View a transcript of this video

View a PDF version of this transcript

Notifications. What are they?

Notifications are ways to inform your users about something, through various channels. 

A notification can be sent as an email, site notifications within your Totara site, push notifications linked to the Totara mobile app, notifications in Microsoft Teams, or appear within the Alerts or Tasks block on your user’s dashboard.

You can choose one or more of these delivery channels for each notification you want to send.

So, we know what they are, but how is a notification triggered?

Well, notifications are tied to trigger events. 

Basically, you decide what needs to happen in the system (the event) for the notification to be sent (the trigger).

You can also decide to send your notification before or after the event has occurred. 

So, you can send a reminder a few days before a course is due for completion or send follow up information weeks after a program has been completed.

Notifications can be enabled in different contexts too. 

Site Administrators can set site-wide defaults that are sent each time an example of the event occurs.

This allows you to standardise your notifications, so users always receive the same notification for each course, or each performance activity, or each time they’re added to a new workspace.

But you can also edit this default or create entirely new notifications at lower contexts too. 

So, if your site has a site-wide course completion notification when you add a new course, you can decide whether to use that notification, edit it, or set up a brand new one just for that course. The choice is yours.

Notifications can be personalised too, using placeholders to add the right information for each user – such as their name, the course they have been enrolled in, or the user who has requested their feedback.

So, it’s a site-wide system, that provides a personalised user experience. Perfect!

So, to recap – notifications can be sent through a variety of different channels based on triggers that happen in the system, and can be site-wide or edited at lower levels.