What is a dashboard?

Dashboards allow you to display curated content, blocks and links to groups of users on your site. Dashboards can be assigned to audiences, and users can select and customise their assigned dashboards if allowed.

The default home page is initially set to the Totara dashboard for all logged-in users on a new site. To change the default home page, go to Quick-access menu > Navigation > Navigation settings and edit the Default home page for users setting.

If multitenancy is enabled then tenant members will see a dashboard specific to their tenant. On this page we have outlined a selection of other ways to use dashboards in Totara.

Using dashboards

In Totara, you can set up multiple dashboards to suit your requirements, providing different users with different navigation options. 

You may want to create separate dashboards for the important roles in your system (such as Learners, Trainers and Site Administrators), providing easy access to important information and features. Learners might benefit from blocks showing their recent learning, course overviews and upcoming seminars, while Site Administrators require a different set of blocks. For example, you could create a reporting dashboard for all Staff Managers on your site, including reports to allow them to visualise their team's training compliance.

Alternatively, you could create audience-specific dashboards, highlighting new content relevant to that audience and signposting to useful resources, forums, workspaces and more. For example, a separate dashboard could provide a space to collate information and training for your organisation's first aiders, which they could access in addition to their role-based dashboards.

You can use the Featured links block to allow users to quickly navigate between their different dashboards. You can draw attention to other dashboards (or other useful links) using large images, rotating images, or banners to point your users in the right direction. There is also a Dashboards block that can be used to allow users to navigate between their various dashboards if the user has more than one assigned dashboard.

Use cases and examples

In this section you can see a selection of different examples of how we use dashboards in the Totara Community. We provide access to these dashboards to different groups using audiences. You can use these examples as inspiration and consider the different ways you could use Totara dashboards to provide useful user interfaces for different groups of users on your site.

My Dashboard

My Dashboard is one of the most important dashboards in the Totara Community, serving as a hub for all of the user's important information. The dashboard contains links to the following:

• The logged-in user's library
• The last course the user accessed
• The user's assigned courses, programs and certifications
• Awarded badges
• The catalogue
• The user's profile and competency profile
• The user's forum posts
• The user's workspaces

The dashboard is also used to recommend content such as workspaces, or highlight events the user may be interested in. The dashboard also includes a short video highlighting its important features for new users.

Additionally, the dashboard is unlocked, meaning users are able to customise it and add their own blocks for other links or content they need easy access to.

Team progress

We also use dashboards to provide Totara Partners with an overview of the learning their staff has completed. On the left-hand side, the dashboard shows a leaderboard displaying how many badges that Partner's Community users have earned. On the right-hand side, the Partner can see the progress each of their users has made for important programs, allowing them to quickly identify when users need to be upskilled on specific areas of Totara.

Program overviews

We create a dashboard for each of the programs on the Totara Community, which allows users to see their progress through the program's mandatory and optional courses at a glance. In the Totara Talent Experience Platform Site Administrator v17 program dashboard shown below, the program contents are divided into five sections: Platform, Totara Learn, Totara Engage, Totara Perform, and Optional. This allows learners to easily see which courses still need to be completed, then jump straight into those courses.