This work, "Totara Social; User guide for Site Administrators and Trainers", is a derivative of “Mahara Wiki” by Catalyst IT Ltd, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.
"Totara Social; User guide for Site Administrators and Trainers " is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 by Totara Learning Solutions Ltd
Totara Social is an enterprise social learning platform. Use it within your organisation to facilitate learning in an online social environment. There are many ways to do this through the various features including; sharing ideas, asking questions, connecting with others, collaborating in groups, and creating pages.
Facilitating learning
Totara Social is both flexible and scalable, meaning it can be used in many ways to achieve a wide range of organisational objectives. Some of the key ways it can improve learning are:
- Supporting more formal learning achieved via traditional training, allowing for peer-to-peer discussions and learning in an online social environment.
- As a tool to allow both your and your organisation’s knowledge to be recorded, organised, and found when needed.
- By helping to foster collaboration within and across your organisation.
User experience
Simple and intuitive to use, your user experience is largely driven by you, as Totara Social is customisable to suit you and your preferences. However, administration and content moderation can also be set by site-level and group-level administrators.
You can read more about the benefits of Totara Social on the main Totara website, where you will also find case studies of how it has been successfully implemented.
Get inspired
As mentioned above, Totara Social is a very flexible tool, but below you will find some example possibilities for inspiration.
Share and vote ideas
Within Totara Social you can share ideas and then vote on them, so that you can filter out the best/most popular ideas to focus your time and resources on them.
You could use the ideas feature to get suggestions for topics to cover in a learning session or perhaps you could collect ideas for a guest speaker at a company event. All the ideas can then be voted on to see the subject/ speaker that most people want to learn more about.
Team forums
Collaboration can be very important in both learning and working. The groups feature within Totara Social is a great way of facilitating this through forums (for discussion), shared files, and shared pages. For example, you could set up a group for each team in your organisation so that they can discuss projects (or courses) in the forums. Within forums there is a like button, so you can acknowledge a post and show support for it without having to type a response. They can also help keep discussions in a tidy thread and stop email inboxes from becoming overloaded.
Ask a question, get an answer
The questions feature allows you to ask questions and receive an answer to it from another user on the Totara Social site. As the question proposer you can then optionally choose to mark the best answer, so this appears at the top. There are many ways this could be applied to learning as it allows learners to ask questions, to answer each other questions, and gives trainers a chance to look at all the given answers so they can spot and correct any misunderstandings. Learners can then also browse the questions others have asked, to see if it answers a question they themselves have also been wondering about.
Project pages
Within Totara Social it is possible to make personal or groups pages, using elements from both inside the system (such as files and blogs) and external elements, including a range of multi-media content. Pages might be used to compile reports, collect and collate external resources, or to produce finished pages (such as a newsletter).
Using Totara Social
Sometimes there are different tools/functionality within Totara Social that doing seemingly similar things but in different ways, below we look at the difference between these so that you can chose the right functionality for your desired output.
Tenants vs groups
Within Totara Social it is possible to organise multiple users into both groups and tenants. So what's the difference between these two?
| Functionality | Description |
|---|---|
| Group | A group in Totara Social is an area you create where multiple users can collaborate and share resources. Groups have shared files, blogs, and pages. They also include forums for discussions, which can be responded to or linked. Read more in the Understanding and using groups section of this help documentation. |
| Tenant | A tenant in Totara Social is an administrative tool, where you can collect a number of users together so that they can have a different theme from the main site and some of the users can be given elevated (administration) permissions to manage users and setting for that tenant without affecting the rest of the Totara Social site for users outside of that tenant. |
There main difference as outlined above is that tenants are designed for administrators, they are administrative tools allowing you to manage users and the social environment, whereas groups are collaborative working space for users at any level.
Content ownership
The table below reviews content ownership in Totara Social, to explain if you create a page (or other content) in a certain location where the ownership sits.
| Content | Ownership | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Page | You (the individual/creator) | When you create a page via the My content area, you own that page and can revoke access to it at anytime. The exception to this is if you enable Allow copying, in which case the copied pages will be owned by the person who copied them. They will also get a copy of all the content on those pages. You can change this setting, but any previously copied pages will still exist and you will be unable to control their content. |
| Group page | Group (the group it was created in) | Even if you leave the group, the page created and any content you added to it will remain on the group page. If the group has Open membership then you may still be able to see content you shared, even after you have been removed from the group. However, you will be unable to edit or delete it. |
| File | You (the individual/creator) | You will own the file that you upload, however please note that if you choose to share it with others they may be able to download it and then they would have access to do with the file as they wish. |
| Group file | Group (the group it was created in) | Even if you leave the group, the file(s) you have uploaded will remain as part of that group. If the group has Open membership then you may still be able to see content you shared, even after you have been removed from the group. However, you will be unable to edit or delete it. |
| Blog | You (the individual/creator) | You will own the content of your blogs and any blog posts. However, it is important to note that if sharing of social networks is enabled you will not be able to retract the content through Totara Social. |
| Group blog | Group (the group it was created in) | Even if you leave the group, the blogs/blog posts you have created will remain as part of that group. If the group has Open membership then you may still be able to see content you shared, even after you have been removed from the group. However, you will be unable to edit or delete it. |
| Idea | You (the individual/creator) | You will own the ability to edit any idea you post (until it has been voted on). However, it is important to note that if sharing of social networks is enabled you will not be able to retract the content through Totara Social. |
| Question | You (the individual/creator) | With any question you post it is important to note that if sharing of social networks is enabled you will not be able to retract the content through Totara Social. |
| Forum post | Group (the group it was created in) | Even though no-one else can edit your post (except Group admins - but this will show as edited by them), once you leave or are removed from a group you will be unable to edit or delete any forums posts made to that group. They will continue to exist within the group after you've left. If the group has Open membership then you may still be able to see content you shared, even after you have been removed from the group. However, you will be unable to edit or delete it. |
| Status update | You (the individual/creator) | You will own the content of your status updates. However, it is important to note that if sharing of social networks is enabled you will not be able to retract the content through Totara Social. |
| Group status update | Group (the group it was created in) | Even if you leave the group, the status update(s) you have posted will remain as part of that group. You will be unable to edit them, although you might be able to see them if the group has Open membership. |
