Moodle is the world's most widely used open source course management system and is used in over 220 countries, with over 53,000 registered sites. It is built by the Moodle project, which is coordinated by Moodle HQ in Perth, Australia, and supported by over 60 Moodle Partners worldwide.
If you want to deploy Moodle yourself without having to learn everything about the platform and just focus on the key steps, then this book is for you.
The book takes a look at the key aspects of a Moodle setup and configuration. It takes you through the whole project process, from the installation and setup of the site, user account setup and configuration, site structure configuration and site design. It then deals with some key concepts, including user role management, custom plugins, and other essential administrative tasks, such as end of year course rollover.
This book is introduction for Moodle administrators and focuses on the most important options on each settings page, rather than dealing with every single possibility.
Chapter 1, Moodle in a Nutshell, deals with a short background of Moodle. We introduce the architectural structure of Moodle and how the different parts work together. We go through the steps of installing Moodle on a Linux server and also how to perform ongoing upgrades.
Chapter 2, Managing User Accounts and Authentication, deals with the essential areas of user account management that every administrator will have to deal with, including adding a user, bulk adding users, and some of the authentication options.
Chapter 3, Managing Categories and Courses, focuses on building out the site structure of the Moodle site, setting up courses, and also organizing them into categories and sub-categories.
Chapter 4, Managing Site Appearance, examines the ways in which you can enhance the appearance of your Moodle site, extending it beyond the default setup using the existing functionality of Moodle and the available themes.
Chapter 5, Role Management, deals with roles and how they relate to enrolling users onto courses. We look at how you can enhance and extend the permissions of the users, by means of managing their role permissions.
Chapter 6, Managing Site Plugins, explores the options available to enhance the functionality of your Moodle site, extending it beyond the default open source coding code and deals with the essential areas of site plugin management that every administrator may have to deal with.
Chapter 7, End of Year Course Rollover, tackles the end of year course rollover management that every administrator will have to deal with. We look at the issues involved in a course rollover, including course backup, restore, and course reset.
Chapter 8, Miscellaneous Admin Tasks, deals with the remaining essential administrative tasks not covered in the preceding chapters that many administrators will have to deal with, including monitoring Moodle usage, performance testing, security, and resilience.
You will need the following to work with Moodle:
A text editor
An up-to-date web browser
An SSH client
Access to a Linux server for installation
If you are an experienced system administrator and know how to manage servers and set up web environments but now want to explore Moodle, this book is perfect for you. You'll get to grips with the basics and quickly learn how to manage Moodle, focusing on essential tasks. Having prior knowledge of virtual learning environments will be beneficial but is not mandatory to make the most of this book.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> php automated_backups.php from the /moodle/admin/cli
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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