Getting users onto courses is a two-step process. Firstly, a user needs to have a user account created in Moodle--the authentication step. Next, they need to be given access to a course through course enrolment. Both of these steps are supported--and can be enhanced--by plugins. Let's start by looking at authentication.

Log in to your development Moodle as an administrator and, from the Site administration menu, slide down to Plugins, then Authentication, and then click on Manage authentication:

The Manage authentication page lists the available authentication plugins (together with general configuration settings further down the page):

Check out the Moodle docs for details of the authentication...

Moodle courses are where learning takes place, and in order to ensure Moodle is as flexible a learning tool as possible, the Moodle platform has been designed to allow developers to provide as much course design flexibility as possible through the plugin system. We start this section by investigating how plugins might be used to alter the standard Moodle course layout.

Moodle comes supplied with four standard course layouts:

• Weekly
• Topics
• Social
• Single activity

The course format is specified from the Course format page:

For example, setting a course to a Topics format containing five sections will configure a course to display three columns: a central column where teaching interactions can...

In this section, we consider the types of interaction that an instructional designer (ID) might want the learner to engage in. Developing new learner interactions is described in much more detail in Chapter 5, Creative Teaching - Developing Custom Resources and Activities. In the meantime, let us look at the types of interaction Moodle supports out of the box and how to select the correct type of interaction based on the requirements presented to us by the ID.

Moodle supports two basic types of learner interaction: resources and activities. Let's start by looking at resources.

A Moodle resource plugin transmits information to the learner--it expects nothing in return. A resource plugin expects...

Once students have been introduced onto the platform and have started to learn, we need to be able to report on, among other things, the activities students have been undertaking. Luckily, Moodle also takes a modular approach to report development. Both course and site administrator report scripts are to be found in the report folder:

Take a look in the documentation at https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Reports for details on the general structure of reports. Whenever you are querying the database, it is vital to remember the following:

• Use the data manipulation API (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Data_manipulation_API), accessible through the global $DB object.
• Don't overload the database with complex queries.

We will be learning how to create custom reports in Chapter 9, Moodle Analytics.

Each plugin can be provided with its own /styles.css script to customise that plugin's look and feel. Over and above that, Moodle provides a flexible plugin-based theming framework--check out the Moodle directory at https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Themes. A new Moodle theme is possibly one of the more complicated plugin types you might need to develop. Go to Eclipse and navigate the PHP Explorer to the theme folder:

The trick to developing a new Moodle theme is to take a pre-existing theme and modify it to your requirements. Take a look in the Moodle plugins directory (https://moodle.org/plugins/browse.php?list=category&id=3) for third-party themes.

Let's take a look at the general structure of a Moodle theme plugin. In Eclipse, open the theme/canvas folder:

In the previous screenshot, you will see two folders that have been expanded: layout and style...