Exploring Moodle users

Each user in Moodle is represented as a user account, which contains information about the person’s profile. In the following subsections, we will briefly explain the difference between user authentication and enrolment before creating your first user account(s) and enroling these users in a course.

Authentication and enrolment

Before we start, it is vital to understand the difference between authentication and enrolment. Users must be authenticated to log in to Moodle, and authentication grants your users access to the system through a login where a username and password must be given. Moodle supports a significant number of authentication mechanisms, such as MS-AD, LDAP, and SAML. For now, let’s work with so-called manual authentication to simplify overall user management.

Enrolment happens at a course level. However, a user must be authenticated on the system before enrolment on a course can take place. The house and key analogy might...