Kineo Totara and Moodle User Group - First Event

On an unusually sunny day in July (for London at least), the first Kineo Totara/Moodle User Group took place at BMA House in London.

Over 50 Kineo LMS clients came together to listen to the planned new Totara developments, hear case study stories and share experiences.

Here’s a write up of what we talked about.

Totara – what’s coming up?

Richard Wyles, CEO of Totara, started by outlining some of the developments in the pipeline for Totara including:

• Open badges, an innovative new project supported by the Mozilla Foundation
• Totara Social, an extended version of Mahara for the corporate enterprise to manage and promote social learning
• Totara Cloud, a cost-effective cloud based offering of Totara for businesses with less than 5,000 staff

There was a quick run through of Totara 2.2 features and a demo of the new features which will be included in the 2.3 release later this year. The 2.3 release includes extended classroom management functionality and a very powerful audience management feature. The audience management feature allows businesses to create very specific audiences using dynamic rules and to allocate content to this audience either just making learning visible or enrolling the audience in courses.

A very wide range of rules can be set, for example:

• Joined in the last 60 days
• In a specific job role
• In a department or location
• Reports to a manager
• Completed a specific course in last 3 months
• Has not yet completed a specific course

These rules can be combined to create a dynamic cohort and manage the learning made available to that cohort.

A Case for Discussion

The user group also heard case studies from Compass, The Co-operative, Royal Yachting Association and Grosvenor on their implementations of Moodle and Totara with Kineo.

Following the presentations the audience split into a number of groups to discuss areas of interest. For example, there were lively groups discussing the new specification for performance management and the new Totara Social and Badges projects.

The discussions are continuing in Kineo’s LinkedIn User Group for Kineo’s Totara and Moodle clients. If you're an existing client, you can join the group here.

And don't forget to join the wider discussion in our eLearning Professionals group too - over 5,000 of your fellow e-learning afictionados are already there!

You can also view photos of the day in the latest Kineo Facebook Photo Album.