Learning Conversations

In writing Moodle Administration, Alex Büchner, from Synergy Learning has created an extremely useful resource that I would recommend to anyone in charge of a Moodle site.

He starts from the point at which you have chosen to use Moodle, and systematically introduces each element of the administrator's role:

• Installation
• The Moodle system
• Course management
• User management
• Roles and permissions
• Look and feel
• Configuration options
• Monitoring activity
• Security
• Performance and optimisation
• Backup and restore
• Third party add-ons
• Moodle networking

In doing so, he covers virtually every aspect of being a Moodle administrator.

These types of reference manual usually answer the questions:

How do I do a particular task?
What are the options available to me?
Why should I choose a particular option?

Moodle administration answers the "How?" and "What options?" questions admirably, in clear language with screenshots throughout.

Much of this is available in the online Moodle documentation, so it could be argued that the book version is immediately out-of-date as compared to the online version. Yet, having the information in book format, allowed me to discover for the first time a number of Moodle features - notably those around performance and optimisation.

The book could be improved, particularly in the earlier chapters , by addressing more of the "Why?" questions. Not necessarily "Why Moodle?" (that's a book in its own right!), but, for example, looking at the impact of:

• choosing a hosted solution over self-hosting
• managing authentication and enrolment via an external database over self-service authentication and enrolment.

The book also seems to assume that most people will be hosting their own Moodle sites, and thus goes into a lot of detail around the technical aspects of installing, optimising and securing the software.

I tend to recommend that organisations will be better off procuring a hosted service which handles all of those aspects, unless any one of these apply:

1. The organisation has a robust technical and support infrastructure
2. The organisation wants to integrate Moodle with other systems inside the firewall
3. The organisation wants to make major changes to the Moodle core code

Most small to medium organisations don't have these requirements or the infrastructure and so opt for hosted solutions, often from a Moodle Partner. Administrators in these situations may be scared off by the first chapters about installing Moodle, LAMP architecture etc. They will want to go straight to Finding your way... , and then onto Course Management. This could, perhaps, be signposted better.

Even so, I have a number of clients to whom I will be recommending this book wholeheartedly.

Moodle Administration (2008)
Author: Alex Büchner
Publisher: Packt Publishing