Using Moodle

Users

User management can be one of the most time-consuming jobs for a system administrator. As your system grows, the number of users who lose their password or have difficulty creating a new account grows as well. Fortunately, there are a few tools to help make the job of user management easier.

Authentication

In Chapter 2, we covered how to create a user account using email authentication. You created the account and Moodle sent you an email with a link to confirm your address. While this is an effective and efficient way to create new accounts, Moodle provides a number of other account-authentication methods as well. If you are in a university environment and have access to a university email or directory server, you can tell Moodle to use them to authenticate new user accounts instead.

External servers prevent users from creating multiple accounts and prevent people from outside the university accessing your server when they shouldn’t.

Moodle provides the following account-authentication methods:

Email-based

Email authentication is the default account-authentication method. With this method, users can create their own accounts. They then receive an email at the address they specified in their account profile to confirm their account.

Manual

This method requires the administrator to manually create all user accounts. If you are using Moodle with a limited number of people or are synchronizing your database with a student-information system, use this method.

No authentication

Users can ...