Grouping methods

When you have a Totara site with a large number of users it is often important to organise them into groups.

There are several different ways of grouping your users in Totara, each of which should be used in different situations. This page briefly outlines the available methods and when they should be used.

Tenants

If multitenancy is enabled on your site, tenants can be created at the site level by a Site Administrator and are typically used to separate different organisations, sub-organisations or different types of users (e.g. external or internal users). This separation can be used to prevent or limit users from interacting with each other within courses or other parts of the site. Tenants also allow you to provide different content to your users. For example, a user in tenant A won't be able to see a Totara Learn course or a Totara Engage workspace from tenant B - only courses and workspaces for tenant A will appear when they search. The following are separated by tenant:

• Courses (Totara Learn)
• Programs (Totara Learn)
• Certifications (Totara Learn)
• Workspaces (Totara Engage)
• Performance activities (Totara Perform)
• Dashboards

Tenants can also have nominated User Administrators and Learning Administrators, providing them greater control over their learning environments and reducing the administrative load on the Site Administrator.

Tenants may have two types of user:

• Tenant members: Users who are only associated with a single tenant (e.g. Learners)
• Tenant participants: Users who can interact with more than one tenant space (e.g. Trainers)

Learn more on the What is multitenancy? page. 

Audiences

Audiences are created at the site or category level and are designed to group users together to perform bulk or automated updates for the members.

These updates include:

• Enrolment in courses, programs and/or certifications
• Visibility of courses, programs and/or certifications within the course catalogue
• Creation and population of learning plans
• Assignment to goals
• Assignment to competencies
• Assignment to performance activities
• Assignment of system-level access rights 
• Reporting content filtering
• Visibility of site elements such as:
  • Featured links tiles
  • Top navigation items
  • Access to dashboards

There are two types of audience: Set and Dynamic.

Set audiences

Audience members are manually added and removed by a Site Administrator and are best suited for groups which have a small number of users who don't change often.

Dynamic audiences

Audience members are automatically added or removed from the group based on specific criteria or rules for belonging to the audience. Dynamic audiences are best suited for groups which have a large number of users and/or have frequent changes to membership.

Learn more on the What is an audience? page. 

Groups

Groups are created at the course level and can include any enrolled Learner.

Groups can be created to distinguish between different types of Learner or create smaller working/project teams.  

A Course Manager can manually add Learners to a group or they can automatically and randomly assign an equal number of Learners to a specified number of groups.

Groups are applied to activities and resources so that content within those learning items can be separate for each group or shared across groups.

For example, a forum set to be separated based on groups would only display discussions for Group A to Group A members and the Trainer/Course Manager. A forum that is set to be visible based on group membership will allow Group A members to participate in Group A discussions but only view Group B discussions without participating.

Groupings

Groupings are collections of two or more groups. Groupings might be used where a course has a lot of users separated into a number of groups. You may want to divide your users into small teams for project or activity work, but also assign activities and resources to larger collections of groups. For example, you could have a health and safety course with three types of Learners: Group A are the organisation's first aiders, Group B are the health and safety officers and Group C are the fire wardens. Some course activities will be relevant to all of these Learners, so you would not use group-based activities for these. Some activities (for example a SCORM package about fire evacuation planning) will only be applicable to one group, in which case you would simply use Groups. However, some activities might involve two or more groups, such as activities about accident report, in which case you would set up a grouping of Group A and Group B.

Learn more on the What are groups? page.

Workspaces

Workspaces allow users to share resources and have discussions with other members of the workspace. Workspaces also include a curated Library of resources and courses (if using Totara Learn) based on the needs or interests of the workspace's users. You can set up workspaces based on teams, skills, interests, or any other topic your users might be interested in.

While Workspace owners can add users to their workspace, a key difference between workspaces and other grouping methods is that users can actively seek out and join workspaces. For example, a user looking to improve their coding skills could search for 'coding' in the Find workspaces tab and join a workspace full of resources and ongoing discussions with other users.

Learn more on the What are workspaces? page. 

Next steps

• Add a tenant
• Create a dynamic audience
• Create a set audience
• Create groups
• Create groupings
• Create a public workspace