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)

A high-level overview of core Moodle concepts

Let’s look at the following diagram to give you an overview of courses, users, and roles. It shows how central the three concepts are and how other features are related to them. Again, all their intricacies will be dealt with in due course, so for now, just start getting familiar with some Moodle terminology.

Figure 3.1 – Core Moodle concepts

Let’s start at the bottom left and cycle through the pyramid in a roughly clockwise fashion. Users have to go through an Authentication process to get access to Moodle. They then have to go through the Enrolments step to participate in Courses, which themselves are organized into Categories. Groups & Cohorts are different ways to group users at course level or site-wide, respectively. Users are granted Roles, in particular, Contexts, which are ring-fenced Moodle areas; the scope of the role is specified by configuring Permissions.

The diagram also...