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

User authentication


Now that you know everything about users and the information that is stored about them, let's look at how to authenticate them with Moodle. So far, we have only dealt with manual accounts, which are activated by default after the installation of Moodle.

Moodle supports a significant number of authentication types. Furthermore, Moodle supports multi-authentication, that is, concurrent authentication from different authentication sources. For example, your organization might use an LDAP server containing user information for all your full-time students and staff, but it wishes to manage part-time users manually.

Remember the basic authentication workflow we looked at in Chapter 3, Courses, Users, and Roles. Now, we can have a look at a more complete picture, as shown in the following diagram:

Let's start at the top where the user enters their user credentials, that is, username and password. Bear in mind that this could take place automatically, for example, in a single sign...