Creating Courses

This is the name that is displayed on the top header of every page in your course and also in the course listings page. The name should be descriptive enough so learners can easily identify the course in which they are working, but it shouldn’t be too long. For example, use English400: Beowulf and not ENG400: Beowulf and the heroic poems of the ancient world.

Enter the institutional shorthand for your course. Many learners recognise Eng101 but not Introduction to Composition. The short name also appears in the navigation bar at the top of the page.

Your Totara administrator may have set up several course categories. For example; 'IT', 'Managing People', 'Health and Safety', etc.

Select from; e-learning, blended, or seminar. This is used to help searching in the course catalog but does not control what activities are available in the course page.

This setting determines the start of the first week for a course in weekly format. It also determines the earliest date that logs of course activities are available for. If the course is reset and the course start date changed, all dates in the course will be moved in relation to the new start date.

You can set an end date, although this will not remove users from the course. 

The summary appears in the course listings page. A good one-paragraph summary will help communicate the essence of your course to your learners.

Course summary files, such as images, are displayed in the list of courses together with the summary in the standard catalog.

Standard layout of the course page.

Use this to set the number of sections your course will have. If you need to change this later, you can. Increasing the number results in sections being added to the bottom of your course page; reducing the number results in sections being removed from the bottom of your course page, and any content in them hidden.

When you hide an upcoming topic section to prevent your learners from jumping ahead, you can choose to display the title as a collapsed section or simply hide the topic altogether. Displaying the collapsed sections gives your learners a road map of the upcoming topics or weeks, so it’s probably a good idea to leave this on the default setting.

Determines whether the whole course is displayed on one page or split over several pages.

This setting allows learners to view their activity history in your course. This is useful if you want learners to reflect on their level of participation.

Select the language for the course.

Use this setting to determine the number of course news items displayed on the course page.

This setting allows you to select whether learners can see the gradebook. If set to No, it doesn’t stop instructors from recording grades, but simply prevents the learners from seeing them.

Activity reports are available for each participant that show their activity in the course. As well as listings of their contributions, such as forum posts or assignment submissions, these reports also include access logs. This setting determines whether a learner can view their own activity reports via their profile page.

This setting limits the size of files you or your learners upload to the course. Your system administrator sets the maximum size for the system, but you can choose to make the limit smaller than the system maximum. You can also further limit the size of files that your learners upload as assignment submissions and for other activities.

If enabled, activity completion conditions may be set in the activity settings and/or course completion conditions may be set.

As soon as user is enrolled a course completion record for the user is created. 

The course completion record for the user marked as in progress when the user views the course rather than when the first course completion criteria is met.

Select the icon that will be displayed with the course.

Select the audience that will be enrolled in the course.

Select who is able to see the course. If Visible to enrolled users and members of the selected audiences is selected then it will be visible to all members of the assigned audiences. Users that are enrolled will be able to see it, not matter what visibility setting is selected.

Groups

Select the group settings for the course. Note that you can allow for group settings to be overridden at the activity level.

• No groups: There are no sub groups, everyone is part of one big community.
• Separate groups: Each group member can only see their own group, others are invisible.
• Visible groups: Each group member works in their own group, but can also see other groups.

Change the role name that is displayed - role permissions for the role remain the same.

Lists any custom course fields that have been created.

Course icon

Totara has a number of methods of managing course enrolments, called enrolment plugins. This setting allows you to choose an interactive enrolment plug-in, such as internal enrolment or PayPal. Your system may well use a non interactive enrolment plug-in, in which case this setting has no effect. We recommend you leave this setting as default and leave the choice of enrolment plug-ins to your system administrator. See Enrolment Plugins to learn more.

This setting determines whether a user can self-enrol in your course. You can also limit enrolments to a certain date range.

This setting specifies the number of days a learner is enroled in the course, starting from the day she enrols. If set, learners are automatically unenroled after the specified time has elapsed. This setting is useful for rolling courses without a specific start or end date.

If an enrolment duration has been specified, then this setting determines whether trainers receive email notification when a learner is about to be unenroled from the course.

If an enrolment duration has been specified, then this setting determines whether learners receive email notification when they are about to be unenroled from the course.

If an enrolment duration has been specified, then this setting determines the number of days notice given before learners are unenroled from the course.

Use this setting to control learner access to your course. You can make a course available or unavailable to learners without affecting your own access. This is a good way to hide courses that aren’t ready for public consumption or hide them at the end of the semester while you calculate your final grades.

A course enrolment key is a code each learner must enter in order to self- enrol in a course. The key prevents learners who aren’t in your class from accessing your Totara course. Create the key here and give it to your learners when you want them to enrol in your Totara course. They will need to use the key only once when they enrol.

You can choose to allow guests to access your course, either with an enrolment key or without it. Guests can only view your course and course materials  they can’t post to the forums, take quizzes, or submit assignments.