Book Image

Moodle 4 Administration - Fourth Edition

By : Alex Büchner
Book Image

Moodle 4 Administration - Fourth Edition

By: Alex Büchner

Overview of this book

This updated fourth edition of the classic Moodle Administration guide has been written from the ground up and covers all the new Moodle features in great breadth and depth. The topics have also been augmented with professional diagrams, illustrations, and checklists. The book starts by covering basic tasks such as how to set up and configure Moodle and perform day-to-day administration activities. You’ll then progress to more advanced topics that show you how to customize and extend Moodle, manage authentication and enrolments, and work with roles and capabilities. Next, you'll learn how to configure pedagogical and technical Moodle plugins and ensure your LMS complies with data protection regulations. Then, you will learn how to tighten Moodle’s security, improve its performance, and configure backup and restore procedures. Finally, you'll gain insights on how to compile custom reports, configure learning analytics, enable mobile learning, integrate Moodle via web services, and support different types of multi-tenancy. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to set up an efficient, fully fledged, and secure Moodle system.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Exploring Moodle users

Each user in Moodle is represented as a user account, which contains information about the person’s profile. In the following subsections, we will briefly explain the difference between user authentication and enrolment before creating your first user account(s) and enroling these users in a course.

Authentication and enrolment

Before we start, it is vital to understand the difference between authentication and enrolment. Users must be authenticated to log in to Moodle, and authentication grants your users access to the system through a login where a username and password must 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 overall user management.

Enrolment happens at a course level. However, a user must be authenticated on the system before enrolment on a course can take place. The house and key analogy might...