How do I manage users on my Moodle?
As the site administrator, you can see and do everything.
This is a big responsibility.
It’s best to have only one or two administrators who are confident in their Moodle skills.
If you really need to add a second site administrator, first make sure they have an account on the
site and then add them from Site administration / Users /Permissions/ Site administrators.
Adding teachers and students is slightly different.
Apart from administrators, all new users who log into Moodle have the role “authenticated
user”.
They must be added to courses as students or teachers.
They don’t have the role of student or teacher across the whole site.
Why not?
Because when you are a student in a school or university, you usually study or teach
a certain number of subjects - but you don’t study or teach every subject available in
the school or university.
In fact you could even teach one subject and be a student in an evening class in a different
subject.
Moodle works the same way.
Watch our other videos for how to add teachers and students.
Moodle offers a number of standard roles you can give to users in courses, categories or
throughout the site.
You can see them from Site administration / Users /Permissions /Define roles.
The administrator isn’t there because the admin can do everything and you cannot restrict
their role.
As a beginner admin it is fine to leave these roles and settings as default.
Managers act like lesser admins.
You can give this role to someone and allow them to do certain tasks but not others either
in the site as a whole or in a course category.
Teachers can add,edit and delete activities in courses, and non-editing teachers can grade
activities but not change the course activities.
Moodle also allows you to use custom roles for specific tasks.
See the documentation for examples of custom roles.
To allow a role to do something or to prevent a role from doing something, you modify the
capability for that role.
Example: We want to prevent teachers from manually enrolling participants.
We click the cog icon next to the editing teacher role.
Note how this role is assigned in a course and activity but not the site?
That’s because teachers don’t teach everywhere in an organisation, as mentioned before.
Clicking Show advanced displays the full selection of options for each capability and clicking
the links take you to the documentation for that particular capability.
We scoll down to Manual enrolments and change “enrol/manual:enrol” to Prevent.
This is just one example of what you can do with capabilities and permissions.
It is a very complex and powerful feature.
Find out more in the documentation and ask in the Moodle community forums
To summarise: Moodle has standard roles you can assign to
users.
Roles are assigned in a context, such as a course.
Teachers and students are usually given their roles within courses
Admins can add or withdraw permissions by modifying the appropriate capability.