Chapter 13
Administering Moodle Courses
In This Chapter
- Administering a Moodle site
- Setting up courses
- Setting up different types of user accounts
- Changing the look and feel of the Moodle site and individual courses
- Adding permissions to user accounts
- Using Moodle module filters and security
Your Moodle installation comes complete with default settings that enable you to get your courses up and running without too many system tweaks. You have many options for customizations, performance, and enabling or restricting various module filters. Many of the administrative options are located and accessible by Teacher roles from the course Administration block, as discussed elsewhere in the book. I also make frequent references throughout the book to administrative permissions and the Site Administration block located on the site front page.
In this chapter, I introduce most of the administrative functions that enable Moodle to run smoothly. I also explain, in more detail, several functions that you need to understand. Moodle has too many settings for me to cover all of them in this chapter, and most often, many settings are taken care of by the system administrator or by IT support staff members who are given the task of looking after Moodle. It may be that you end up wearing multiple hats: site administrator, course creator, and teacher. If this is the case, you need to pay special attention to this chapter. If you have IT support in your organization, it's useful for you to know what is in here so that if your system administrator is new to Moodle, you can inform him that there are ways you can get what you need with few tweaks. Believe it or not, often IT staff are given the job to support new software without any prior experience — that's why they require mass quantities of caffeinated beverages and walk around blurry eyed.
The structure of this chapter follows the categories listed in the Moodle Site Administration block, shown in Figure 13-1. This structure is also followed by the help files at Moodle.org. Each item in the Site Administration block is a link that takes you to the particular section or displays more subsections. Note: You need to have an administrator user account or administrative privileges in order to be able to view the Site Administration block.
Figure 13-1: The Site Admini-stration block.
This chapter touches only the surface of information for the IT administrator, so if you need additional information on a particular setting, click the Moodle Docs for This Page link located at the bottom of the page. This link takes you to the Moodle documents written and updated by Moodle.org developers.