What this book covers

Moodle has grown into a mature, sophisticated, and complex software system. As a result, Moodle Administration covers a wide range of topics. A fun way to demonstrate the various subjects is in the form of a tube/subway/metro/ underground map (under the Creative Commons license by Synergy Learning):

Chapter 1, Moodle Installation, tells you about the most suitable Moodle setup for your organization, including software and hardware requirements. You will learn how to install Moodle in three environments, namely, LAMP/Unix, Windows, and Mac OS, before Moodle updates options are covered in detail. Throughout the chapter, you will also learn how to perform some of the described operations using the Moodle Command-line Interface (CLI), Git, and Moodle Shell (Moosh).

Chapter 2, The Moodle System, covers the building blocks of the learning platform. First, we cover the Moodle architecture, that is, the main Moodle components and where its data and code is stored. We then provide you with the skills to find your way a round in Moodle via its intuitive user and administration interface. Finally, we deal with the management of files, which includes Moodle's standard file management, web host file management, and file management via the file system repository.

Chapter 3, Courses, Users, and Roles, gives you an overview of Moodle courses, users, and roles. It covers the basics of the three key concepts and demonstrates how the three core elements are inherently intertwined.

Chapter 4, Course Management, shows you how to set up new courses (also in bulk) and organize them in categories. The remainder of the chapter deals with an array of enrolment options, covering Moodle's internal enrolment (manual, self, and guest), cohort enrolment and synchronization, database-driven enrolment, for instance, via LDAP, meta courses, and payment-driven enrolments.

Chapter 5, User Management, explains how to manage users on your system. We first cover what user profiles look like and how they can be extended before presenting (manual and bulk) standard user actions. We then explain how to add users to Moodle manually, that is, one-by-one, and via batch upload before dealing with cohorts. Then, you will learn about a plethora of authentication mechanisms that Moodle equips us with. Finally, we discuss the best practices of user naming schemes.

Chapter 6, Managing Permissions – Roles and Capabilities, guides you through permission management. It applies roles and capabilities to users in different contexts. We will cover the assignment of roles, modification of existing roles, and creation of new roles before we deal with any administrative role-related settings.

Chapter 7, Moodle Look and Feel, tells you how to adapt your Moodle system to bring it in line with the corporate branding of your organization. We will cover the customization of the front page, basic creation of Moodle themes, and support for mobile devices via responsive themes. You will also learn how to configure the Moodle editor and support users with accessibility requirements.

Chapter 8, Moodle Plugins, explains in detail how to extend your Moodle system via third-party add-ons. You will be able to distinguish between good add-ons and not-so-good add-ons before we cover extensions that are popular with other users. We will then cover how to install, configure, and uninstall third-party add-ons. Plugins that are covered are activities, blocks and filters, repositories, portfolios, text editors, licenses, question types and behaviors, plagiarism prevention, licenses, and availability restrictions.

Chapter 9, Moodle Configuration, deals with the educational and technical configuration of your Moodle system. Pedagogical topics that are covered are badges, collaboration (blogs, comments and tags), LTI, localization, grades and gradebook settings, and a number of miscellaneous parameters. Technical subjects that are dealt with include synchronous communication (instant messaging and video conferencing), asynchronous communication (inbound and messaging as well as RSS feeds), and a number of experimental settings.

Chapter 10, Moodle Logging and Reporting, equips you with the tools that you require in order to interpret and analyze the vast amount of usage data that Moodle is collecting. You will learn about the logging framework and monitoring facilities provided by Moodle that include activity reporting, user tracking, and some basic statistics. Then, we will take a look at third-party tools that cover learning analytics, report generation, web log analyzers, and live data trackers such as Google Analytics and Piwik.

Chapter 11, Moodle Security and Privacy, focuses on ensuring that the data in your Moodle system is protected from any misuse. You will learn about security notifications, user security, data and content security, and system security. We will conclude the chapter with information on privacy and data protection concerns.

Chapter 12, Moodle Performance and Optimization, makes sure that your Moodle system runs to its full potential. We will cover configuring, monitoring, and fine-tuning your virtual learning environment for maximum speed. You will learn how to optimize Moodle content before we focus on system parameters, namely, caching via the Moodle Universal Cache (MUC), session handling, cron management, scheduled tasks, module settings, and miscellaneous settings. We also present some basic performance profiling and monitoring tools.

Chapter 13, Backup and Restore, focuses on ensuring that your data would not be lost in the event of a disaster. We will cover course backups, site backups, system backups, and restoring data from the taken data archives.

Chapter 14, Moodle Admin Tools, covers Moodle admin tools that assist you with certain specific administrative tasks. These include web-based helpers such as upgrade and database tools as well as CLI scripts. We will also be looking at some add-ons, especially the powerful Moodle Shell, Moosh.

Chapter 15, Moodle Integration, looks at ways to integrate Moodle with other systems via web services. We will provide information about the basic concepts of Moodle web services before you learn how to set up external systems and users controlling Moodle. This also covers the support for the official mobile app.

Chapter 16, Moodle Networking, tells you how to connect disparate Moodle and Totara systems either in a peer-to-peer setup or via a Moodle hub. You will also be able to apply the learned networking techniques to connect the popular open source e-portfolio system, Mahara, and the social learning tool, Totara Social, to Moodle. We will further show you how to connect to Moodle.net and set up your own community hub.

Appendix, Configuration Settings, provides you with a list of parameters that can be modified in Moodle's configuration file and the impact that each of these values will have. The areas covered are Administration Settings and System Settings.