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...