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Totara 19 is here!
Totara V19 has just released, and with the release, it is now much easier to manage goals and personal development. The new Totara Perform features help employees and managers work together better. For example, Goal Tasks break big goals into smaller, actionable steps. Linked Courses connect learning directly to goals, helping people gain the necessary…
A tikanga-forward approach to onboarding success
When we bring new people into the team, we usually have three main goals: We want our new people to be engaged with the organisation, which includes being connected with their team. We want them to be able to contribute in their role as soon as possible. And we want to set them up for…
Mark Your Calendars: Totara 19 Arrives This Month!
Totara is releasing it’s latest version of Totara LMS, Version 19, in January 2025. We’re pretty excited about this release and the benefits it will bring. Totara 19 offers practical features that make learning management more straightforward and effective. The new Course Enrolment Approval workflows let organisations control who can access training with customisable approval…
We won the NZATD award for Best Online Learning Project!
We are over the moon to have won the NZATD Best Online Learning Project alongside Health NZ | Te Whatu Ora for the National Cervical Screening e-learning modules that we developed! This was very much a team effort, with close collaboration between Te Whatu Ora’s clinical experts and Synapsys learning designers. Te Whatu Ora…
New Client Top Ticket Items #2: To Customise or Not…
We have the privilege of working across a huge range of sectors and organisations. So, it’s interesting that we often find new clients asking the same questions. In this series of posts, we’ll cut across the most common challenges occupying people’s minds. Here’s another big one: Whether to customise or not to customise your LMS/LXP…. …
Exciting features of Totara v18
As a Totara Gold Partner, the Synapsys’ team is excited to work with the latest Totara v18! Among numerous new features, two stand out as particularly exciting for us! Firstly, the capability to duplicate learning programs significantly reduces administrative time. Whether you are a course administrator, a system administrator, or a course creator, you can…
Synapsys take on big L&D trends for 2024
TrainingIndustry.com have identified three big L&D trends for 2024. Here’s our take on them, and a couple of others you may want to consider as well. 1. AI, EI, and growth mindset take centre stage. It’s difficult to disagree with the idea that responding to AI, building emotional intelligence, and having a growth mindset (being…
Merry Christmas from the Synapsys Team
Kia Ora Synapsys Whānau! As we wrap up an awesome, albeit challenging year, the Synapsys NZ crew came together to reflect on the year and think about the road ahead. We had a great time discussing ways of strengthening our relationships with our partners and extending a welcome to new members of our Synapsys whānau….
Smart learning technology in action
With over 20,000 learners, The Career Academy is an internationally recognised online education provider who partners with industry to help learners advance their careers. At that scale, operational efficiency goes hand in hand with seamless, compelling learning experiences. As their Totara partner, our job is to ensure their learning platform achieves both goals – compelling…
Navigating AI Challenges in Workplace Learning – podcast
In this very interesting episode of the Learning While Working Podcast Lars Hyland and Matt Linaker from Totara discuss how to navigate the challenges of AI in workplace learning. Lars emphasised the idea that generating content at a faster pace with the help of AI tools might not be advantageous if there is no connection…
Engage and Collaborate: Miro’s Role in Online Workshops
As online workshops have become more common, an ongoing challenge has been how to engage learners in the sessions. How do you recreate the participation and collaboration that happens when people are learning face-to-face? Miro is a really useful tool for online facilitation, we’ve been using it in workshops for project managers. Miro is an…
How long does it take? – Navigating learning design timeframes
One of the first conversations we have with many of our clients starts like this: I’ve already done a full learning needs analysis and gathered all the content; Can you start building learning content for us? People seem quite surprised when we still want to go through a discovery process before giving a final answer…
Using Animation in E-Learning Design: Engage, Delight, and Educate Your Learners
At Synapsys, our Design Phase helps us to look at what formats will help your learners to succeed, based on the goals of your learning intervention and how you want your learners to feel about what you have to share with them. Bringing together the audience analysis with the options for interactions means the resulting…
Constraints, used properly, are the true drivers of innovation.
Constraints, used properly, are the true drivers of innovation. We always take the time early in the design process to establish a project’s real constraints and goals. Goals are great; they help us get clear on what we’re doing – they feel good. Constraints can be frustrating. They limit our thinking and sometimes mean exciting…
The Importance of User Testing
Have you ever thought how user testing can help learning designers improve their skills? We recently had an excellent experience that not only reinforced the importance of user testing, but also helped us understand learners’ needs better. Trust in the process enhances outcomes We were working on materials with Silver Fern Farms who have a…
Learning Objectives as a House Design Metaphor
The thing about learning objectives is that they can be compared to designing a house. Just as you need to know the specific requirements of a person when building a house, you also need to understand the needs of learners when defining learning objectives. For instance, consider a family with three children, who are…
Achieving Competency Excellence: Public Trust’s upgrade of TrustEd with Totara TXP16!
It’s one thing to create a competency framework for your organisation, but many find the process of effectively measuring staff achievement against it a much bigger challenge. Key to achieving this is a technology platform that makes the connection between frameworks, development pathways, and learning opportunities. Public Trust‘s recent upgrade of their TrustEd competency…
RNZCGP enhances learning experience for registrars with Totara TXP16
The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (RNZCGP) recently upgraded their Totara TXP to boost their capability to deliver learning programmes to their registrars in a more accessible, engaging, and fulfilling way. The College uses the Totara platform to deliver General Practice Education Programme and Rural Hospital Medicine Training Programme for doctors who would…
The limits of visual working memory and how we apply it in learning design
We all know that our ability to keep multiple things in our mind is limited. Four things is a common benchmark, and the article “When four is not four, but rather two plus two” suggests it might actually be two on each side of our brain. And yet we see so many learning experiences ignoring…
Need to get out of a Pickle?
Do you remember the super fun and engaging microlearning project we did with WorkSafe New Zealand and AKQA called “Pickled”? It was a series of learning games that made it to the finals of the Mobile Experience category at The Webby Awards, which received over 13,500 submissions from over 70 countries. That’s right, Pickled was such a hit! Guess what?…
Supporting Farmlands Co-operative with their transformation
Farmlands Co-operative is taking their employees’ development and growth to the next level with a whole new learning experience to be rolled out this year, and it starts with Totara 17. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be partnering with them and support their vision to become reality as they roll out new functionality this…
Articulate’s new microlearning option in Rise 360!
We are really happy to see Articulate‘s new microlearning option in Rise 360! Our learning designers love its simplicity. The one-click access to #learning activities allows learners to quickly get into the learning instead of negotiating multiple layers of navigation. This approach is particularly valuable for busy professionals who want to maximise their time. Whether you’re on…
Z Energy responds to new supply chain opportunities
How do you measure learning experience going forward? That was the big question for Julie Fitzgerald from Z Energy when partnering again with Synapsys in 2022 – this time to help develop a company-wide learning and training platform with a focus on understanding supply chain models. Our Managing Director, Phil, recently sat down with Julie…
Gamification in Learning: Partnering with Z Energy
Z Energy is one of New Zealand’s largest fuel distributors, and a long-term partner of Synapsys. Z Energy first engaged Synapsys’ services when Z took over the company from Shell, and were responsible for developing a learning and training platform for pilot Z Energy sites around the country. Having now established themselves fully –…
Synapsys on partnering with DIA: NZLPP Project
“This programme is an exemplar for Synapsys in how genuine partnerships with our clients can contribute to significant positive impact across a sector in challenging times.” The Department of Internal Affairs (“DIA”) is New Zealand’s public service department, responsible for issuing documents like passports, citizenship grants, registering births and deaths, and more. They also advise…
Raising-the-bar on accessibility
We are excited to announce we are taking home an Initiative award for Accessibility at the 2021 NZATD Learning and Development Awards. The award acknowledges work that creates accessible learning and encourages best practice. We are receiving this award for the online module Demystifying Procurement, which we developed and built in collaboration with MBIE. The…
Consolidate your systems for a streamlined, integrated experience.
Picture the scene: you’re jumping online to complete a quick training module. You sign in to your emails to double check which course your manager recommended. You then log out, and log into your learning management system to take the course. After the course, you still have questions, so you email a colleague to ask…
Shining with Rise
In the last few months, we’ve worked with several clients
to make e-learning modules in Articulate Rise, where previously we would have
used Storyline.
Right now seems a good moment to look back and think about what made Rise the best solution for these projects, how to get the most from it, and what pitfalls exist for the unwary.
LTIG – 11th June 2019 – Christchurch Event
We’ve covered some interesting topics at the Learning Technology Interest Group over the last few sessions like Learning Design and Learning Experience Design. Few are more topical than microlearning though, and for our next session we’ll be looking at how ‘badging’ and micro-credentials tie in with bite-sized learning. Recently we published a piece on Practical…