 Hello and welcome, great to meet you virtually speaking. My name is Chad Alton, I'm Director of My Learning Space, we're an Australian online learning services provider. Our aim today is to help your organisation improve its learning efficiencies in about half an hour or so. We'll start with a brief appraisal of online learning and follow that with a demonstration of some of the key features of the Totara Learning Management System software. And naturally we'll allow time for Q&A at the end. We'll unmute mics if need be, but look along the way feel free to use the chat function and we'll incorporate any questions or comments as appropriate. Being mindful that you may have to or have already had to devise a business case for online learning, we'll start with a rationale. In today's economic and political climate, organisations of all shapes and sizes are seeking ways to become leaner, more productive, meanwhile minimising cost. To that end, one of the strongest arguments for online learning is that it does help organisations achieve more with less. Web-based learning management systems such as Totara represent an excellent return on investment. Relative to traditional face-to-face, same time, same place learning. One of the reasons being is that financial and human resources can be more efficiently allocated. Less travel translates to less time out of the office and more time for staff to focus on core business. So it is all about not being bound by time or place, so that means anyone anywhere can learn or be trained about anything at any time. So think of training and learning and development without boundaries. It's quite exciting. This diagram illustrates what a learning management system or a good learning management system might look like. You can see Totara has been dropped in the centre of the cloud. The cloud represents the internet in this case. It's built upon internet-based technologies and infrastructures and any good learning management system will enable resource sharing. So items such as documents, presentations, multimedia can be shared by online course participants. A good element of source that allows collaboration through tools such as blogs and forums, wikis and some messaging. And naturally we need to be able to measure the achievement of learning outcomes through assessment. So items such as quizzes, assignments and tracking and reporting features are important as well in a good learning management system software. So we as users can access the LMS via the internet from a variety of devices. So not being bound by time or place, we can go certainly beyond desktop computers and laptops. A good LMS software will also let you access it via a smartphone or a tablet device. Okay, well here's our roadmap for today and perhaps a little overview of where we're headed. In case you're not aware, Totara is a corporate distribution of Moodle and Moodle happens to be the world's most popular learning management system. Totara has been designed specifically for workplace learning and assessment. So it's kind of Moodle plus some wonderful features that are ideal for the corporate sector, government departments, registered training organizations in particular. So it has a great range of features that will enable you to facilitate training programs in an online face-to-face and a blended environment. You'll be able to personalize learning via individual learning plans and programs. You'll be able to match learning to fit your organizational structure. So you can match the complexities of potentially an ERP or a HR system or another system within your organization against your learning management system. You'll be able to manage teams of learners and naturally assess, track and report on competency, achievement, learning and development. Okay, for the purpose of the demonstration, I've logged myself into Test Instance of Totara. This is version 2.2, fairly plain vanilla at this stage, but of course it is highly customizable. So we can brand the learning management system according to your corporate requirements, your specific requirements in terms of actually a logo and the header, colors and fonts and styling and icon sets and so forth. You'll see if we go to the settings block, site administration, appearance, incidentally we're seeing the system through the eyes of an administrator at the moment, but we'll toggle to other views so you can see what a manager and a learner gets as well. We'll go to theme selector. The themes are synonymous with templates or skins that you might be familiar with in other systems, but Totara is clever in the sense that it enables device detection. So it's clever enough to know if the end user is connecting to the LMS file, a default device such as a laptop or a desktop computer, a mobile or a tablet and to serve up a theme that is optimized for that sort of device. Different devices with different screen resolutions will need a theme that's optimized to that end and also a legacy device in the case of an end user connected to your LMS with an outdated browser. Say for example in an Explorer 6 we still want to be able to give them a usable experience. So we would come in and select the theme from the range of themes that are available, different colors and styles and icon sets and layouts naturally. With this custom theme that we've got at the moment we would be able to go via a graphical interface and very quickly adjust some of its settings such as the logo, the favicon, the color of links, background colors and buttons and so forth and even drop some CSS code in the box there at the bottom if that was appropriate. So we could do all of that via the administrative interface without requiring access to files located on the server. So just returning to or use the breadcrumbs to navigate to the front page again just to show you a couple of things in terms of the general look and feel of Totara. Naturally we've got some tabs across the top here that kind of tile vertically into sub elements. The tabs will vary depending on the user and the role they have within the learning management system. So administrators or people with reports or people who are managers of teams have different tabs or elements on the set tabs. So we've got also these square things called blocks. They can easily be expanded or collapsed and there's naturally sub elements sitting within each of those kind of in a nested way and we would follow the link to go to a particular location or to perform a certain function. We can dock the blocks. So we click the little blue area to move the block to the dock. I'll do that for these others as well. So you get the idea. Each of those docks into kind of a vertical strip on the left side of the page. They kind of declutters the given page and you can mouse over the block and expand the elements within it. If you want to put it back, it's more or less the reverse process. So we click the blue icon to move it back or we can move them more once we undock them all like so. As far as what a course looks like, to give you a quick look and feel of a course. A bit like the cooking show. This was one prepared earlier. So we've got blocks. It's sort of a three column layout. We've got blocks on the left and the rightmost portion of the page and we have the content in the center section. So these could be organized into topics or weeks. And naturally we've got titles or headings and we've got activities and resources of the learning nature situated within them. Down the page so the user could scroll. There's a few different ways we could serve these up. Naturally if we click this little box to the side we can just show topic or section one and all of the other topics are collapsed into a jump-through menu. Alternatively we can reverse process to show all topics. We'll get that expanded view back. We'll use the breadcrumbs to return home. Now I mentioned before being able to map your organizational structure to the learning management system. If we go into site administration, hierarchies will get some sort of an idea of that. So we've got a positional framework here that's been built already. So by way of example we have a project officer in I guess the manager position and working beneath them we have a text support employee position and a software developer employee position. So similarly for HRM we've got trainer and administrator and the L&D manager has an instructional designer and on my facilitator role under them. So you can build this positional framework. We can do a similar thing for organizations within your LMS. Let's face it some of us work within fairly complex organizations. So we want to be able to map that structure to our LMS. So again by way of example we've got the IT area and within that we've got the service and support group and within it service desk and desktop support team. And then we've got some other areas with their respective groups and teams as well. So where that comes together as far as users are concerned browse users we're going to look at this learner in particular. The user profile tells us a bit about them and who they are, where they're from what courses are enrolled in when they first and last access the system what they're interested in and so forth. We can send them an instant message from this page. Down the side here in the navigation block if we go to positions where you can populate a primary, secondary and aspirational position or if we open up the system where you could in fact let a manager or all the end-user themselves put the information in here. The idea would be we've got a few fields toward the bottom that could be populated according to the frameworks we just had on screen there before. So the idea would be you would choose the position from the framework or frameworks available and locate and likewise for organization. And if appropriate if this learner was reporting to a manager you would select that person from the list of users. We can have a start and finish date and a description for any of these positions as well and then we would simply update it. But the idea behind that is if we define positions and organizations we can bulk assign learning plans or programs which are sets of courses to users instead of being a one size fits all approach and on the same token if we assign a manager to a user that learner becomes part of a team and the manager can oversee and monitor and track and report on their progress. So that's hierarchies just in a nutshell. Just as a little aside with competencies of course competencies are goals synonymous with goals or key performance indicators if you like they're really the measure of learning and development. So Totara allows us to build competency frameworks you can have one or one or more. And by way of example here we have the health and safety area within that we have the management unit that's one of several units and within that particular unit we have these competency descriptors. So here's an example one the prime responsibility to take all practical steps that's if you like it's one performance criteria that's one competency that the learner will need to demonstrate in some shape or form. Over to the right we've got a column for evidence items so we've got a number there beside that first competency. So if we click the number one we can see on this subsequent screen health and safety the health and safety course is linked to that competency. The relationship there is if the learner successfully completes the health and safety course the LMS will indicate that they have achieved this particular competency for reporting purposes. So that's the relationship. We'll have a little look at program management. Of course we can organize courses into categories and have programs which is a powerful feature in the sense of we don't have to single-handedly enroll users into courses where you can bulk assign sets of courses to large groups of users. Okay so we'll come in here and add a new program we'll give that program a name it will be available to students and let's say in terms of availability we'll make it for this calendar year. The description and end-note are optional but the description might have some more information about this particular program or set of courses and an end-note might be a congratulatory note or a link to a subsequent program or course that the user will be required to complete. So we'll save the changes there that's just some general information about the program we go to the content tab so we just work our way left to right across the top. So we've got a few options here in defining the content of the program we can add sets of courses and all competencies we can also set up a recurring course that might be more appropriate in a situation where you've got mandatory training it might be compliance type training that needs to be performed by all staff on a periodic basis that would be the way to go. But look, we'll demonstrate how to set up a set of courses if we go add let's say this is induction so we'll add health and safety and orientation okay we will also add another set of courses to this particular program that might be to do with computer skills okay so we'll give each of these a name these sets within the greater program so it might be OHS the first set and we will allow 30 days they must complete all courses within that particular set so that's health and safety and orientation within 30 days and then it can be then or it can be the logic for the subsequent set so we might say then for the computing skills set and again it could be all courses or one course within that set and you specify the number of days and we save changes so the logic is highly flexible in terms of the courses that we add to the program and the duration we go to the assignments tab across the top and this is where we can assign learners in bulk for a set fixed or relative information criteria so we can add either organizations according to that framework or positions audiences which are essentially cohorts or site-wise groups we can add managers or individuals or all these things any or so if we go with organizations we go add organizations to the program we can then say right we'll add a service desk and desktop support add some positions to this program so the jobs concern might be tech support and software developer we would then set the completion date for each of these groups of people so they can be set fixed to a completion date or relative to a login again it can vary for each person who might want it to be like so then we would save changes the idea would be users who have a certain position or are situated within a certain department unit, branch of your organization would inherit this program this set of courses upon their next login so that's the idea behind what we're doing there and it becomes very automated when it has been configured as I've just demonstrated and not just the programs but of course the courses contained within it and any evidence items that are linked to the competencies that are linked to the courses as far as reporting goes again this is the administrative function Totara's got what's known as a report builder this is a fully featured, highly sophisticated in-build report builder so we can build custom reports via a graphical interface and save ourselves tens of thousands of dollars potentially and two types of reports and better reports are pre-built and you can see there's a dozen or so of them good to go we've also got user generated reports so more to the point these are created by the administrator and then assigned to users of the system by their role and the set recipients can schedule the reports to run on a periodic basis and be emailed to them if they so choose so look what we can do down here we would go new report give the reporter a name say course completion 2012 we'll select the data source so it might be information that relates to an audience competencies or courses programs objectives or users amongst other sources of data in this case we're after course completion as the data source we click the button where it's create report so we work our way across the tabs at the top we go to the columns tab columns are much like fields in a report so we determine what columns to display we rename them we can move them up or down we can delete them we can in fact add additional columns or fields to this report say for example the user's email could be quite useful and perhaps their manager this is going to be a course completion report we could sort ascending or descending by any given field or column as appropriate as well okay so this tab next one across the top is where we would determine which fields display in the basic or the advanced view for this particular report so other than the user's full name as we can see at the moment those additional fields will appear in the advanced view we go to the content tab here we control what content gets displayed we're going to show all records what does it match any of the criteria or all the criteria below and that criteria can be specified and that might relate to the user's organization or their position or what their organization was at time of course completion we can show by user and by completion date past, present or future okay so we can really granularize this report that will soon run and then lastly access this is where we determine who will be able to view the report so the default here is to restrict access so only certain users can view the report and we determine by role which users will be able to view this report so it might be just for the eyes of managers let's say and administrators we would save changes so the reports being built we can now view the report follow the link we can see here we've got along the lines of adiac results over three pages so we've got users full name, the course, organization position etc so that information is all there we might want to further granularize this report however because it's a course completion report and we've also got people who haven't completed we might not be interested in them so if we click the button top right that we shall advance we get the other fields that we can filter by so naturally we can filter by organization or position, name of the course, date and so forth but here we want to filter by completion status so let's specify completion status needs to be equal to completed so our 88 records found initially should be reduced down to one you can see there okay this can be exported to file such as a text file or to a spreadsheet format what we might also want to do is save this search for ease of future reference so I'll simply say search name is completed and we'll let other people view this report who have been granted access so that's saved if we go to my reports tab at the top naturally we will see the reports that we have access to we could come here at any stage and simply click the link to run them in real time or you can schedule the reports to run automatically and be emailed to you so we would select the report that's appropriate and schedule report so we want all of the data or just that subset what format and then how often do you want to be emailed to that report on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and you can also specify the day and time save your changes so very powerful feature there now questions just come through in terms of being able to integrate or map the structure from an internal system such as a HR system or an ERP type system with Totara LMS, yes very achievable in fact there's a new feature called Totara Sync just give you a quick look at it so long as you can push or export a file from your internal system in a CSV format you can potentially sync and map the data from that system to the learning management system so that could be for organizations position frameworks and even the user and probably in particular not just the user but the manage that they report to as part of a learning team so by way of example with the organization before we do the files directory you would specify the organization the folder where these files, CSV files will be put for synchronization so push from your internal system to Totara then we go into the settings so we look at organizational settings to give you some sort of an indication of formatting here so we've got the source is CSV format in terms of configuring that source file we're given an idea in terms of the structure that would be required for that file and we can actually map fields from that internal system to the LMS so they meet up you can also specify what to do with the internal data during synchronization when an item was removed from its original source do you keep or do you delete so hopefully that gives you some sort of indication I guess we could put the files in that location in an automated sense or alternatively you could come in and manually upload the files for synchronization at any point, like so for organization position or user so that's a pretty powerful feature that's as much as I had in mind from an administrative point of view I might show you a few things through the eyes so I'll log out as admin come back in as a manager let's face it we're all lifelong learners and a learning management system is no exception you could be an administrator or a manager responsible for the learning of others but you still need to take ownership of some of your own learning in a formal and structured sense so in this case the manager is logged in and they can see courses that they've been assigned and their status at this point in time on a little dashboard here across the top as well they've got an additional TOTARA's intelligent enough to recognize this user as a manager managing a team of learners so it serves up this my team tab so we go to it and you can see through the eyes of a manager the members of this particular team so it's kind of a I guess a snapshot page where you can see the team members links to their plans, profiles bookings and records and we can also see their last login courses started, completed and competencies achieved on one screen so if we click in to one of these learners we'll look at this learner here and there learning plan or plans so we can see we've got active plans plans can be initiated by the learner to contain courses and competencies and objectives and or they may be initiated by the manager administrator and then assigned to individuals or learners depending on their position or organization so the workflow could come from either end or both so if we look at one here let's see my learning plan 2013 it looks like a plan that may have been initiated by the learner and it was approved by this manager there's the overview we as a manager could include some thoughts which is the plan looks good and in fact we had approved it earlier let's do for completion at the end of this calendar year we follow the tabs across the top we can look at the courses competencies and objectives that constitute that plan and naturally we as a manager can adjust the status, the priority or the due dates and include comments were appropriate as well so that's learning plans so we can on the left hand side here we can also see a record of learning from any given learner as part of our team they're required learning and active learning so that's all broken up to return to the team member page we can also look at the learner's profile bookings into face to face or offline events things such as workshops or training events or seminars so we can set up these face to face events and if you like a booking or registration workflow within an online course so learners can sign up and or be approved by their managers and naturally we'll want to record attendance maybe export that to file or report on it so all of those things are possible and records so we can also look at a record of learning which you can see here for this particular learner is part of our team the courses they've been enrolled in some have due dates and we can see the progress the status is indicated there by the coloured bars that can be exported to file that view can also be filtered and if we don't want to look by course we can also look at the record of learning by competency objectives indoor programs return home I'll log out as manager and quickly come in let's see the system through the eyes of a learner so it will be a different view again naturally there will be no administrative functions here they don't have a my team tab at the top they're not a manager, they're simply a member of a learning team but again we've got I guess the progress bars indicating status toward completion of these courses we could go to the my learning tab at the top so we get this very functional dashboard looking page down the center section we've got an overview of the courses that we're enrolled in that are simply a click away and things such as assignments that have due dates and might perceive grades and feedback they're indicated there as well we can have tasks and alerts that are relevant to us individuals that's a very personalized page to relate specifically to this learner we've got other links down there you can see to record a learning bookings into face-to-face or offline events and development planner if this learner wanted to initiate an individual learning plan and have it approved by their manager so there's quite a lot going on at the top as well we can find courses we can keyword search or we can browse by course category or even by program we can request a course as well and lastly the calendar so this relates specifically to upcoming training events that may be promoted across your organization and all those that are of relevance to us and then use with the system I might pause the demonstration at that point in time and just see if there's any questions or comments that come through from the audience today before I wrap things up a question there in terms of cost well look Totara represents excellent return on investment relative to other commercial or proprietary type learning management systems on the market and if you're evaluating Totara and say Moodle for example and you like the functionality you've seen in this demonstration I think for a few extra dollars Totara gives you excellent bang for buck it really punches above its weight and you'd be surprised it's highly affordable it's available under a subscription based model so as long as your organization subscribes you get access to the software under a product maintenance agreement so it's very polished it's robust it's well maintained software fit for workplace learning and development and naturally the decision then becomes an easy one it's more a case of have you got the capability to fly solo as an organization and manage the deployment yourself or do you engage the expertise of a Totara partner such as my learning space and we're very well positioned to help organizations who may need assistance software installation and configuration and naturally hosting upgrades, backups training and support and so forth so a bit of food for thought Confucius was a great Chinese thinker and social philosopher back in about 500 BC and I really like this quote and I reckon in the context of 21st century education his ideas have withstood the test of time and I think this is what learning should be about should be our mantra for learning development and training in the workplace let me do an I understand so it's a very hands on experiential approach user centered there's some resources from today the software is very well documented incidentally we've got a demonstration site there if you are wish to evaluate the software for it and there's our contact details feel free to reach out to us at any point in time if you need a quote or you've got a question or you need further assistance to get up and running we have an excellent learning management system in your organization as I said we're well positioned in the Asia Pacific as a total partner and we'll be able to assist you with consultancy hosting, training and support so thank you for your time today I hope the session has been of benefit to you and all the best