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)

Configuring user authentication

Authentication is the process of getting access to a system. 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 staff, and OAuth2 for students, but it wishes to manage part-time users locally.

In the second half of this chapter, we will explore user authentication and the overall management of authentication plugins before covering common authentication settings. Then, we will deal with all authentication methods, which have been grouped into four categories: internal, external, provider, and system.

Exploring user authentication

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