WELLINGTON, New Zealand, April 15, 2014 – Totara Learning Solutions announced a significant change to its open source distribution strategy this week — offering Totara Seedlings, an unsupported version of the popular software. 

Since its launch in 2011, TotaraLMS has been offered as a distribution of the popular education platform, Moodle. For a low-cost subscription fee, customers receive the benefit of code support and maintenance, security updates, error correction, patch updates and a continuing stream of new innovations supported by Totara Learning Solutions.

Richard Wyles, Totara’s chief executive, said that he has always seen his company as an extension of the Moodle community.

“We believe Seedlings is the most effective way to do that, compared to our previous direct approach such as our work on open badges for Moodle,” he said. “It might not have been clear just how much we do in the open source realm.”

He added that Seedlings is a great way for software developers to get to know the company and engage in its project, and for potential customers to evaluate the features including upcoming versions.

“We don’t believe in dumbing down our community version to bait customers into buying our enterprise edition,” he said. “Seedlings is the beta version containing our very latest innovations.”

As the name implies, Totara Seedlings contains young, even experimental code, so it’s not suitable for use in a production setting, Wyles added.

TotaraLMS 2.6 includes a wide range of new features including a powerful enhancement to the learner catalog system enabling organizations to define how training opportunities are presented.

About Totara

Totara is a distribution of Moodle designed specifically for the corporate sector.

Moodle was designed for the education sector and has become the leading platform in education. At Totara we have focused on the requirements of the corporate sector and extended Moodle’s wide range of functionality to meet the specific requirements of corporates.

The key additional features in Totara include:

• competency structure to which you can link roles and learning resources and courses
• management hierarchy allowing managers to review and manage their team’s learning
• individual development plans to manage staff performance and development
• full classroom management and self-service
• sophisticated reporting and a dashboard for management reporting
• enhanced theme branding to ensure you can fully reflect any brand