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MOODLE MANUAL

Compiled by HowToMoodle | Moodle Version 2.7JUST ASK US

SiteAdministration

Key: Teacher view Student view Admin setting Tip

1Compiled by www.HowToMoodle.com

Contents

NEW USER ACCOUNTS 3

Single Accounts 3

User Profile Fields 5

Add New Users – Bulk Upload 9

ENROLMENT METHODS 15

Manual enrolment 15

Self-enrolment 18

Guest access 24

Cohort sync 26

Course meta link 27

PayPal 30

Email-based self-registration 33

LANGUAGE 37

Language packs 37

Language customisation 38

Language settings 41

ROLES AND PERMISSIONS 43

Context and roles 43

Standard roles 50

FRONT PAGE 58

Layout: Central area, Courses or Categories? 60

Front page FAQs 62

My Home 63

Default home page 63

THEMES 65

Theme selector 65

Themes FAQs 70

BULK COURSE CREATION 71

Creating the text file 72

BACKUP AND RESTORE A COURSE 76

Some uses of Backup and Restore 76

Course Backup 76

Course Restore 80

Key: Teacher view Student view Admin setting Tip2


New user accountsSINGLE ACCOUNTS

An administrator or manager (or any other user with the capability moodle/user:create) can create new user accounts in:

Settings > Site administration > Users > Accounts > Add a new user.

(To add users in bulk, see Bulk Upload users.)

General

UsernameThe user will use this username to log in to the Moodle instance. It needs to be unique. This may be changed. A username can only contain lowercase alphabetical letters, numbers, hyphen ‘-’, underscore ‘_’, period ‘.’, or the character ‘@’ - unless you enable ‘Allow extended characters in usernames’ ( Site Administration > Security > Site Policies)

Authentication methodThis specifies how Moodle will check whether the user’s specified password is correct.

Accounts created by an administrator use the Manual Accounts method. Accounts created by users, using the email sign-up method, use the E-mail based self-registration method.

Suspended accountSuspended user accounts cannot log in or use web services, and any outgoing messages are discarded.

Generate password and notify userMoodle will generate a temporary password and email the user with instructions on how to log in and change it - see next page.


Here is an example of a ‘new user email message’.

The message may be changed in Site administration > Administration > Language > Language customisation.

Select ‘moodle.php’ and the string identifier newusernewpasswordtext. Enter your preferred message in the Local customisation box, and clcik Save changes to the language pack.

PasswordThis is the user’s password. It is subject to the password policy in Site policies. A user can change their password by the Settings block > My Profile settings > Change password link.

First NameThe user’s first name is displayed along with the last name in messages, forum posts, participants list, reports and anywhere where something about the user is shows on the page.

SurnameThe user’s surname is displayed along with the first name in messages, forum posts, participants list, reports and anywhere where something about the user is shows on the page.

Email addressPassword reset notices, forum digests and other messages are sent to this email address from the Moodle site.


USER PROFILE FIELDS

Email displayThis setting controls who can see the user’s email address.

Email formatThis setting can be used such that Moodle will send text-only emails to the user.

Email digest typeThis setting set whether the user will receive an email for each new forum post in subscribed forums, or if new posts should be sent once per day in a digest, and which type of digest.

• No digest (one receives individual emails),

• Complete (a single digest daily) or

• Subjects (a single digest daily with only the post topics included).

Forum auto-subscribeIf a user subscribes to a forum, new posts will be sent in the digest as specified. This setting sets whether a user is automatically subscribed to forums or if a manual click on the subscription button in each forum is required.

Forum trackingTHis setting specifies whether new posts written since the user’s last visit should be highlighted as such.

Text editorThis setting specifies whether the user prefers to see the WYSIWYG Atto text editor or just a plain text box.

City/townThe user can enter their city or town

Select a countryThe user can select their country. The city and country defaults can be set in Administration > Site administration > Location > Location settings.

TimezoneThis setting is used to adjust the times of messages and assignment or quiz due dates to match the user’s local time

Preferred languageYou can view Moodle in several different languages which you


can select here. Changing the preferred language only affects the Moodle interface, not the course content!

DescriptionInformation about the user that other users can see, such as information about studies, hobbies or qualifications.

User PictureThis section is optional and allows users you to choose thier own profile picture. The user’s picture is displayed next to the user’s name along with any content they have posted in Moodle activities such as a forum.

If the administrator has enabled it in Administration > Site Administration > Users > Permissions > User policies, a gravatar attached to an email account will appear as the profile image if a picture has not been uploaded.

InterestsThe list of interests can be used as a way of connecting users with similar interests. Tags must be enabled on the site.

Optional

There are several optional fields that come with an standard install. These include:

• Web Page

• ICQ number

• Skype ID

• AIM ID

• Yahoo ID

• MSN ID

• ID number

• Institution

• Department

• Phone

• Mobile Phone

• Address

The site administrator may add more custom fields or turn off any of the Optional fields.


New profile fieldsAdministrators can create new user profile categories and fields in Administration > Site administration > Users > Accounts > User profile fields. Profile fields may be a menu of choices, text area, text input or a checkbox and may be required or not.

New profile fields will appear on each user’s profile page unless “Who is this field visible to?” is set to “Not visible” in which case only the administrator can see the field. The fields can also be displayed on the signup page if “Display on signup page?” is set

to “Yes” (although note that they will never be displayed if set to “Not visible”).

You can set the order in which your custom profile fields appear under the associated profile category using the up/down arrows on the User profiles fields page.

To create a new profile field, select the profile field format you require from the dropdown list.

Common SettingsAll new fields must be given a unique Short Name and a Name (this is displayed on the profile page). You may also choose to enter a Description for the field for your own reference.

There are also a number of configuration options common to all custom profile field types:

Is this field required?

This option specifies whether this is a mandatory or optional field for user accounts.

Is this field locked?

This option determines whether once information is populated in this field, it cannot be edited by the user.

Should the data be unique?

If you need the information populated in your field to be unique across the system (such as an ID number) select Yes to this option and the profile page update will perform a validation check on the data entered.


Display on signup page?

Depending on the authentication method in use on your Moodle site, you may have some users creating their own accounts. If you would like this custom field to appear on the registration or signup page, select Yes.

Who is this field visible to?

Each custom field can be given one of three visibility settings:

• Visible to everyone

• Not visible

• Visible to user

The Not visible setting would typically be set by an administrator who wants to hold private data on the users. The Visible to user setting would normally be selected for a field that holds sensitive information, while the Visible to everyone setting can be used for any type of information.

Specific SettingsThere are also a few field type Specific Settings requiring configuration around default value and size.

• Important

When bulk uploading user data via .csv file, it is essential to use the correct convention to represent the new profile field. The convention is ‘profile_field_shortname’. Replace ‘shortname’ with the actual short name used for the new profile field. For example, if the new profile fiend name is dob, the cvs file field should read profile_field_dob.

• Create new a Profile Field before attempting to upload a file using that field name. Otherwise, uploading the file will result in the error “profile_field_shortname is not a valid field name”.


ADD NEW USERS – BULK UPLOAD

An administrator can upload multiple user accounts by using a text file from Administration > Site administration > Users > Accounts > Upload users.

There are many robust options for uploading information (fields associated with a user) with this method: For example:

• Enrolling users in multiple courses with course specific roles.

• Updating user information in the User profile.

• Deleting users from the site.

Rather than uploading the text file, it can simply dragged from the desktop and dropped into the upload area.

• Tip: It is usually not necessary to upload users in bulk with Upload users. To keep maintenance work down, first explore forms of authentication that do not require manual maintenance, such as connecting to an external database or letting the users create their own accounts (Self enrolment).

Upload user processHere is an outline of the process:

• Create file for uploading

• Go to Settings > Site administration > Users > Accounts > Upload users

• Add file to upload

• Upload users preview - check settings and default user profile settings (see example on next page)

• Upload users preview - click “Upload users”

• Upload users results - shows list of users, exceptions made in upload and summary of number of users

• Upload users results - click “Continue”

• Returns to Upload users screen


Updating users previewHere are some of the many settings for the kind of Upload user function you want to perform on the “Upload users preview” page.


Updating existing accountsBy default Moodle adds new user accounts and skips existing users lines where the username matches an existing account. If you set “Upload Type” to Add new and update existing users, and existing user account will be updated.

• Add all, append number to usernames if needed

• Add new and update existing users

• Update existing users only

Warning: errors updating existing accounts can affect your users badly. Be careful when using the options to update.

Additional OptionsThere are also field settings to force password change, allow renames, allow deletes, prevent email address duplicates, standardise usernames and select for bulk operations (new users, updated users, all users).

Standardise usernamesThis folds username to lowercase and strips out illegal characters. This is roughly equivalent to:

$username = preg_replace(‘/[^-\.@_a-z0-9]/’, , $username);

Set default user valuesYou may be able to set default user field values, if the fields were not included in the uploaded file on this page.

Upload user resultsAfter accepting the preview settings by clicking on “Upload users”, you should see the the Upload users results screen.

This screen will show you any exceptions or changes that were made to each user in the upload process. For example if you were updating user information, the updated information will be shown. If a user was not added that record will be highlighted. It will also summarize how many users were uploaded or updated; it will show the number of weak passwords and the number of errors.


File formats for upload users fileThe upload users file has fields separated by a comma (or other delimiter) ONLY - no space. The first line contains the valid field names. The rest of the lines (records) contain information about each user.

• Avoid special characters in field information like quotes or other commas. Test a file with only one record before a large upload. Remember there are other ways to authenticate users on you site or enroll users in a course.

• You can use a spread sheet program to create the file with the required columns and fields. Then save the file as “CSV (comma delimited)”. These files can be opened with simple text editors for verification.

Valid upload file for testingHere is an example of a simple valid upload file: (Column headers on the first line of the file are only highlighted in bold in this example to distinguish it from the rest of the of the data/user details)

Fields that can be included

• Test a file that contains the fields you propose to use with one user before attempting a file upload for the first time

Required fields:username, firstname, lastname, email

Validity checks are performed for:

• username can only contain alphabetical lowercase letters , numbers, hypen ‘-’, underscore ‘_’, period ‘.’, or at-sign ‘@’

• email is in the form: [email protected] .

• Password field: “password” field is optional if “Create password if needed” setting is chosen (default).

If included, values should meet the requirements for the site’s Password policy.

To force password change for a particular user, set the password field tochangeme.

If omitted, a password will be generated for each user (during the next Cron job) and welcome e-mails sent out.

Optional fieldsTo provide values other than the default include one or more of these fields:

institution, department, city, country, lang, auth, timezone, idnumber, icq, phone1, phone2, address, url, description, mailformat, maildisplay, htmleditor, autosubscribe

• Country- use a country TWO LETTER CODE

• Some fields have a maximum number of characters that are allowed (notably institution should be at most 40 characters long). See hints below.

• Maildisplay, htmleditor and autosubscribe can be set from an import screen.

Custom profile field names: (Optional). • If xxxxx is the real custom user profile field name (i.e. the unique shortname), then the custom profile field name would be profile_field_xxxxx


• Create the custom fields BEFORE importing. Use the standard header. The “shortname” for your custom field is xxxxx (NB the shortname must be all lowercase, otherwise won’t be recognised). The first record must include “profile_field_xxxxx”.

Example: To create a custom field “genre”, you must write a shortname “genre” in the new field, and write “profile_field_genre” in the header of the .csv file.

For custom profile fields that are a menu, use the corresponding value.

Example: A custom field ‘Department’ with one of three values ‘HR’, ‘Marketing’ or ‘Training’. Just insert one of those three words (e.g. ‘Training’) as the value for that field.

Special fieldsUsed for changing of usernames or deleting of users

oldusername, deleted

Enrolment fields: (Optional):course1, type1, role1, group1, enrolperiod1, enrolstatus1/course2, type2, role2, group2, enrolperiod2/enrolstatus2 etc.

• course is the “shortname” of the course, if present the user will be enrolled in those courses.

• type refers to the role to be used for associated course enrolment. Value 1 is default course role, 2 is legacy Teacher role and 3 is legacy Non-editing Teacher.

• You can use role field instead to specify roles directly - use either role short name or id (numeric names of roles are not supported).

• Users may be also assigned to groups in course (group1 in course1, group2 in course2, etc.).

• A group is identified by name or id (numeric group names are not supported)

• You can set the enrolment duration, in days, for each course (enrolperiod1 for course1, enrolperiod2 for course2, etc.).

• You can suspend users from courses by using the enrolstatus field, where 1 against a user means they are suspended (and leaving blank means they are still enrolled.)

Cohort field: (Optional):cohort1

Internal cohort id numbers or non-numeric Cohort IDs of existing cohorts must be used; names are not allowed.

mnethostid (Optional)Existing MNetusers can be added to courses, groups or cohorts as below:

• enrolling to courses: username+mnethostid+course required

• adding to group: username+mnethostid+course+group required

• adding to cohort: username+mnethostid+cohort required

• suspending/reviving accounts: username+mnethostid+suspended required

All other operations are ignored. You can not add users, delete them or update them (such as change names or email, profile fields, etc.)

Commas within a field must be encoded as &#44 - the script will decode these back to commas.

For Boolean fields, use 0 for false and 1 for true.

To prevent users from receiving a large number of emails from courses or forced subscription forums use the maildigest. The options for this field are 0 = No digest, 1 = Complete digest and 2 = Digest with just subjects.


Encoding file formatOn the initial Upload user screen, you may select the file encoding format from a pull down list. These include UTF-8 (the default), ASCII, ISO-8859-1 to ISO-8859-11 or any one of over 36 formats.

SpreadsheetIf you use a spreadsheet program such as Excel to create your .csv file, check the resulting output in a text editor before you upload it. It is possible to get trailing commas on each line from an empty field if you have added and deleted columns of information prior to saving the final file. Also check the character encoding. A csv file is a simple text file (ASCII or Unicode) that can be used to upload user accounts.

Excel translates passwords that begin with - (minus) or + (plus) as zero. Even when saving as .csv and saying “Yes” to “Keep this format, and leave out any incompatible features.” Check for this before uploading, as a zero halts the upload process.

If you use a formula in Excel to create fields (for example, the concatenate function to create a user name), then remember to copy the cells with the formula and use special paste with values checked to make them into an acceptable data for a csv file.

The upload will also fail if you have trailing spaces at the end of your data fields. Often, this can not be removed with a simple Find “ “ and Replace with “”. If information has been copied from web sources than it is possible to include non-breaking spaces which will prevent your upload from being completed correctly. To find these invisible spaces, use the Find and Replace function in Excel. In the find field, hold alt and type 0160. Leave the replace field blank.

CountryThe country should be written as a two letter code, in capitals. For example, use BE for Belgium or NL for the Netherlands. Using “be” or “nl” as a country code will result in a database error.

Tip: If you are having trouble working out the two-letter code for a country, you can consult the list of country names and code elements available on the ISO Website. A common error is to use UK for United Kingdom; it should be GB.

Field size limitsSome fields have maximum character lengths. Typically the file will import to the preview list screen but not finish the process. Turn on debug to see the fields that are too long. Common fields to cause problems are “Institution” which is limited to 40 characters, and “City”, also limited (20 characters). The error will be “User not added - error”.

Valid fieldsAll the fields that are valid are listed below, except for any custom fields you may have created.

firstname, lastname, username, email, city, country, lang, timezone, mailformat, maildisplay, maildigest, htmleditor, ajax, autosubscribe ,institution, department, idnumber, skype , msn, aim, yahoo, icq, phone1, phone2, address, url, description, descriptionformat, password, auth, oldusername , deleted, suspended, course1, course2, course3, course4

Enroll users to Cohorts (system groups)You can enroll users to any Cohort (system level group) by using only the “username” and the “Cohort ID”. Here is a sample CSV file:

username,cohort1

teacher1,system-teachers



Make sure you set “Upload type” to “Update existing users only” (So you are not asked to add firstname, lastname and email fields too)


Enrolment methodsCourse enrolment is the process where authenticated site users can be registered as course participants.

Authenticated user roleWhen users log in, they are automatically assigned the role of authenticated user. A user will have additional roles as well as the authenticated user role according to where they are in Moodle, such as a teacher or a student in a course.

By default, authenticated users have permission to edit their own profile, send messages, blog and do other things outside of courses.

Depending upon which enrolment methods are enabled for the site (by an administrator in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins), some or all of the following enrolment methods are available within a course:

MANUAL ENROLMENT

• The manual enrolment plugin has to be enabled by the site administrator. It should normally be enabled as certain other enrolment plugins, such as self-enrolment, require it.

• This enables users to be enrolled manually in Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolled users.

• It allows the teacher of the course to manage individual or collective enrolment to their course themselves. If a new student arrives unexpectedly with just a login to the site, they may be enrolled by the teacher into their course without any input from an administrator.

Check for manual enrolment in your course • In a course, go to Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods

• Make sure ‘Manual enrolments’ has its “eye” opened.

Editing manual enrolment settingsManagers can edit the manual enrolment method in the course and set the default enrolment period and default role in Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods.


It is possible also for students or teachers to be notified when enrolments expire. Select:

• From the dropdown “Notify before enrolment expires”, select either “Enroller only” or “Enroller and enrolled user”.

• From the dropdown “Notification threshold”, select a time.

Enrolling users - Method 1 • Go to Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolled users. Click the ‘Enrol users’ button at the top right or bottom left of the page

• Use the ‘Assign roles’ dropdown if you wish to change the role. Select enrolment options as appropriate:

• The enrolment option ‘Recover user’s old grades if possible’ is not ticked by default and is easy to miss.

• An administrator can set the checkbox ticked for all courses on the site by enabling the setting ‘Recover grades default’ in Administration > Site administration > Grades > General settings.

• Browse or search for the user.

• Click the Enrol button opposite the user. The user will indent in the list and the enrol button will disappear, indicating that the user is enrolled.

When you have finished, click the ‘Finish enrolling users’ button (or simply close the enrol users box). The user will then appear in the list of enrolled users.


Enrolling users - Method 2 • Go to Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods

• Click the ‘Enrol users’ icon in the edit column opposite manual enrolment

• Select users from the not enrolled users list, using Ctrl + click to select multiple users

• Click the add button to add the users to the enrolled users list


Editing individual enrolment start and end datesEnrolment start and end dates may be edited for individual students as follows:

• Go to Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolled users

• Click the edit icon in the enrolment methods column for a particular user.

• Edit dates as required, then click the ‘Save changes’ button.

Administration settings • The manual enrolment plugin may be enabled or disabled site-wide in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins.

• Site-wide settings, including default settings for manual enrolment in new courses, may be set via Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manual enrolments.

• Enrolment expiration action - specifies what happens when user enrolments reach expiration date. Please note that option “Unenrol user from course” purges grades, group memberships, preferences and other user related data from the courses.

• Hour to send enrolment expiry notifications - specify hour for sending expiration notifications.

• Add instance to new courses- if this is enabled, then whenever a new course is created, manual enrolments will automatically added to new courses.

• Enable manual enrolments - this specifies if enrol instances are enabled by default in new courses, it is strongly recommended to keep this setting enabled.

• Default role - this sets the default role, which is normally student and may be altered by a teacher in a course.

• Default enrolment duration - this sets the default length of enrolment in new courses.

• Notify before enrolment expires - specifies if teacher or optionally students should be notified before the expiration.

• Notification threshold - specify how many days should be users notified before the enrolment expiration.

SELF-ENROLMENT

• This allows users to enrol themselves into a course, either directly by clicking “enrol me in this course” or via an enrolment key (“course password”). The teacher does not then have to manually add students.

• More than one instance of the self-enrolment method can be used so that when users enrol themselves they are assigned different roles e.g. certain users can be assigned the role of student and other users can be assigned the role of non-editing teacher

• The self-enrolment method also allows for users to enrol themselves into groups by using a group enrolment key.

• The enrolment plugin needs to be enabled by the site administrator in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins and has to be enabled within the course. The manual enrolment plugin has to be enabled in the same course as well.


Course settings

Check self-enrolment is enabled

In a course, go to Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods and ensure the “eye” is opened for self-enrolment.

Adding an enrolment key to a courseA course enrolment (or enrollment) key is one method of restricting self-enrolment to a smaller group. The default setting is not to set a key and allow anyone to enrol themselves into the course.

An enrolment key is often used as a simple method of having someone else beside the teacher determine if a particular student can self enrol in the course. The idea is that one or more people will supply the course key to authorized people. Sometimes this distribution is private email, postal mail, on the phone or even verbally in face to face meetings such as a class or counselor’s office.

• In the course administration block, click Users>Enrolment methods

• Make sure self-enrolment is enabled (has its eye open) and then click the edit icon on the right:

• Add your enrolment key in the box provided. (Click Unmask to see what you are typing.)

• Click Save changes

Setting a group enrolment key • It is possible also to enrol students into the course and also directly into groups by use of a group enrolment key.

• To do this, you first need to add the course enrolment key as in the section above.

• If you do not set a master course enrolment key for the course, then anyone can enrol without a key and users will not be put into groups.

• Users in groups do not need to know the master course enrolment key, only their own group enrolment key.


• Users not in a group can use the master course enrolment key as usual

• Change the setting Use group enrolment keys to Yes

• Save the changes and then in the Course administration settings, click Groups>Create groups

• Add an enrolment key to the group. This will be the key they type in to access the course. (The course enrolment key is simply there to keep others out)

Administration settingsMaking an enrolment key required in every courseBy default, enrolment keys are not set. However, if the administrator wants to ensure all teachers set enrolment keys, this can be forced in Administration>Site Administration>Plugins>Enrolments>Self-enrolment. This means that self-enrolment settings will not become effective until the teacher adds an enrolment key. Note: It does NOT provide a site wide enrolment key.

Using the password policy for enrolment keysTo ensure that teachers use secure keys that follow your site’s password policy, check the box in Administration> Site Administration> Plugins> Enrolments> Self-enrolment

Giving users a hint of the enrolment key • By default, for security reasons, Moodle will not give any clues as to what the enrolment key is. Checking the box in Administration>Site Administration>Plugins>Enrolments>Self-enrolment will provide the first letter of the enrolment key if needed.

• Tips

• If the enrolment key for a course “gets out” and unwanted people self enrol:

• Change the key, but currently enrolled students will not need the key again.

• Unenrol the unwanted users via Enrolled_users in the course administration block.

• Changing or placing a key does not impact currently enrolled students, nor does it impact students who may also be enrolled by an enrolment plugin.

• Guests may (optionally) be required to supply the enrolment key (as specified on the Course Settings page). They will be required to supply the code every time they enter the course.

• The “No” or “Date range” options in the “Course available” setting effectively disables the enrolment key feature, even if it is set.

Course administration settingsThe following settings may be changed by clicking the edit (hand/pen) icon to the right of the self-enrolment option in Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods:

Setting the enrolment periodTick the “enable” box to the right of Enrolment period and then choose your dates.

Enrolment durationSet the amount of time a user enrolment is valid, starting with the moment the user enrols themselves. If disabled, the enrolment duration will be unlimited.


Notifying users when their enrolment expiresIt is possible also for students and/or teachers to be notified when enrolments expire by selecting either “Enroller only” or “Enroller and enrolled user” from the dropdown “Notify before enrolment expires” and a time in “Notification threshold”.

Editing individual enrolment timesIt is possible to edit the date and hour of an individual’s enrolment from Administration>Course administration>Users>Enrolled users by clicking the edit icon in the enrolment methods column for the user in question.

This then brings up a screen where the date and time can be modified.


Unenrolling students who haven’t been active on the course

Choose from the dropdown to the right of “Unenrol inactive after...”

Deciding the maximum number of users in your courseType the maximum number of users you want in your course in “Max enrolled users”. When this limit is reached, nobody will be able to self-enrol. If you leave the number at 0 then there will be no maximum number.

Allowing only cohort members to self-enrol

If you have cohorts set up, then you can restrict self-enrolment to particular cohorts.

Select the name of the cohort from the drop down box. A member of the cohort can self-enrol as normal

A non-member gets a message telling them they are not able to self-enrol.


Sending a welcome message to new usersIf enabled, users receive the following message via email when they self-enrol in a course:

Welcome to {Course name}

If you have not done so already, you should edit your profile page so that we can learn more about you: {link to profile page}

If you want to send a different message, simply type it in the custom welcome message text box.

Note: An administrator can customise the message for the whole site.

Site administration settingsThe self-enrolment plugin may be enabled or disabled throughout the site invAdministration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins.

Shared settings for all coursesThe page Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Self-enrolment contains options for defaults that an administrator can set:

• Require an enrolment key - if this box is ticked then all courses with self-enrolment enabled will need to have an enrolment key. The setting won’t save until the teacher adds a key - something to be aware of as this can cause confusion:)

• Use password policy - tick this box if you want enrolment keys set by teachers to follow the password policy of the site.

• Show hint - tick this box if you are prepared to allow the first letter of a key to be given as a “hint”

• Enrolment expiration action - specifies what happens when user enrolments reach expiration date. Please note that option “Unenrol user from course” purges grades, group memberships, preferences and other user related data from the courses.

• Hour to send enrolment expiry notifications - specify hour for sending expiration notifications.

Default enrolment settings in new coursesThese can be set in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Self-enrolment but teachers in individual courses can alter them to suit their needs:

• Add instance to new courses - if an administrator selects this, then any new course created will include the self-enrolment plugin

• Enable self-enrolments- if this is enabled then users by default can self enrol into a course.

• Use group enrolment keys - the setting for group enrolment keys in a course will be set to “yes” by default

• Default role assignment - normally, when users self enrol, they have the student role. If necessary that role can be changed by default here - for example - if your Moodle has a dedicated role you wish to use instead.

• Enrolment duration - this sets the default enrolment length for new courses (but again, may be altered by the course teacher.)



• Unenrol inactive after- this sets the default time after which a student will be unenrolled if they haven’t accessed the courses. (Teachers may change this)

• Max enrolled users - adding a number here will specify the maximum number of users who can self-enrol into new courses. Teachers in the course can change this. If it is left at 0, there will be no maximum.

• Send course welcome message- if this box is checked then newly enrolled users will receive a welcome message by default.


Self-enrolment method options • One course may contain multiple self-enrolment methods. User may be enrolled once in each instance only.

• Custom instance name - specify custom enrolment method name.

• Enable existing enrolments - if disabled all users enrolled via this plugin cannot access course.

• Allow new enrolments - disable if you do not want to allow students to self enrol in the future.

• Enrolment key - specify key required for enrolment.

• Use group enrolment keys - optionally use group keys for enrolment too.

• Default assigned role - specify role to be assigned to suers during enrolment, this can be manually after user enrolment.

• Enrolment duration - specify enrolment length, this can be manually after user enrolment.



• Unenrol inactive after- specify time after which a student will be unenrolled if they haven’t accessed the courses.

• Max enrolled users - adding a number here will specify the maximum number of users who can self-enrol into this course.

• Only cohort members - optionally restrict this enrolment method to members of specified cohort.

• Send course welcome message- if this box is checked then newly enrolled users will receive a welcome message by default.

• Custom welcome message - specify custom message if necessary.

GUEST ACCESS

Guest accountMoodle has a built-in “Guest account”. Visitors can log in as guests using the “Login as a guest” button on the login screen and enter any courses which allow guest access. In addition, logged-in users can enter any courses which allow guest access without being required to enrol.

This feature can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.

Guests ALWAYS have “read-only” access - meaning they can’t leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students. Guests cannot:

• Post in forums

• Edit wiki pages

• Participate in a chat

• Take quizzes

• Submit assignments

• Add glossary or database activity entries or comments

• Receive any scores or grades (because of the read-only access)

If you want guests to be able to take quizzes, or any of the other activities listed above, and have considered the security implications, you can create a visitor account, say with username = password = visitor, for everyone to share.

• This allows those with the guest role to view the contents of a course.

• Users with the “guest role” may be visitors who do not have an account on your Moodle, or users who do have an account (“authenticated users”) but who would just like to explore your course.


• This might be used, for example, if a Moodle site serves as a website where certain courses contain publicly available information, or else with a commercial Moodle site where courses with guest access can offers a “taster” of the kind of courses which may be purchased.

• It is possible to add an enrolment key so that only those guest users you wish to grant access can enter the course

Course settings for guest access • In Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods, first ensure that you have added “guest access” as an enrolment method, and that it has its eye open.

• Ensure that self-enrolment is also enabled.

• In Administration > Course administration > Edit settings, scroll to “Guest access”

• Set the drop down to “Yes”

• If you wish guests to use a password to access the course then add it here.

Site settings for guest access • In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins, ensure Guest access is enabled (has its eye open).

• In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Manage authentication set the Guest login button to Show if you want the button on the Front page.

• Also Guest accounts can be logged - check the Administration> Site administration > Server > Clean up > Log guest access setting

Default settings for guest accessClicking on Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Guest access brings up the screen where an administrator can set defaults for guest access in courses. Guest access can be turned on by default in all new courses.

You can also:

• Require each course with guest access to have a password for guests. (Note: this can confuse teachers who are not aware of the requirement.)

• Use or ignore your Moodle’s standard password policy for guest access passwords.


• Offer if needed the first letter of the password as a hint.

Auto-login guests • In Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies, you can tick the box so that visitors are automatically logged in as guests when accessing a course with guest access (i.e. they don’t have to click the “login as guest button”.

• In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage Authentication, you must have “Guest login button” set to “Show”.

• In Administration > Site administration > Security > Site policies you can check “Open to Google” setting so that the Google search robot will be allowed to enter your site as a Guest. In addition, people coming in to your site via a Google search will automatically be logged in as a Guest.

COHORT SYNC

A cohort is a set of users which has been added either to the site as a whole or to a particular category and which can then be made available in a course through the cohort-sync enrolment plugin.

• All members of a cohort to be enrolled in a course in one action, either manually or synchronised automatically.

• Only an administrator or a manager can use this plugin.

• The Administrator will first need to enable the Cohort-Sync enrolment plugin site wide (Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments) and then add it to the required Course: (Administration> Course administration > Users > Enrolment Methods).

Enrolling a cohort in a courseTo enrol a cohort into a course the Cohort-Sync Enrollment plugin needs to be added by an administrator or manager to the enrollment methods for the course.

At this stage the Cohort-Sync instance for the course is edited and the appropriate Cohort selected.

The role to which the Cohort users are assigned is also selected at this point (typically Student).

Adding a cohort to a groupThe cohort members can also be added to a pre-made group at this stage. If any members are added or removed from the cohort, they are automatically added or removed from the group. Note that such members cannot be unenrolled manually from the groups screen and there will be information about their cohort below their name on the group screen.


Visiting the Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolled Users page will show users enrolled via the Cohort-Sync plugin.

• Notes:

• By default, a teacher cannot add this plugin to their course. It needs to be configured by an Administrator or a user with the Manager role.

• The user should be a site-level Manager, not at the category or course level, otherwise the user will not see the option.

• If you want the user with the Manager role at the category level to see this enrol option, then you must add some cohorts on the category level, not on the site level.

The required capabilities for setting up a cohort-sync are:

• moodle/course:enrolconfig in the course context

• moodle/cohort:config in the course context

• moodle/cohort:view in the same context as category

The required capabilities for manually enrolling cohort members are:

• the same as cohort sync

• enrol/manual:enrol in course context

• moodle/course:enrolreview in course context

COURSE META LINK

A course meta link allows users in another course to be automatically enrolled into your course as well. An example is a course for “Staff Only” and a course for “Support and Help”. If the “Staff Only” course is added to the “Support and Help” course with the course meta link plugin, then every time a new member of staff joins the “Staff Only” course, they will also be automatically enrolled in the “Support and Help”.

Teachers can only select from courses in which they are teachers when using this method. The Course meta link plugin needs to be enabled at the site level by the site administrator and at the course level.


Metacourse examplesA child course and a meta course with no association (link)

A child course associated with (linked to) one meta course

One child course associated with (linked to) two meta courses


Course settings for Course meta link

• In a course, go to Settings > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods.

• Click the dropdown menu under the enrolment methods and select ‘Course meta link’.

• In the screen that comes up next, select from the dropdown box the course you wish to bring enrolments from.

• Then click ‘Add method’.

• Notes:

• A teacher in a course will only be able to choose from courses they are teachers in elsewhere.

• To add more courses, add another instance of the course meta link.

• The users from the child course will now be enrolled in the current course - see the numbers in the screenshot below:

• When new users are enrolled to the child course, they are automatically brought into the current meta course.


Site administration settings for Course meta linkThe Course meta link plugin may be enabled or disabled throughout the site in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins.

The page Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Course meta link contains default options. The page can also be accessed by clicking the Settings link on the course meta link section of Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins.

By default all role assignments from child courses are synchronised to meta courses. However, the “Roles that are not synchronised to metacourses” setting enables administrators to exclude particular roles.

Enabling teachers to add meta linksAn administrator can enable teachers to add course meta links as follows:

• Go to Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Define Roles. Select the Teacher Role and click on the Edit button

• Scroll down to Course Meta Link as shown in the images below:

The default setting is “Not Set”

When the Edit button is clicked, the panel changes to “Allow” and a checkbox.

Change to “Allow” by a click on the checkbox.

• Scroll to the bottom of the page to save your changes.

PAYPAL

• This allows users to pay for a course. The PayPal enrolment plugin needs to be enabled site wide by the administrator in Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins

• The plugin also needs to be added to a course by the administrator or a manager.

• The course teacher can select a cost (and currency for their course) along with other course-specific requirements.

Course settings for Paypal • In a course, go to Administration> Course administration>Users>Enrolment methods


• If you do not see PayPal, use the pull down menu “Add method” and select PayPal.

• Make sure PayPal has its “eye” opened:

Setting a price for your course • In Administration>Course Administration>Users>enrolment methods, click the edit/hand/pen icon to the right of the Paypal option.

• Give a name to this enrolment method if you wish in “Custom Instance name”. (You don’t have to!)

• Ensure that “allow Paypal enrolments” is set to “yes”

• In “Enrol cost”, type in the cost of your course and in “Currency” choose your currency.

• Usually you would leave the “Assign role” as “student” unless you have a very special reason for allowing your users to enrol as, say, editing teachers.

• Choose an enrolment period, or start and end dates if desired.

• Click the “Save changes” button.


What the new user sees

When a new user clicks on your course link, having made a login to your Moodle, they will see this screen, inviting them to go to PayPal to purchase access to your course.

Administration settingsIf you wish to allow users to make their own accounts on your site then set up Email based self-registration

• Go to Administration>Site Administration>Plugins>Enrolments>Manage enrol plugins and enable (open the “eye” of Paypal).

• Click the blue Settings link to the right of the PayPal enrolment link. Here are the default settings and default settings for new instances in a course:

• Add the email of your Business PayPal account. The email settings are case sensitive and must exactly match that in PayPal.

• Choose whether to notify students/teachers/admin.

• Choose whether (or not) to allow the Paypal enrolment plugin by default in new courses

• Choose a default cost and currency. (This may be overridden in individual courses)

• Choose a default role assignment. (This means the role that a new user will automatically be given in a course when they purchase access. Usually this would be “student” unless you have a special reason for choosing another role.) This may be overridden in individual courses.

• Choose the default enrolment period. This may be overridden in individual courses.

What to set up at Paypal.com • Create a Paypal account

• Not required but recommended for selling: Upgrade your account to “Premier” status and get “Verified”

• Set the Encoding to UFT-8. In Paypal, go to “Profile > Language Encoding” (under the Selling Preferences column) and set your website’s language (like select “Western European Languages (including English)” as it is the only English version). Then click on the “More Options” button and set the Encoding to “UTF-8”, select “Yes” to use the same encoding for data sent from Paypay to you, and save.

• Optionally setup IPN in Paypal to interact with Moodle. Log into Paypal, go to “Profile > Instant Payment Notifications (IPN)”, click “Turn On IPN”, click the “Edit settings” and enter a URL that references your IPN file in your Moodle installation (for example: http://<domain name>/moodle/enrol/paypal/ipn.php)

What the user sees • If you have allowed users to create their own accounts then when they click to login, they will be presented with a screen Is this your first time here? It will give them instructions for making an account (which may be customised in the authentication common settings in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage


authentication) and once their account is confirmed via email they can click on a course which can be purchased and pay for it via Paypal. PayPal courses will have a dollar sign icon next to them:

• Once payment is made both the user/student and the teacher/admin should have received emails from Paypal confirming the purchase.

Changing the dollar symbolThe default currency symbol for Paypal is a dollar sign. If you are using GBP or Euros or another currency, you can change this by creating your own customised icon with your choice of currency.

Make it 16x 16 pixels and call iticon.gif Upload your new icon via FTP to your moodle directory>enrol>paypal>pix. Your icon.gif will override the dollar sign.

Make sure you refresh your page to be sure of the changes.Email-based self-registration

EMAIL-BASED SELF-REGISTRATION

The email-based self-registration authentication method enables users to create their own accounts via the ‘Create new account’ button on the login page. They then receive an email at the address they specified in their account profile to confirm their account.

• An administrator can enable email-based self-registration in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage authentication.

• In addition to enabling the plugin, email-based self-registration must be selected from the self-registration drop-down menu in the common settings.

• Notes:

• Enabling self-registration results in the possibility of spammers creating accounts in order to use forum posts, blog entries and so on for spam. Minimize this risk by limiting self-registration to particular email domains using the setting at Administration > Site administration > Plugins> Authentication > Manage authentication. Alternatively, enable self-registration for a short period to allow users to create accounts; then disable the method.

• The Email-based self-registration authentication plugin must be enabled to allow users who previously self-registered to login. Selecting Email-based self-registration as the self-registration method allows potential users to self-register.


Login page with ‘Create new account’ button

Enable reCAPTCHA elementNew account form with CAPTCHA element

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from bots, or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

Spam protection may be added to the email-based self-registration new account form with a CAPTCHA element - a challenge-response test used to determine whether the user is human.

In addition to enabling the reCAPTCHA element, email-based self-registration should be set as the self registration authentication plugin and reCAPTCHA keys should be set in the manage authentication common settings.


Email confirmation messageAn automated email confirmation message is sent to the user using the support contact email address.

You can change this text in Administration > Site administration > Language > Language customization by choosing the appropriate language pack. Select ‘moodle.php’ from ‘core’ and search for the string identifier name ‘emailconfirmation’ and editing it with a local customization.

Support contact

An administrator can specify a support name, email and/or support page in Administration > Site administration > Server > Support contact for including in the confirmation email.

• Tips:

• Check your user list regularly for spam, suspect names, emails or users in the system but not enrolled in the course

• Disable Blogs unless actually using them. Some spambots know how to post there.


• Enable some sort of login failure notification in Administration > Site administration > Security > Notifications so you can see who is having login issues

• Check Administration > Site administration > Reports > Spam cleaner from time to time

• Potential users may not receive the account confirmation email due to it ending up in the spam folder, being refused by the remote server, an invalid email address entered etc. Such accounts may be confirmed manually by an administrator.


LanguageLANGUAGE PACKS

Over 100 language packs are available for an administrator to install on a Moodle site via Administration > Site administration > Language > Language packs.

Select the languages you require from the list of available language packs (1).

Then click on the “Install selected language pack” button (2).

Multiple language packs may be selected for install by holding down the Ctrl key whilst clicking on the language packs. Installing many (20+) language packs has almost no impact on Moodle performance.

All language packs, apart from English, are stored in moodledata/lang folder.

Parent language packsCertain language packs contain only the modified language strings from their parent language, rather than a complete set. Therefore, it is necessary to install the parent language pack too. These language packs are:

• de_du, de_kids and de_comm (which requires de)

• es_ar, es_es (which requires es)

• fr_ca (which requires fr)

• en_us, en_ar, en_kids (which requires the default en)


Language pack updatesTo update installed language packs, except English and any local language packs, click the ‘Update all installed language packs’ button in Administration > Site administration > Language > Language packs.

The English language pack is updated automatically each time the site is upgraded.

It is a good idea to update language packs monthly.

LANGUAGE CUSTOMISATION

Words or phrases (in any language) used on the site may be easily changed by an administrator using the language customization feature. For example, you may want to change the word “Course” to “Unit”. The process consists of 4 steps:

• Check-out the strings

• Filter the strings you wish to customize

• Customize the strings

• Save and check-in the strings

InstructionsGo to the Administration > Site administration > Language> Language customisation page.

Pick the language to customise from the pull down list.

Click on the “Open language pack for editing” button. This may take some time to process. When the language pack has loaded, click the “Continue” button.

• If you get the “Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 180 seconds exceeded” message, you will have to press the button ‘Check out string into translator’ several times to get the operation completed.


Click (or Ctrl + Click) the files from the “Show strings of these components” list to select them. The files are grouped.

For example, you will find the assignments strings under “mod” (1) and moodle.php under “core”.

After selecting the file(s), it is possible to use the “Only strings containing” filter along with other filters.

For example, entering “teacher” allows you to look only at the string text that contains that term (2) in the file(s) you selected.

Then click on “Show strings”(3).

Make your changes in the appropriate “Local customisation” box (4). Click “Apply changes and continue editing” (5) if you want to use another filter or edit other files.

Click “Save changes to the language pack” (6) to save all of the changes you have made.

• Tips:

• Do not see any string changes? Did you remember to use the “Save changes to the language pack” button? Did you refresh your browser so that it is not looking at a cached page? Did you edit the language file that is actually being used on your site, course or by the user?

• Are you unable to find the string you wish to change? Tick the ‘Show origin of languages strings’ checkbox in Administration > Site administration > Development > Debugging then visit the page containing the string you want to customise.


Using filter stringsCustomized onlyCheck this field to display only those strings that are already present in your xx_local pack.

Help onlyCheck this field to display only help tooltips, that is the texts used when clicking the yellow question mark icon.

Modified onlyDisplays only the strings that are modified in the current session.

• Notes:

• The term ‘customized’ means strings that are saved on disk in your xx_local pack directory.

• The term ‘modified’ represents the changes made since the last check-in string into the language pack. Customized strings (already saved in a file) are highlighted with green. Modified strings (not saved in a file yet) are highlighted with blue.

• You may want to use this option look at your current work before you check it in.

Only strings containingInsert a phrase that must appear in the string. For example, if you put a word ‘student’ here, you will get only those strings that contain this word.

• The ‘Only strings’ filter can be used for a total search for a term used in your Moodle site for the selected language pack.

String identifierIf you know the string identifier (it is the first parameter of the get_string() function), type it here. For example, the names of activity modules are defined in strings ‘modulename’. Finding where a particular string is saved can be difficult sometimes. The administrator can start a debugging function: Site administration> Development> Debugging and choose “Show origin of language strings”. Then if you append “?strings=1” (or “&strings=1” if there is already a parameter) to the end of the page URL, beside each string will be shown something like “{rememberusername/admin}”. The last part says which php file uses the string, so this one is in admin.php. If there is nothing after the /, look in moodle.php. The first part, before the /, is the string identifier.

Use combination of filter settings to get the required set of strings.Click button ‘Show strings’ for potential editing. Input your own translation. The strings that pass all the conditions defined in the filter are displayed in a table. To replace the standard translation, put your own into the ‘Local customization’ field.

• If you want to delete your current customization , just delete the content of the ‘Local customization’ field and click the “Save and continue editing”. The modifications that are going to be removed a customized string are highlighted in red. If you made changes to a field previously “Save and continue editing” it will be highlighted in blue.

Click “Save and continue” button before you change the filter settings and show a new set of strings.

Saving your work into filesAs necessary, you may repeat the “show strings”, “local customization” and “Save and continue” process. When you have made all the changes you want to make, click “Save and check in strings into files” to process all changes made in the translator database to your local language pack.

Writing the modifications into filesDuring the check in, the contents of the translator database are dumped into files in moodledata/lang/xx_local/ directory.

Click “Save and check in strings into files” to process all changes made into your local language pack.


• This operation removes the directory first and then re-creates it with the actual data. Therefore it is reasonable not to touch the files directly after you have checked out them into the translator.

LANGUAGE SETTINGS

User profile settings

A user can set their preferred language for the site in Administration > My profile settings > Edit profile.

Course administration settingsA teacher can force the language of their course in Administration > Course administration > Edit settings.

The capability moodle/site:forcelanguage may be allowed by the admin for users who need to override this language (for example, when testing problems in a course in a language they do not know.)

Site administration settingsLanguage settings for administrators are in Administration > Site administration > Language > Language settings.

Language auto detectBy default, Moodle detects a user’s language from their browser setting. However, language auto-detection may be disabled so that the default site language is used instead.

Default languageThis sets the default language for the site. This setting can be overridden by users using the language menu or the setting in their user profile.

Note: If a preferred language is set in your browser, this will override the default site language (unless language auto-detection is disabled).

Display language menuThis sets whether the language menu is displayed on the login page and the home page. If this is turned off, the only places where a user can change the language setting is in their user profile or in the course settings if they are a teacher.


Languages on the language menuIf you want to limit the number of languages from which students and teachers can select, enter a reduced list here.

Language selection priorityThis figure shows the Moodle priorities when selecting languages:

Cache language menu

If enabled, the list of available translations is cached. The cache is automatically refreshed when you install or delete a language pack via the in-built language packs management tool. If you install a new language pack manually, you have to use Purge all caches feature to refresh the cached list.

Cache all language stringsCaches all the language strings into compiled files in the data directory. If you are translating Moodle or changing strings in the Moodle source code then you may want to switch this off. Otherwise leave it on to see performance benefits.

Sitewide localeIt’s generally best to leave this setting empty, as it’s set through each language pack.

Excel encodingLeave as default (Unicode) unless you have a particular reason for wanting Latin encoding.


Roles and permissionsA role is a collection of permissions defined for the whole system that you can assign to specific users in specific contexts. The combination of roles and context define a specific user’s ability to do something on any page. The most common role examples are those of student and teacher in the context of a course.

CONTEXT AND ROLES

• In Moodle, apart from the site administrator, users do not normally have a global, site-wide role. In other words, even though you may be a tutor offline, when you are in Moodle you could have a tutor role in the course you teach in but a student role in another course where you are studying for a diploma. There are a few exceptions but this is generally the case.

• Because of the way Moodle works, assigning roles is done for a particular context. Site and course are examples of two different contexts. When you create a new role or tweak a pre-existing role via Administration > Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles, you are asked in which context(s) you want the role to be assigned:

System context • Administration > Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Assign system roles

• Any roles assigned here apply to the whole Moodle site. It makes sense therefore that only roles that need this functionality can be assigned here. The Manager role and Course creator role are examples of two such roles. Assigning a teacher or student here would result in their being able to teach/study in every single course on the site, which is not usually desirable.

• If you really feel your Moodle needs to have teachers or students assigned in the system context, go to the teacher/student role in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles and check the “system” box. Then search for and allow the capability moodle/course:view

Front page context • Administration > Site Administration > Front Page > Front Page roles

• Those with a role in the system context do not need to be assigned a role here as well.

• However you might want to allow a teacher to manage items on the front page; in this instance, you would assign them the role on the Front page.

Course Category context • See Category enrolments

• Users may be enrolled in the category to save enrolling them in each individual course in that category.


Course contextEnrol users • Go to Administration > Course administration > Enrolled users

• Click the “Enrol users” button and click those users you wish to enrol

The dropdown menu at the top shows roles for which you are allowed to enrol.

Typically they are those users with lower roles than you.

See Enrolled users for more details.

Block context • (Within the block) Administration > Assign roles

• You may wish to assign roles to a block if, for instance you want specific people to see the block but for it to be hidden from others

Activity Module context • (Within the activity settings) Administration > Locally assigned roles

• An example of this is assigning a student the teacher role locally in an individual activity like a forum so they can moderate their classmates’ posts while still retaining the student role in the rest of the course.

User context • The most common use of this is for the Parent role.

• When the Parent role is created via Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles the “user” context box is checked.

• To assign a parent the role in the context of their child (so they can see their child’s grades etc) click the child’s profile and then go to Administration>Roles>Assign roles relative to this user

• See Parent role for more information.

The assign roles page lists the names of users assigned to each role (unless there are more than 10 users, in which case this is stated).

HierarchyBy assigning a role to a user in a certain context, you grant them the permissions contained in that role for the current context and all lower contexts.


The list of contexts in hierarchical order is as follows:

• System (no parent)

• Front page (parent = system)

• Course category (parent = parent category or system)

• Course (parent = category or system)

• Module (parent = course or system)

• Block (parent = course or system)

• User (parent = system)

Roles can be inherited. For example if a user is assigned a Teacher role in a specific course category then the user will have this role in ALL courses within the category. Tip: use the override feature in a specific context for exceptions.

Roles will only work if the role assignment is made in the correct context. Some examples: a Teacher role should be assigned to a user in the course or course category context, a Forum moderator for a particular forum should be assigned in that specific forum.

Assigning someone the role of Site Administrator • Although this is a system role, the site administrator role cannot be assigned via Administration>Site Administration>Users>Permissions>Assign system roles because it would be too easy to mistakenly enrol or unenrol administrators and be left with nobody in charge of your Moodle.

• For this reason, administrators are assigned via a special page: Administration> Site Administration> Users> Permissions> Site Administrators and you are asked to think twice before you give someone this role. Select the name from the right and move it over to the left:

• The original (primary) administrator cannot be deleted.

Hidden rolesIf you want to provide users with access to the course, but don’t want them to be visible in the participants list, use the Other users link in the course administration menu (Administration > Course Administration > Users > Other Users). Assigning roles here provides course access, and editing rights according to the permissions set for the role assigned without actually enrolling the user in the course. This is similar to the functionality of the “hidden user” check box in previous versions of Moodle.

• By default, the only role which can be assigned to other users is the manager role. To enable other roles, such as teacher to be assigned, the capability moodle/course:view should be allowed for the role.


Enabling teachers to assign the role of teacherBy default, teachers are only allowed to assign the roles of non-editing teacher, student and guest. To enable teachers to assign the role of teacher:

• Access Administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles.

• Click the tab “Allow role assignments”.

• Click the checkbox where the teacher row and column intersect.

• Click the “Save changes” button.

Beware of assignments that don’t make sense

There are many role assignments that do not make sense as the underlying functionality does not exist. Just because you give someone the “right” to do something does not guarantee that the interface or facility actually exists within the context that you have assigned that right. For example, you can assign a user the right to create new categories in the category context. However there is no interface within Moodle to do that (category creation is only available at the system level).

Multiple assignmentsA significant part of the roles infrastructure is the ability to assign a user into multiple roles (at the same time). The capabilities of each role are merged to produce the effective set of capabilities. For example, a user could be both a Teacher and Student in the same course. You should be careful to ensure that if you change a user’s role that you remove them from any other roles as required as this will no longer be done automatically.

PermissionsMoodle allows specific roles to be able to change other specific role capabilities (permissions) based on the context. For example, a teacher in a course may want all students (users with a student role) to be able to edit all forums in that course. Or a teacher may want all students in a specific forum to be able to edit that forum.

If you want to give a specific student the ability to edit a specific activity, see Override permissions.

Course and activity permissionsRole permissions for a course can be changed in Administration > Course administration > Users > Permissions and for a particular activity in Administration > Activity administration > Permissions.

Click the Allow icon (+) opposite a capability to give permission to additional roles or the Prevent icon (X) to take away permission.


Block permissionsBlock permissions can be changed by:

•Turn editing on in the course

•Click the assign roles icon (a face and mask) in the header of the block

• Scroll down to the settings block and click the Permissions link

Checking permissionsThe check permissions feature provides a method to view all roles both in the current context and higher contexts and capabilities for a selected user based on their role assignments. These capabilities determine whether or not the selected user is allowed to perform associated tasks within the system or course.

A teacher can check permissions for their course in Administration > Course administration > Users > Permissions > Check permissions and for a particular activity in Administration > Activity administration > Check permissions.


An administrator can check system permissions in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Check system permissions.The capability “Review permissions for others” (allowed for the default roles of manager, teacher and non-editing teacher), controls whether a user can check permissions.

Capability overview reportAn administrator can generate a capability overview report in Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Capability report.

The report allows the administrator to select a capability and one or more roles. The report will show the role and its permission level for that capability and whether that capability had been overridden for the role where in the site. For example, it might show that the gradereport:user view capability for a student role is set at the system level as “Allow” and for Course 1 it is set to “Prohibit”.

It is possible to select more than one capability with more than one role and have an overview of all.

Override permissionsOverrides are specific permissions designed to override a role in a specific context, allowing you to “tweak” your permissions as required.

Overrides may be used to “open up” areas by giving users extra permissions. For example, an override may be used to enable students to rate forum posts.

Overrides may also be used to prevent actions, such as starting new discussions in an archived forum.


PermissionsSettings for each permission capability:Inherit

This is the default setting. If a capability is set to inherit, the user’s permissions remain the same as they are in a less specific context or another role where the capability is defined. For example, if a student is allowed to attempt quiz questions at the course level, their role in a specific quiz will inherit this setting. Ultimately, if permission is never allowed at any level, then the user will have no permission for that capability.

Allow

This enables a user to use a capability in a given context. This permission applies for the context that the role gets assigned plus all lower contexts. For example, if a user is assigned the role of student in a course, they will be able to start new discussions in all forums in that course (unless a forum contains an override with a prevent or prohibit value for the capability).

Prevent

By choosing this you are removing permission for this capability, even if the users with this role were allowed that permission in a higher context.

Prohibit

This is rarely needed, but occasionally you might want to completely deny permissions to a role in a way that can NOT be overridden at any lower context. An example of when you might need this is when an admin wants to prohibit one person from starting new discussions in any forum on the whole system. In this case they can create a role with that capability set to “Prohibit” and then assign it to that user in the system context.

Conflict resolution of permissionsPermissions at a “lower” context will generally override anything at a “higher” context (this applies to overrides and assigned roles). The exception is PROHIBIT which cannot be overridden at lower levels.

If two roles are assigned to a person in the same context, one with ALLOW and one with PREVENT, then ALLOW will win.


Special exceptionsNote that the guest user account will generally be prevented from posting content (eg forums, calendar entries, blogs) even if it is given the capability to do so.

Locations for overriding permissions • Front page context: Administration > Front Page settings > Users > Permissions

• Course category context (when used):Category > Administration > Permissions

• Course context: Administration > Course administration > Users > Permissions

• Module context: (from the chosen module) Administration > Module administration > Permissions

• Block context: (from the chosen block) Administration > Block administration > Permissions

• User context: (from the user’s profile) Administration > Roles > Permissions

Ability to override permissionsUsers who have the capability moodle/role:override allowed or the capability moodle/role:safeoverride allowed) can override permissions for selected roles (as set in Allow role overrides).

The default manager role has the capability moodle/role:override allowed, and can override permissions for all other roles.

The default teacher role has the capability moodle/role:safeoverride allowed, and can override permissions for the roles of non-editing teacher, student and guest.

Enabling non-editing teachers to override safe permissions • Access Administration > Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles.

• Edit the non-editing teacher role and change the capability Capabilities/moodle/role:safeoverride to Allow.

• Click the button “Save changes”.

• Click the tab “Allow role overrides” (in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles).

• Check the appropriate box(s) in the non-editing teacher row to set which role(s) they can override. Most likely it will just be the student role (you don’t want non-editing teachers to be able to override managers), so check the box where the non-editing teacher row intersects with the student column.

If preferred, a new role for overriding permissions may be created and selected non-editing teachers assigned to it.

Overriding permissions for selected studentsSometimes a teacher will want to override permissions for selected students. Typically they will assign a student a role locally. For example, assign a student as a non-editing teacher. However, managers can override specific permission in a role. This does not create a new role. It modifies an existing specific role and affects all users assigned to that role in the context.

Sometimes the administrator (or someone with the permissions to) will create a new role. For example, the administrator will copy all the student permissions to a new role, then change specific permissions. The teacher then assigns specific students to this role without having to worry about checking off the correct role permissions.

STANDARD ROLES

Manager roleThe default Manager role enables users assigned the role to access courses and modify them, as well as perform certain administrative level tasks related to courses, users, grade settings, etc.

Unlike the administrator role, the Manager role is a ‘real role’, whose capabilities you can edit, but is similar to Administrator (but much safer to use) due to its broad default powers. As a normal role, like Course Creator or Teacher, while the Manager role has almost very many capabilities by default, you can edit that role if you choose.

(The way permission checks work in the Moodle code is that there is a function called has_capability. For admins, has_capability will always return true, no matter how the roles are set up. Thus there is no way to edit what permissions an Administrator has.)


Adopting a best-practice based on the Principle of Least Privilege suggests that Administrators should normally use a Manager role, and not use an Administrator account, similar to the way you are recommended not to log into Linux as root.

The Manager role therefore allows a site Administrator to give very powerful roles to others who are assigned a Manager role, but without having to give them a full Administrator role.

Assigning the role of Manager at the Site levelYou can give someone the Manager role site wide (to enable them for instance to add new users) by going to Settings>Site Administration>Users>Permissions>Assign system roles, selecting the Manager role and moving over your chosen user.

When you do so, users in that role will have access to only some of the items in Site administration. They do not have access to areas such as Security, Server, Plugins, Appearance, or Advanced Features, which are reserved for those in the Site administrators group. They have access to most of the tools for User, Course and Grade system settings and tools.

• Notes:

• Some of these can further restricted by editing specific capabilities of the role, e.g., create users, upload users from a file, manual enrolments, managing cohorts, language customisation, et cet.

• Manager has access to Front page same as with other courses (as it is technically a course).

• Manager has access to most system level reports but not the Configuration report.

• Manager has the ability to assign other users as a site wide Manager

• Also, a Manager has the ability to edit the role of Manager itself - to disable this, you could prohibit the Create and manage roles moodle/role:manage capability

Assigning the role of Manager at the Category levelThe Manager role can also be assigned in the context Category rather than site wide.

Do this if you want someone to be able to have access to all the courses in a single category and manage them, but do not want them to have access to any of Site administration tools.

Assign this as follows: Site administration > Courses > Add/edit courses > (select a category) > Edit this category > Settings block: Assign roles > Manager > (select user) Add

• Notes:

• Category-level manager is assigned to a specific category. To manage more than one category, assign them that role in each category separately

• Thay can manage any sub-categories beneath the category they are assigned, create new subcategories and move courses. They can create courses in the their assigned categories

• They will not have as many capabilities as a site-level manager. Certain capabilities can only be applied in the system context (via a system role)

• They can only login as another course participant of a course in their category, and browse within that course only

• Tip: Some commands are in the Settings blocks. Managers must “Turn editing on” in order to have Edit category and Add category links or buttons both in Settings and on the main content area. The screenshot on the left is a view of the Administration block for a Category level Manager with Editing turned on, showing the Edit this category and Add a sub-category commands:


Course creator roleA user assigned to the role of course creator can create a course. If the setting “Creators’ role in new courses” is left as default (teacher), then the course creator is enrolled as a teacher in any course they create. They can then edit the course settings and enrol other users. A course creator can also view hidden courses.

The role of course creator could typically be assigned to a master teacher, department head or program coordinator.

Creating a courseThe “Add a new course” button can be found at the bottom of the page listing all courses.

When a course creator creates a course, they are automatically enrolled in the course as a teacher, or whatever role is set in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies.

• Notes:

• If a user is assigned the role of course creator in the course category context, the “Add a new course” button only appears when the course category contains at least one course.

• Course creators are not automatically assigned the role of teacher in a course they have not created, even if it is in a category where they have course creator rights.

Deleting a courseThere is no user interface for course creators to delete courses they have created, however they can do so by editing the URL of the course from http://yourmoodlesite.net/course/view.php?id=N to http://yourmoodlesite.net/course/delete.php?id=N (replacing ‘view’ with ‘delete’).

Role assignmentA user may be assigned the role of course creator as a system role (in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Assign system roles) or in the course category context.

Role permissionsIf you require a course creator to have additional permissions, it is recommended that the Manager role is used, rather than changing the course creator role permissions. Otherwise, allowing additional capabilities for the course creator role may result in course creators having access to courses which they have not created.

The role of course creator is ONLY intended for enabling users to create courses; it is not intended for enabling users to edit existing courses!

TeacherTeachers can do anything within a course, including changing the activities and grading students.

Non-editing teacherA non-editing teacher can to view and grade students’ work within a course, but cannot alter or delete any of the activities or resources.

This role might typically be given to a classroom assistant for example.

Student • A user with the Student role in Moodle can participate in course activities and view resources but not alter them or see the class gradebook. They can see their own grades if the teacher has allowed this.

• When a student first joins Moodle they see all available courses. Once they have enrolled or been enrolled into at least one course they then only see their own courses in the My Courses section of the navigation block or via the My home


link.

• A student’s view and navigation in Moodle will be different from the course teacher’s or from students assigned to a different group.

• Administrators and Teachers determine how a student enrolls, and what they can do or see in a Moodle site. These permissions can vary with each course or with any of Moodle’s many kinds of activities. For example, in some contexts, students may correct or grade other students’ work, be encouraged to explore everything in a course and interact with other participants. In a different context, the student maybe guided upon a closely defined path, with minimal interaction with others.

GuestMoodle has a built-in “Guest account”. Visitors can log in as guests using the “Login as a guest” button on the login screen and enter any courses which allow guest access. In addition, logged-in users can enter any courses which allow guest access without being required to enrol.

Guests ALWAYS have “read-only” access - meaning they can’t leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students.

They cannot:

• Post in forums

• Edit wiki pages

• Participate in a chat

• Take quizzes

• Submit assignments

• Add glossary or database entries or comments

• Receive any scores or grades (because of the read-only access)

This feature can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.

If you want guests to be able to take quizzes, or any of the other activities listed above, and have considered the security implications, you can create a visitor account, say with username = password = visitor, for everyone to share.

Enabling guest accessTo allow guests into courses on your Moodle, see the section on Enrolment Methods.

Skip login page for guest accountAll users will be automatically logged in as guests if you enable Auto-login guests in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies. The standard login page is displayed after users visit page that requires real user login.

Authenticated userWhen any user logs in, they are automatically assigned the role of authenticated user. A user will have additional roles as well as the authenticated user role according to where they are in Moodle, such as a teacher or a student in a course.

By default, authenticated users have permission to edit their own profile, send messages, blog and do other things outside of courses.


Examples of using rolesGive a student forum moderator rights

How: Assign the role of non-editing teacher in the module context, via the “Locally assigned roles” link in the forum administration section of the Settings block.

• Enables a user to edit or delete forum posts, split discussions and move discussions to other forums

• Consider assigning this role to two students, and guiding them in learning to facilitate a forum together; for example, they can share the “coverage” of the Forum on certain dates.

Enable a student to grade assignment submissionsHow: Assign the role of non-editing teacher in the module context, via the “Locally assigned roles” link in the assignment administration section of the Settings block

• A form of peer assessment/evaluation

• Similarly, enable a student to grade essay questions in a quiz

Give a student the rights to approve database module entriesHow: Assign the role of non-editing teacher in the module context, via the “Locally assigned roles” link in the database administration section of the Settings block

• Enables a user to approve, edit and delete database module entries

• Similarly, give a student the rights to approve glossary entries

Allow a student to clean up saved chat sessionsHow: Assign the role of non-editing teacher in the module context, via the “Locally assigned roles” link in the chat administration section of the Settings block.

• Allows a user to delete chat logs for conversations which don’t go anywhere

• Allows a user to save chat logs for a longer period of time

• Allows a user to put together group chat sessions

Create an archive forumHow: Override the student role in the module context, via the “Permissions” link in the forum administration section of the Settings block and remove the capabilities to start discussions and reply to posts.

• In an archived forum, students may no longer start new discussions, nor add replies, but may still read all the discussions

• Similar uses: Archive database, glossary or wiki


Enable students to rate forum postsHow: Override the student role in the module context, via the “Permissions” link in the forum administration section of the Settings block, and allow the capability to rate forum posts

• A formative assessment

• Peer evaluation

• See Forum permissions for more details

• Similar uses: Enable students to rate database or glossary entries

Allow students to unenrol themselves from a courseHow: Override the student role in the course context, via the “Permissions” link in the Course administration area of the settings block and allow the unassign own roles capability

• Useful for taster courses, revision courses and any other courses which are optional

Hide a block from guests

How: Override the guest role in the block context, via the “Permissions” link in the block administration area of the Settings block and prevent the capability to view blocks

A similar use would be to hide a block from students

Role settingsUser policiesThe following settings may be changed by an administrator in Administration>Site administration> Users > Permissions > User policies.

Role for visitorsUsers who are not logged in to the site will be treated as if they have the role specified here, granted to them at the site context. The role of Guest is the default and the recommended setting for standard Moodle sites. The user will still be required to login to participate in an activity.

Role for guestThis option specifies the role that will automatically be assigned to the guest user. This role is also temporarily assigned to non-enrolled users when they enter a course that allows guests without password.


Deny Guest Access to a site altogetherGo to Site administration> Plugins> Authentication> Manage authentication and there is a switch there that allows you to turn the Guest Access button off altogether.

Default role for all usersIt is recommended that the default role for all users is set to Authenticated user. To set it to a custom role, the custom role must be assignable in the system context and have role archetype set to none.

• It is not recommended that the default role for all users is set to student.

Auto-login guestIf not set, then visitors must click the “Login as a guest” button before entering a course which allows guest access.

• If auto-login guest is set, the guest login button also needs to be set to show (in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage authentication), even though visitors won’t necessarily use it.

Hide user fieldsThe following user fields appear on users’ profile pages. Certain user fields are also listed on the course participants’ page. You can increase student privacy by hiding selected user fields.

Description, city/town, country, web page, ICQ number, Skype ID, Yahoo ID, AIM ID, MSN ID, last access, My courses and first access and groups

• User fields on users’ profile pages are hidden from all users with the capability moodle/user:viewhiddendetails not set.

• User fields on the course participants page are hidden from all users with the capability moodle/course:viewhiddenuserfields not set.

Show user identityAny of the following fields may be shown to users with the capability moodle/site:viewuseridentity when searching for users and displaying lists of users.

• ID number

• Email address

• Phone number

• Mobile phone

• Department

• Institution

This setting is useful for sites with a large user base, where the likelihood of users with the same name is high.

Locations where user identity fields are shown are as follows:

• User selectors (Assign roles in some places, groups, forum subscribers)

• Browse list of users

• Course participants

• Grader report

• Quiz reports

• SCORM reports

• Assignment submissions

• Course completion report

• Activity completion report

• Enroling users


• Select only one or two fields that are mandatory at your institution. Do not select more than two fields or tables become very wide.

Maximum users per pageYou can choose here the maximum number of users to be displayed when searching in courses, groups, cohorts etc. The default is 100 but if your Moodle site is very large you can increase the number here.

Enable Gravatar

Gravatar (an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally unique avatars.

An administrator can enable the use of gravatars in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies. If a user has not uploaded a user picture, Moodle will check whether the user’s email address has an associated gravatar and if so, will use the gravatar as the user’s picture.

Gravatar default image URLIf gravatars are enabled, an alternative default user picture may be specified. The options are:

• A gravatar default image - by entering a code such as mm. See https://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/images/ for codes of other gravatar default images.

• A specified image - by entering the image URL

If the field is left empty then the theme’s default user picture is used.

Unsupported role assignmentsUnsupported role assignments are role assignments in contexts that make no sense for that role, such as the course creator role in the course or activity context, or the teacher role in the user context.

• Prior to Moodle 2.0, there was no ‘Context types where this role may be assigned’ setting in the edit role form: any role could be assigned in any context. When upgrading a site from Moodle 1.9, any role assignments in contexts that make no sense for that role are listed as unsupported role assignments in Settings > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Unsupported role assignments.

In general, it is safe to delete all unsupported role assignments. In doing so, the worst that can happen is for a user to be unassigned a custom role; no other data loss will occur.


Front pageThe front page is the initial page seen by someone reaching a Moodle site after or before a login. Typically a student will see courses, some blocks of information, displayed in a theme. In the Navigation bar and Navigation block it is called “Home”.

A combination of site policies, user authentication and front page settings determine who can get to the front page. And once they get there what they can see and what they can do.

In many ways, a Front Page has similar features and functions to those in a Course. For example, Activities, Resources and Blocks can be added to the Front Page to give it different looks.

Front page settings

The following settings may be changed by a site administrator in Administration > Front page settings > Edit settings:

Full site nameThis name appears at the top of every page above the navigation bar.

Short name for siteThe short name appears at the beginning of the navigation bar as a link back to your site front page.

Front page summaryThis summary can be displayed on the front page using the course/site summary block.

Front page and Front page items when logged inThe centre of the front page can display any combination of the following: news items, a list of courses, a list of enrolled courses, a list of course categories, a list of categories and courses, a course search box or none. The order is determined by a combination box.


It is possible to create one setting for anyone who gets to the front page without logging in to the Moodle site, and another look for only those who have logged into the Moodle site. There are two combination boxes.

The image on the left shows the first Front Page settings dialog - what visitors will see before they log in.

The image on the right shows a second front Page settings dialog - what Authenticated Users will see when logged in.

An alternative option for logged-in users is My home, covered later in this section. My home can be set in Site administration > Appearance > Navigation.

Maximum category depthThis specifies the maximum depth of child categories expanded when displaying categories or combo list. Deeper level categories will appear as links and user can expand them with AJAX request.

Maximum number of coursesThis sets the maximum number of courses displayed on the site’s front page in course listings.

Include a topic sectionThis adds a topic section to the centre-top of the front page. When editing is turned on, resources or activities can be added to the topic section, in the same way as on a course page.

• The label resource can be used to add text or an image to the centre-top of the front page.

News items to showThis setting only applies if the front page is set to display news items or if you are using the Latest News block (show on the right).

Comments per pageEach course may include a Comments block which allows user comments to be displayed. The commnts per page setting controls the number of displayed comments.


Default front page roleThe default front page role enables logged-in users to participate in front page activities. It is recommended that it is set to “Authenticated user on front page (frontpage)” role. It should never be set to Guest.

For sites which do not have a default front page role (because they upgraded from 1.9), it is recommended that the administrator creates a new role with front page archetype, resets it to default and then sets it as the default front page role.

Front Page rolesAs in a course, you can assign users roles just in the context of the front page. This is different from the default Authenticated User on Front Page role found in front page settings. As a security issue, usually only administrators can modify the front page, other users do not.

It is possible to upload users as students in the front page with a csv file using the site short name as ‘course1’ field, student in ‘role1’ field (and, if needed, chosen group name in ‘group1’ field.)

Front Page backupYou can back up the front page, similar to a Course backup.

Front Page restoreAs in a course, you can restore a backed up version of the front page. Front Page questions

Question bank and QuizThe Question bank is accessible from the Front Page. For example, if “topic” is checked in the front page settings, you can add a Quiz module activity.

LAYOUT: CENTRAL AREA, COURSES OR CATEGORIES?

A Moodle site’s front page can be reconfigured from the default standard to give it a different layout or change how it functions. This is a major decision: what is it you want in the centre of your front page? You can have a list of categories, a list of categories and courses, or neither. A label with a table full of images works just as well. The issue is always the same: what looks good? Depending upon the changes, this can be either a simple or a more complex process. A custom theme may have a unique front page format. Here are some examples using the formal white standard theme:

Clean look, topic checked, no blocksThe standard Moodle page format of Blocks on the left and blocks on the right is not always appropriate. The site administrator can change this basic format by simply deleting or hiding blocks that can be seen by users. Navigation can be placed on the dock.

The two column formatThe administrator may decide which blocks should appear on the front page and move all of them to the left or right side. This format allows you to decide what you want in the centre, and where you want the blocks, left or right.

• It is possible to force a block column to assume a specific width. For example, placing an image of 400 px in a block will force that column to 400 px.


The clean lookSome sites want an uncluttered look. A site administrator or designer may want to start with the most basic look and then add features.

• As a site administrator, turn on editing and hide or delete all blocks that can be seen by teachers or students on the front page.

• Then go to the Site administration block> Front Page> Front Page settings and:

• Set the “Front page” list to None, None, None, None.

• Set “Front page items when logged in” list to the same.

• Check the box for “Include Topic section” and “Save”.

Block settings

Each block has a number of configuration settings that you can change.

This screen shot shows the Navigation block settings.

See Managing blocks for more details.


FRONT PAGE FAQS

What do we mean by the ‘front page’ of Moodle?The front page is the site home page. The front page link in the navigation block and navigation bar is called ‘Home’. When logged in, a user’s customized home page is called ‘My home’.

How can I add text and a picture to the centre column?

• In Settings > Front page settings > Edit settings make sure that ‘Include a topic section’ is ticked

• In Settings > Front page settings, click ‘Turn editing on’

• Return to the front page and click the edit icon at the top of the centre column

• Add text and a picture

• Click the ‘Save changes’ button

How can I prevent activities I made on the front page being seen in the navigation block?Uncheck the box “Show front page activities in the navigation” in Settings > Site administration > Appearance > Navigation.

How do I limit the number of courses that appear on the Front Page?In Settings> Site administration> Appearance> Courses, you can change the number of courses to be displayed on one page to a different number. The default is 20, but you can make it whatever you want. You can also, from Settings> Site administration> Front page> Front page settings, change what is displayed after login to show only categories.

One way of resolving this issue is to replace the Course and Category list on the Front Page with a HTML block that links off to the various category pages. This keeps your courses off the front page altogether.

There are a couple of ways to do this, you can have a list of Categories, in a table, or you can use a table full of icons, much the same as Moodle’s front page. Depending on the number of Categories, say 11 different subject areas and one Administration area, create a four-row, four-column table. The orderly nature of a balanced table implies an orderly site, particularly if the images linking to a Category are clear and the alt tag text says what it is linking to.


MY HOME

My home is a “dashboard” page that usually has the Course overview block in the central column (1). This provides links to their courses (2) and associated upcoming activities or unread forum posts (3).

Users can customise My Home (4).They are allowed to manage their Private files and Add, remove and reposition a limited range of blocks.

The navigation block: • includes a My Home link (5) directly above (or below) the Site home link.

• Once a regular user is logged in, the My courses link will also take them to their My Home page.

DEFAULT HOME PAGE

An administrator can set My home as the default home page for all logged-in users by selecting ‘My Home’ as default home page in Administration > Site administration > Appearance > Navigation.

If ‘User preference’ is selected as default home page, each user needs to navigate to either the ‘Home Page’ or the ‘My home’ page then via the Administration > My profile settings click the “Make this my default home page” link. This option only appears on the page that is not their current default home page. Once selected, Moodle will remember which page to present them each time they log on.

Users with the Site administrator role cannot set My Home as their default home page.


Setting the default My home page for new usersAn administrator or manager (or other user with the capability moodle/my:configsyspages) can set which content (course overview, calendar, blocks) appears on the My home page for new users as follows:

• Access Administration > Site administration > Appearance > Default My home page

• Select the required blocks from the “Add a block” drop-down menu. Configure each block as desired

• Reposition blocks using the arrow icons in the block headers

Adding a block to the My home page for all usersAn administrator can add a new block to the My home page for all existing users (not only new users) as follows:

• Turn editing on for the front page

• Add the block to the front page

• Edit where the block appears and set the page contexts to ‘Display throughout the entire site’

• Go to the My home page and again edit where the block appears and set ‘Display on page types’ to ‘My home page’

Preventing users from customizing their My home pageBy default, users can modify their My home page and add blocks. An administrator can prevent this as follows:

• Go to Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles

• Edit the authenticated user role and untick the capability “Manage My home page blocks”

Preventing users from adding a block to their My home pageBy default, users can add many blocks to their My home page. An administrator can prevent them from adding a particular block, such as the Online users block, as follows:

• Go to Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles

• Edit the authenticated user role and untick the capability “Add a new online users block to the My home page”

Blocks not available on My homeThe following blocks may not be added to a user’s My Home page (because it wouldn’t make sense):

• Course completion status block

• Course/site summary block

• Self-completion block


ThemesThemes provide a “skin” to completely change the look and feel of your site (or even an individual course).

THEME SELECTOR

An administrator can set a theme for the site. Different themes may be set according to ‘device type’ - default, legacy (for older browsers), mobile and tablet.

Go to Administration > Site administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme selector

Click on “Clear theme caches” button.

Then click on the “Change theme” button on the right of the current theme being used for the device.


Scroll down to find the new theme.

Then click the “Use theme” button next to it.

Moodle will tell you it has been saved as the default theme.

Check your Moodle site by going to the Moodle site’s home page. You may have to refresh your browser to see the new theme.

• The selected theme may be overridden if user, course or category themes have been allowed in the Theme settings.

Theme settingsAn administrator can change theme settings in Settings > Site administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme settings.

Theme listThis lists the themes available for course and user themes. Leave this blank to allow any valid theme to be used. If you want to shorten the theme menu, you may specify a comma-separated list of names, though don’t use spaces (e.g. standard, orangewhite).

You can preview the available themes in Administration > Site Administration > Appearance > Themes > Themes selector.

Theme designer modeTurn this on if you are designing and testing themes as it will stop the themes being cached and enable you to see theme changes quickly. (You can also do this with the Clear theme cache button on the theme selector page.)


Allow user themesIf the option allowuserthemes is enabled, each user may select their preferred theme on the edit profile page. All Moodle pages will be displayed in the user’s theme, apart from courses where a course theme has been set.

• The user’s theme will not be available in mobile and tablet devices unless the option “enabledevicedetection” is unchecked.

Allow course themesIf you enable this, then teachers will be able to set their own course themes. Course themes override all other theme choices (site, user, or session themes).

If the option “allowcoursethemes” is enabled, each editing teacher may select their course theme via the Force theme option on the Course settings page. The course will always be displayed in the theme specified in the course setting, with user and the site themes being overwritten.

• The course theme will not be available in mobile and tablet devices unless the option “enabledevicedetection” is unchecked.

Allow category themesWhen enabled, themes can be set at the category level. This will affect all child categories and courses unless they have specifically set their own theme. Warning: Enabling category themes may affect performance, as it will result in a few extra DB queries on each page, so only turn this on if you need it!

• The category theme will not be available in mobile and tablet devices unless the option “enabledevicedetection” is unchecked.

Allow theme changes in the URLIf this is checked then the theme may be changed by adding ?theme=theme_name (or &theme=theme_name if there are other URL parameters) to the URL in the browser. Theme names should be in lower case with spaces replaced by underscores, for example the theme “Formal white” should be entered as ?theme=formal_white

Allow users to hide blocksAllows users to display and hide blocks

Allow blocks to use the docksIf the theme allows it, then checking this will allow the user to move blocks to the side dock.

Custom menu itemsThe setting “Custom menu items” allows you to create a drop down menu that can be displayed by themes that support it. All themes that are provided with Moodle 2.0 support this custom menu.

You are able to create the custom menu by entering custom menu items one per line into the setting. Each item is preceded by a number of hyphens (-), the number of hyphens determines the depth of the item. So items that are NOT preceded by a hyphen appear on the top level of the menu (always visible), items with a single hyphen appear on a drop down menu below the previous top level item, and items with two hyphens appear on a drop down menu below the previous first level item and so on.

The content of each item is constructed of up to three bits, each separated by a | (Shift + \) character. The bits are label|url|tooltip.

labelThis is the text that will be shown within the menu item. You must specify a label for every item on the menu.


urlThis is the URL that the user will be taken to it they click the menu item. This is optional, if not provided then the item will not link anywhere.

tooltipIf you provide a URL you can also choose to provide a tooltip for the link that is created with the URL. This is optional and if not set the label is used as the tooltip for the menu item.

Example of creating a custom menu:Moodle community|http://moodle.org

-Moodle free support|http://moodle.org/support

-Moodle development|http://moodle.org/development

--Moodle Tracker|http://tracker.moodle.org

--Moodle Docs|http://docs.moodle.org

-Moodle News|http://moodle.org/news

Moodle company

-Moodle commercial hosting|http://moodle.com/hosting

-Moodle commercial support|http://moodle.com/support

Note: The custom menu does not escape characters within the label. If you want to use a special HTML character such as an ampersand you must escape it yourself within the label. eg use & instead of &.

Multilanguage supportYou can add a language code (or a comma separated list of codes) as the 4th item of the line. The line will be then printed if and only if the user has currently selected the listed language. For example:

English only|http://moodle.com|English only item|en

German only|http://moodle.de|Deutsch|de,de_du,de_kids

Adding other attributes to the HTMLOther attributes, such as target can be added with escaped quotes:

Moodle Homepage|http://moodle.org\” target=\”_blank

The first escaped quote closes the href attribute, allowing other attributes to be added. All quotes for the extra attributes must be escaped as well. Do not add the closing quotation mark on the final attribute, it is added automatically by Moodle.


Enable device detectionIf enabled, this feature will detect mobile and tablet devices that identify themselves via the web browser at the time of login to Moodle.

It works with the theme selector.

An administrator should set which theme should be used as a default, or when a mobile (1) or tablet device (2) is detected.

Device detection regular expressionsThis will allow you to customize the theme selector options. For example, you can add a custom theme for IE6 and another for Windows CE by entering the identifying expressions the browser sends and the “Return value” you want to display as the theme selectors “Device type”.

Special themesSession themesMoodle offers an additional way to set a theme: session theme. This is set with the URL and lasts until you log out. When you next login, the site/course/user themes are active again. This option is great for theme testing and works perfectly when you want to enable different themes for different situations.

For example you can offer a special link for PDA users and integrate the session theme orangewhitepda in that link. Nobody needs to change any settings, you just click on that link. The session theme is called by the URL parameter&theme=orangewhitepda. The whole URL without the session theme could look like http://mymoodlesite.org/course/view.php?id=18 and with the parameter for the PDA theme like”http://mymoodlesite.org/course/view.php?id=18&theme=orangewhitepda”.

In a standard Moodle installation, session themes are not active. To activate them the administrator must add the parameter $CFG->allowthemechangeonurl = true; to the Moodle config.php file in the Moodle base directory.

Page themeA page theme is for special page-only themes set by code, use $PAGE->force_theme().


Theme hierarchyHere is the usual order in which themes are considered by the Moodle interface.

Theme type Overwrites Display Setting type

Site - all pages* saved in theme profile

User Site theme all pages* saved in user profile

Course Site, user and session themes one course saved in course profile

Session Site and user themes all pages* temporary until logout

(* except courses with the course theme set)

Change default hierarchyThe priority of themes can be set via the /moodle/config.php file. The order defines which theme wins when there are several set at different levels. You can set a variable called $CFG->themeorder (see config-dist.php for more details). By default it is set to:

$CFG->themeorder = array(‘course’, ‘category’, ‘session’, ‘user’, ‘site’);

Particular theme settingsLogo, tagline, link colour, column width, custom CSS and other settings for a particular theme may be set by an administrator in Administration > Site administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme name.

THEMES FAQS

Where can I find more Moodle themes?As well as standard themes, which you will find in your Moodle installation, there are a number of free add-on themes available for download from Moodle plugins directory - Category:Themes. Don’t forget to choose the correct version of a theme for the version of Moodle you are currently using.

How do I install a new theme? • Unzip the .zip file to an empty local directory.

• Upload folder to your web server to the /moodle/theme/[Theme Name]. (Replace [Theme Name] with the name of the theme you have downloaded.) Ensure the new theme folder and its contents are readable by the webserver. Change Read and Write permissions (CHMOD) for the files and folder to 755 - Owner read/write/execute, Group read/execute, Everyone read/execute. Incorrect permissions may prevent display of the newly installed theme.

• Choose your new theme from within Moodle via Administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme selector.

How do I install a new theme when using cPanel? • Upload your new theme .zip file to your web server via cPanel.

• Then using cPanel install the new theme to your Moodle theme’s folder. The new theme will be installed into its own folder at /moodle/theme/[mytheme] (where [mytheme] is the name of your new theme.

• Ensure the new theme folder and its contents are readable by the webserver. If necessary change Read and Write permissions (CHMOD) for the files and folder to 755 - Owner read/write/execute, Group read/execute, Everyone read/execute. Incorrect permissions may prevent display of the newly installed theme.

• Choose your new theme from within Moodle via Administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme selector


Bulk course creationAn administrator can upload multiple courses via text file in Administration > Site administration > Courses > Upload courses.

In addition to creating new courses, this functionality may also be used to update or delete courses, or import content from another course. For information on using this functionality to create course templates, see Adding a new course

Either drag and drop the CSV file or click the ‘Choose a file’ button and select the file in the file picker

Select appropriate import options carefully, then click the preview button.

Upload courses admin screen

Courses successfully uploaded

When using the web interface, use the Preview option to see if any errors were detected in the previewed rows. If you proceed with the upload and and error was detected with a course, it will be ignored.


Short file exampleuploadcourse.csv:

shortname,fullname,category,summary,enrolment_1,enrolment_1_role,enrolment_1_enrolperiod,role_student

Notice there are no spaces between the items.

CREATING THE TEXT FILE

The text file to upload courses must be a CSV file.

It accepts the following columns which are divided in two categories: Course information and Course actions.

Course information fieldsMost of those settings are available on the settings page of a course. Please refer to Course settings for more information. Field names must be lower-case.

shortnameThe shortname

fullnameThe full name

idnumberThe ID number

categoryThe ID of the category to place the course in. This takes precedence over category_idnumber and category_path.

category_idnumberThe ID number of the category to place the course in. This takes precedence over category_path.

category_pathThe path of the category to place the course in. If you want to place the course in a category named “Science-Fiction” which is located under the category “Movies”, the value to provide is: Movies > Science-Fiction. Note that the separator must be [space]>[space]. Also note that the category MUST exist, it will not be created. If you want to place the course in the top-level category “Movies”, the value to provide is: Movies

visible1 if the course is visible, 0 if hidden

startdate

The time at which the course starts. Please note that this value is passed to the PHP function strtotime to generate a timestamp.

summaryThe summary of the course


formatThe course format to use, this must be a valid course format plugin name. E.g. weeks, topics.

themeThe theme to use

langThe language to use

newsitemsThe number of news items

showgrades1 to show the gradebook to students, 0 to hide it.

showreports1 to show the activity reports, 0 to hide it.

legacyfiles1 to enable the legacy course files, 0 not to.

maxbytesThe maximum upload size of the course in bytes. Use 0 for the site limit.

groupmode0 for No groups, 1 for Separate groups and 2 for Visible groups.

groupmodeforce1 to force the group mode, otherwise enter 0.

enablecompletion1 to enable the activity completion, 0 not to.

Enrolment fieldsSome fields can be constructed to enable and configure enrolment methods. The fields must be named enrolment_[number] for the enrolment method name, and enrolment_[number]_property for its properties.

enrolment_[number]The name of the enrolment method

enrolment_[number]_delete1 to delete this enrolment method from the course, if set to 1 all the other properties will be ignored.

enrolment_[number]_disable1 to disable this enrolment method from the course, if set to 1 all the other properties will be ignored.

enrolment_[number]_startdateThe enrolment start date. This value is passed to the PHP function strtotime().

enrolment_[number]_enddateThe enrolment end date. This value is passed to the PHP function strtotime().

enrolment_[number]_enrolperiodNumber of seconds, or if not a value understood by strtotime() such as “4 days”.


enrolment_[number]_roleThe role short name

enrolment_[number]_[property]Where property is understood by the specified enrolment methodNote:

Example enrolment_1: manual

enrolment_1_role: student

enrolment_1_enrolperiod: 1 month

enrolment_2: self

enrolment_2_startdate: 2013-01-30

Role renamingTo rename some roles, using the following pattern:

role_[shortname]

The new name of the role [shortname].

Example

role_student: Apprentice

role_teacher: Master

role_mycustomrole: Jedi

Course action fieldsThose settings take precedence over the Course process parameters.

delete1 to delete the course

renameThe shortname to rename the course to

backupfileAn absolute path to a backup file (.mbz) to import in the course

templatecourseThe short name of a course to import the content from

reset1 to reset the course


Mandatory fieldsshortnameThis field is mandatory for every operation, with the only exception of creating new courses. See details on the course process parameter Shortname template for more information.

fullnameRequired when creating a new course.

category, category_idnumber, category_pathOne of these is required when creating a course.

Import optionsTo prevent unexpected behaviour, you have to specify what you want the tool to be able to do.

Upload modeThis allows you to specify if courses can be created and/or updated.

Update modeIf you allow courses to be updated, you also have to tell the tool what to update the courses with.

Allow deletesWhether the delete field is accepted or not

Allow renamesWhether the rename field is accepted or not

Allow resetsWhether the reset field is accepted or not

Course processThis allows you to specify actions to be taken for every course uploaded.

Shortname templateIf you are creating courses without a shortname, you can use this field to automatically generate a shortname. This field accepts two placeholders: %i for the ID number, %f for the summary.

Restore fileA backup file (.mbz) to import in the course after create/update.

Restore from courseThe shortname of a course to import content from after create/update.

Reset after uploadWhether to reset the course after creating/updating it.

Default course valuesThose are values that can be set in the web interface for all the fields that are not specified in the CSV file. Note that they are always used when creating a course, but only when specified during update (see Update mode).

Increasing speedWhen importing the content of a backup file, or another course, you are advised to enable the setting keeptempdirectoriesonbackup. This will considerably speed up the process of the upload if you are importing multiple times from the same source.


Backup and Restore a courseA course can be saved with some or all of its parts by using the course backup. Typically, the site administrator will set a schedule of automated course backups for the whole site. A teacher with editing privileges can create a backup or download an existing backup for safe keeping, or for use on another Moodle site.

SOME USES OF BACKUP AND RESTORE

A teacher can use the backup and restore processes in many ways:

• Duplicating courses or specific activities in one course to another course (similar to Import)

• Updating a production Moodle site course, with material from a localhost site course

• Transferring a course to a new Moodle site.

• Creating a blank activity, save just that activity and then restore it to the course or another course one or more times.

COURSE BACKUP

• To backup a course, go to Administration> Course administration > Backup

• In the initial settings, select activities, blocks, filters and other items as required then click the Next button.

• Only those users with administrator or manager permissions can choose whether to include users, anonymize user information, or include user role assignments, user files, comments, user completion details, course logs and grade history in the backup. User data includes such information as forum posts, glossary entries and so on. It also includes the relevant user accounts as well, in order that data consistency can be maintained when the backup is restored on a different Moodle site. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, this feature can also cause a privacy leak and possible exploitation of the whole original site.

• Users with the teacher role are not able to backup user information belonging to activities, so there will be a red cross and padlock next to any user information.

• Tip: Glossary and database activity entries can easily be moved to a different course using the Export and Import entries feature without needing to backup user data.


• Schema settings - Select/deselect specific items to include in backup

• If desired, select specific types of activity to be backed up by clicking the link ‘Show type options’.

• Then click the Next button

• Confirmation and review - Check that everything is as required, using the Previous button if necessary, otherwise click the ‘Perform backup’ button

• Complete - Click the Continue button

A backup file (with distinctive .mbz extension to avoid confusion with .zip files) is then saved in the course backup area.

Backup and restore from Moodle1.9 to 2.xCourses created in Moodle 1.9 can be backed up and then restored into a 2.x Moodle but blocks are not currently restored and nor is user data (such as forum posts, grades, submissions etc)

• Tip: Have you apparently lost content after a restore in Moodle 2.x? Turn editing on and look for the topic headings that say “Orphaned activities”. The go to course settings and increase the number of topic sections and things will return to normal.


Backup individual activitiesIt is possible to make a copy or backup of individual activities in a Moodle course and then re-use these activities in a different Moodle site or in a different course on the same Moodle. (Note that if you wish to re-use activities within the same Moodle it might be simpler to use the Import function.

• To make a backup of an individual activity, ensure you are logged in with editing rights, as a teacher for example.

• Click on the activity you wish to backup.

• The settings block to the side will have a link Backup as shown in the screenshot:

• In the next screen, check/tick the type of item you wish to backup - in this case, just Activities.

• Click Next.

• On the next screen, check the activity you wish to backup and click Next:

• At this stage, if you wish you can rename the filename (keeping its .mbz extension). Check you have included the correct activity and click Perform backup. You will get a message saying the backup file was successfully created.


• Click Continue and you will find your backup in the User Private backup area.

• You can download your file from here and then restore it to a course in another Moodle site. See Activity restore for information on how to do this.

• Note: For security reasons, those with the teacher role are not able to backup user information belonging to activities, so there will be a red cross and padlock next to any user information.

Using the new backup format (experimental)If you have large courses you may find it useful to turn on an experimental option introduced in Moodle 2.6, ‘Enable new backup format’ (in Administration > Site administration > Development > Experimental > Experimental settings).

This option selects a different internal backup format. Without this option, you cannot back up courses larger than 4GB.

You can change this option at any time. Whatever the option is set to, restore works for both the old and new format. The option only affects newly-created backups.

When you use this option, backup files still have the .mbz extension and work the same way, but there are some differences:

• There is no limit on total backup size (tested with courses up to about 10GB.)

• Files may be slightly smaller.

• If you need to edit this type of backup file manually, you will need to rename the .mbz file to .tar.gz, instead of .zip. You may need to use different software to extract and recompress this type of file (tested using GNU tar on Windows and Linux).

The new backup format is experimental, but is being used in some large sites and may be enabled as default in a future Moodle version. If you find problems with it, report them in the Moodle tracker.


COURSE RESTORE

A course backup file (.mbz) may be restored from within any existing course for which you have permission. During the restore process, you will be given the option to restore as a new course or into an existing course.

• Go to Administration > Course administration > Restore (if you have an empty course to restore into.)

• Upload the backup file, or choose a file in the course backup area or in the user private backup area, and click Restore

• Confirm - Check that everything is as required then click the Continue button

• Destination - Choose whether the course should be restored as a new course or into an existing course then click the Continue button

• Settings - Select activities, blocks, filters and possibly other items as required then click the Next button

• Schema - Select/deselect specific items and amend the course name, short name and start date if necessary then click the Next button

• Review - Check everything is as required, using the Previous button if necessary, then click the ‘Perform restore’ button

• Complete - Click the continue button.

Compiled by www.HowToMoodle.com

This manual contains selected content from the Moodle community documentation site at http://docs.moodle.org. We hope that this manual will be a convenient companion to your work with Moodle. If you find this resource useful free to distribute it in electronic or printed formats.

www.howtomoodle.com | [email protected] | 0330 660 1111Compiled by HowToMoodle

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