Book Image

Moodle 3 Administration - Third Edition

By : Alex Büchner
Book Image

Moodle 3 Administration - Third Edition

By: Alex Büchner

Overview of this book

Moodle is the de facto standard for open source learning platforms. However, setting up and managing a learning environment can be a complex task since it covers a wide range of technical, organizational, and pedagogical topics. This ranges from basic user and course management, to configuring plugins and design elements, all the way to system settings, performance optimization, events frameworks, and so on. This book concentrates on basic tasks such as how to set up and configure Moodle and how to perform day-to-day administration activities, and progresses on to more advanced topics that show you how to customize and extend Moodle, manage courses, cohorts, and users, and how to work with roles and capabilities. You’ll learn to configure Moodle plugins and ensure your VLE conforms to pedagogical and technical requirements in your organization. You’ll then learn how to integrate the VLE via web services and network it with other sites, including Mahara, and extend your system via plugins and LTI. By the end of this book, you will be able to set up an efficient, fully fledged, and secure Moodle system.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Moodle 3 Administration Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

An overview of performance and optimization


Web applications, in general, and Moodle, in particular, have very distinct application layers consisting of an operating system, web server, database server, and an application that's developed in a programming language. Each layer has its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to optimization. We will mainly focus on the application layer, which is the focus of this book.

The following areas are not dealt with in any detail in the following pages, and it is necessary to refer to the respective documentation with regard to performance and optimization issues:

  • Operating system performance: The choice of operating system and its configuration will have a major impact on how Moodle performs. In principle, Linux or any other Unix derivative performs better than any other operating system. PHP applications, such as Moodle, run significantly slower in a Windows environment than on Linux. Some aspects of this have been covered in Chapter 1, Moodle Installation...