Moodle Administration Essentials: Quick Guide for Beginners

Every organization today requires a Learning Management System to spearhead the organization towards skill development. Each member of the project is expected to understand all the technologies that the entire team is working on. Even fresh graduates with an educational background in technology are thoroughly trained in different technologies during their training period by external learning vendors. These groups utilize various Learning Management system for a structured approach towards streamlining the candidate to align with industry experts gradually.

Let us understand LMS in detail, how it works and its use cases.

A learning Management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. There are many open-source LMS available in the market. Here are the top Learning Management Systems available in the market.

Despite having a lot of competitors, Moodle remains the best open source LMS around the world because of its strong community and educational design. The other reasons to justify the selection of Moodle as your preferred LMS are:

• Truly open source: Moodle is free to use for everyone; you need not pay even a single penny for using it on your servers.
• Proven and trusted worldwide: Moodle is trusted all over the world.
• Designed to support both teaching and learning: Moodle delivers a powerful set of learner-centric tools and collaborative learning environments that empower both teaching and learning.
• Easy to use: A simple interface, drag-and-drop features, and well-documented resources along with ongoing usability improvements, make Moodle easy to learn and use.
• Always up to date: The Moodle project’s open-source approach means that it is continually being reviewed and improved on to suit the current and evolving needs of its users.
• Community support: Moodle has the biggest community of developers, teachers, and designers working all around the globe for making improvements to the product named Moodle.

What is Moodle?

Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system (LMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It provides customizable management features and community-sourced plugins.​ Open-source platforms give access to the site owners to customize the code as per their requirement like branding, add plugins, third-party tools, and implement best practices into their learning strategy.

Moodle Stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Moodle support over 170 million educators with 100,000+ implementations across the world.

What are Moodle Plugins?

Plugins enable you to add additional features and functionality to Moodle, such as new activities, new quiz question types, new reports, integrations with other systems and many more.

Installation:

Here is a step-by-step installation guide for Ubuntu: Click here. 

Managing a Moodle course:

A course in Moodle is an area where a teacher will add resources and activities for their students to complete the given tasks.

The course teacher has control over the layout of the course homepage and can change it at any time. Progress can be tracked in several ways.

Students can be either enrolled manually by the teacher, automatically by the administrator, or they can be allowed to enrol themselves using the Self-Enrollment method where the Enrollment Key is provided by the teacher.

How to add a new course and an activity in Moodle?

Step 1:  Login into Moodle using the Admin credentials.

Step 2: Go to the Site home

Step 3: Click on Add a new course

Step 4: Provide the following details on the Add a new course page

• Course full name
• Course short name
• Course visibility
• Course Start and End date
• You can also provide the course description and course image to be displayed with the course

Step 5: Click on Save and display, a new course will be added to the course list

Step 6: Select the course you have created, click on the Turn editing on button then click on Add an activity or resource 

Step 7: A dialog box is popped up; select an activity or resource you want to add to the course and provide the required details.

Step 8: For example, a quiz has been added to the course.

Now let us see how to provide Moodle Administrator access:

Site administrators have permissions to do anything. Users may be assigned the role of site administrator by another site administrator in Site administration > Users > Permissions > Site administrators, but the role itself cannot be edited (or deleted!). The primary administrator (created when the site was created) cannot be removed from the site administrator role.

Steps for providing Moodle Admin access:

Step 1:  Login into Moodle using the Admin credentials.

Step 2: Go to Site Administration

Step 3: Add a New User

Step 4: Add the required fields in the User Profile page

Step 5: A new user has been added to the list. Now navigate back to the Site Administration -> Users and select Site administrators.

Step 6: Provide the user with admin access:

You are done.

Conclusion:

Learning Management Systems help and support the training needs of organizations and institutions with functional, flexible learning solutions.

CloudThat also provides expert advice on building LMS for our clients.

CloudThat has utilized the Moodle platform to create various quizzing applications to support the learning and career growth of our customers. We provide mock tests, questions banks and hands-on labs which are useful for candidates pursuing cloud certifications.

If you are looking to integrate Moodle into your organization, feel free to drop us a query and our team will reach out quickly.

WRITTEN BY Daneshwari Mathapati