Moodle 3.0x Administration Tutorial: ADVANCED COURSE

In this lesson, let us begin by understanding the best practices on how to setup different environments for your Moodle installation.

The key focus of the next 2 lesssons is on "Software Testing". Firstly, let me clarify that Moodle Framework itself is extensively tested before a stable release is made available to the public. This will include all the standard plugin modules included with the package. You should ALWAYS be using the official stable release of Moodle for your production servers - and not the "Development release" versions.

As the Administrator of your Moodle LMS installation - a key aspect of testing that you will be interested in - are the "Non Functional Requirements". In this lesson, I will discuss what this is, how you should approach this - and a few tools that will help you.

Firstly, what is the meaning is "Non Functional Requirements" Testing?.

This is in direct contrast to "Functional Testing". If you are testing, for example - the Assessment workflow in Moodle - then it is a part of "Functional Requirements".

In this lesson, we will see Moodle Plugin installation. I have now logged into my localhost Moodle 3.1 installation - with Admin rights.

Start by expanding the "Site Administration" link. Then Plugins. Under this menu, you will find the configuration screen links for all the major standard plugin categories that came "out-of-the-box" with your core Moodle. We will not look at other pages now, but if you want to configure anything - this is the location to come.

cPanel has been used to demonstrate critical tasks of Backing up and Restoring Moodle codebase. 

In this lesson, I will show how to backup and restore a database from phpMyAdmin - web interface database client.

I have logged in currently with Administration priveleges on my testing database server. This will not be an extensive tutorial of phpMyAdmin - as that is out-of-scope for this course - I will just focus on the backup and restore aspects. Typically, on your production server also, you will have access to phpMyAdmin - so what you learn here will be applicable in many situations - and will be very helpful to you.

Moodle automated Course Backup and Restore Feature.

Welcome to this new section of the course - where I will be showing how to UPGRADE Moodle. This will be a critical skill to you as a Moodle Administrator.

In this lesson, I will mention the extremely important points to be noted, caveats, small print, pitfalls and how you should make the best use of this section.

Let's start with the upgrade process in this lesson. This is the site that will be upgraded - the path is localhost/moodle3p. We will be upgrading from Moodle 3.0+ to Moodle 3.1.2+ in this lesson.

In this lesson, I am going to show how to upgrade your production server inside the cPanel using the Softaculous script.

Sometimes you will want new users on your site to be able to register themselves in through an email based authentication mechanism. In this lesson, I will show how you can enable this.

Also, this is an important courses to be "self-running" - that is auto-pilot mode.

If you want to design such that users can enroll themselves into courses - there are 2 steps to this. Firstly from an Admin's perspective - you should allow "Email based Self Registration" on your site. This is an expremely popular technique - all major social sites, media sites of the world use email based self registration.

Second step - you should configure one or more of your courses - from a teacher's perspective - to enable self enrollment.

For some courses you will want to allow student self enrolment. This means that the user will see a list of courses that allows self enrolment and then enrol themselves into the course by submitting up an enrolment form in Moodle.

In this lesson, we will see how to enable student self registration.

This lesson is for demonstrating a very powerful technique of Course Enrollment called as the "Cohort Sync". This is a core feature shipped with Moodle. To understand this lesson - I will assume that you already have a basic understanding of what Cohorts are and simple use cases of how they are used.

Lets do a quick recap.

Cohorts are site-wide collections of users. They are analogous to "Groups" - except that cohorts have larger visibility and smaller functionality - as compared to Groups. The most important usage of Cohorts are for course enrollments.

Cohort visibility can be fine tuned to be either site-wide (which is the default) - or limited to specific named course categories. Cohorts can be manually created or automatically created - either directly or indirectly as a part of bulk User creation.

In a normal Moodle configuration - only a logged in registered user - who has additionally been enrolled into a course - can see the contents of the course and participate in the course activities.

There will be a few situations where you will want visitors to your site to view the contents of your site - while still disabling all other  activities of the course. Example - for course marketing - where you want to show a teaser of the course. Or sometimes, if you want to make the course fully public. Or even for search engine crawler and SEO purposes - you will want this read only access to be active.

The technique to do this is called as "Guest Access". Moodle has a special role called as "Guest role". Any time a visitor to your site, clicks on the "Login as a guest" - they will be assigned a guest role.

In this lesson - I will discuss the overall capabilities (or should I say limitations) of Moodle in the area of Payment Integration and ecommerce. That is, the ability to buy and sell courses through the core platform.

At the high level - Moodle does not pretend to support any ecommerce features - except for the MOST rudimentary. The current and future roadmap of Moodle is very clearly focussed on LMS capabilities. That said, IT IS possible to do sell courses with some limitations - and without any sort of bells and whistles.

In this lesson, I will now show step-by-step completely how you can configure PayPal payment for your courses on Moodle. In the previous lesson I have discussed the pre-requisites, so you should already have a PayPal account by now.