Exploring Moodle users
Each user in Moodle is represented as a user account, which contains information about the person's profile.
Authentication and enrollment
Before we start, it is vital to understand the difference between authentication and enrollment. Users have to be authenticated in order to log in to Moodle. Authentication grants your users access to the system through a login where a username and password have to be given. Moodle supports a significant number of authentication mechanisms, such as MS-AD, LDAP, and SAML. For now, let's work with so-called manual authentication to simplify the overall user management.
Enrollment happens at a course level. However, a user has to be authenticated to the system before enrollment on a course can take place. The house and key analogy might help: you need a key (authentication) to the house (Moodle), and you then need a separate key (enrollment) for each room (course).
So, a typical workflow is as follows (there...