculated quiz question capability

As of Totara 13.48 there is a new capability which determines a user's ability to add calculated quiz questions. You can use this capability to limit Calculated, Calculated simple and Calculated multiple choice quiz questions to administrative users if required.

Totara Engage

Here is an overview of the main features of Totara Engage.

Library

In Totara Engage users can curate libraries of resources, playlists and surveys which can be shared with other users.

Workspaces

In Totara Engage you can create workspaces for different groups or topics in your organisation.

As of Totara 13.3 you can add users to a workspace in bulk.

Recommendations

Another key feature of Totara Engage is the recommendations engine, which can help your users to find content based on their interests and other users' activities.

Users can see trending content and find related resources to the ones they find interesting.

Microsoft Teams integration

With Totara Engage you can now integrate your site with Microsoft Teams.

This can allow your users to seamlessly access content from your Totara site from within Teams.

Totara Perform

Here is an overview of the main features of Totara Perform. 

Performance activities

Totara Perform brings a new performance activities feature, which allows you to create and customise various performance activities such as check-ins, appraisals and feedback. Within these activities you can use existing relationships drawn from job assignments (like manager and appraiser), or create ad hoc relationships like peers or external participants, to ensure the right people are providing input on performance. The flexibility of performance activities also make it easy to manage any personnel changes if they occur, even mid-way through a performance activity. 

Competency changes

Although the competency frameworks and competencies themselves still work largely the same in Totara 13 as they did previously there have been some additions to the competency functionality in Totara Perform. You can now access a competency profile for users on the site (depending on your permissions and relationship to the user) - this contains a number of graphs and links to more data on the user's progress in different competencies they are assigned.
 
There is also an enhanced competency assignment process that will allow you to assign competencies to users or groups of users (such as audiences and organisations). This supports the decoupling of competencies from learning plans, which used to be how they would be assigned in older versions of Totara.
 
Last but not least you can now create achievement paths for competencies, meaning that each point on your competency scale can have a different set of criteria. Each scale point can have one or more criteria required for it to be considered achieved. 

Totara Mobile app

We have also launched a mobile app called Totara Mobile. Here are some of the key features of the app.

Learning on the go

Learners can now access all of their current learning from within the Totara Mobile app, including any courses, programs and certifications.

Offline learning

For the first time Totara users can complete their learning offline by downloading it to their device.

Learners can then complete their SCORM activities in the app's native SCORM player.

Native SCORM player

The Totara Mobile app's built-in native SCORM player allows users to complete SCORM activities in a mobile-friendly format.