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

Web services in Moodle


First of all, you have to activate web services, which can be accessed by navigating to Advanced features | Enable web services. Second, you have to enable the Web services authentication plugin (Plugins | Authentication | Manage authentication). Once this has been done, go to Plugins | Web services | Overview, which acts as a dashboard to set up Moodle web services.

Tip

A word of warning: Enabling web services comes with a potential security risk as you are granting access to Moodle to outside users and systems. The mantra should always be to open up as few services and functions as possible.

Moodle supports three ways of how external entities can connect via web services:

  • Enable web services for mobile devices (we will be dealing with this later)

  • Allow an external systems to control Moodle

  • Users as clients with token

Two checklists are shown, one for each approach. The following screenshot shows the list for external systems—the one for token-based clients is, with...