Building Recurring Courses in Totara Learn

Whether your training programs require regulatory compliance or certifications that need to be renewed on a regular basis, the Learning Management System (LMS) helps to simplify and automate rolling out recurring courses. Recurring courses are commonly used to either copy a new set of users into a mandated course or re-enroll users regularly. Using Totara Learn for your organization’s learning solution, building recurring courses for specific teams or departments can be rolled out and managed easily. Learn how in this blog post.

Building a Recurring Course in Totara: Certifications or Programs

In Totara, duplicating a course can be done using a similar backup and restore process as Moodle™. If you are looking to reuse a course for a brand new set of learners, backing up the course and restoring it would be the way to do accomplish that goal. However, if you want to have the course recur to the same users, there are two methods: certifications or programs.

Using Certifications

Certifications in Totara are sets of courses that can be configured to repeat at set intervals. The Totara system takes care of resetting the courses for the user as well as notifying them that it is time to retake the certification. To set up a certification, you must first create a new certification and give it a name, description, ID and other information. Audience visibility can be set on the creation page as well so that only certain audiences will be able to find the certification in the course catalog. After creating the certification, go to the content tab to add one or more sets of courses to the original certification path. This path is the one that learners take to get their initial certification. In the re-certification section, admins can define a different path or choose to use the same courses.

Using a Program

Using the program feature in Totara, administrators can add a single recurring course. The course will create a copy of itself at set intervals so that users can take it again. After creating a program, admins can navigate to the Content tab and choose Recurring course from the “Add a new” menu and then click on the Add menu. The admin can then navigate to the course to be added and click on it to add.

After choosing the course, there will be some settings to adjust such as the time frame for the course to repeat and the amount of time before the course is due to create it.

Either Method

With either of these methods, admins can set up notifications to automatically notify users when it is time to repeat the content. Being able to easily build recurring courses and automate enrollment and reminders saves your organization the effort of manually reaching out to each learner to prepare for their next certification. Also, these programs or certifications can be assigned to individuals, audiences, organizations or positions depending on how the users are set up in Totara. Reports that track where learners are in these learning paths can also be constructed using the Totara Report Builder. Learn more about Totara tools and functionality in our Comprehensive Totara LMS Guide.

To learn more about Moodle™ and Totara tips and functionality, explore the other resources on our blog. Or, request an individual demonstration to see an overview of our fully-managed Moodle™ and Totara solutions below.