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

Course categories


The role of the Moodle administrator is to manage categories and courses. It is possible to delegate these tasks to non-administrators, and we will deal with this in Chapter 6, Managing Permissions – Roles and Capabilities. Here, let's start with an overview of course categories.

Course categories – an overview

Categories act as containers for courses. They can have subcategories, which can have sub-subcategories, and so on. The arrangement is similar to that of files and folders on a disk drive, where courses are like files and categories are like folders. This hierarchical structure can be visualized as follows:

A course always belongs to a single category. It cannot belong to multiple categories and also cannot be without a category. There is one exception to this rule, namely, the front page (course id = 1). Internally, the front page is treated as a course that neither belongs to a category, nor can be deleted.

There are different ways of organizing course and category...