In this article by Alex Büchner, the author of Moodle 3 Administration, Third Edition, gives an overview of Moodle courses, users, and roles. The three concepts are inherently intertwined and any one of these cannot be used without the other two. We will deal with the basics of the three core elements and show how they work together. Let's see what they are:

• Moodle courses: Courses are central to Moodle as this is where learning takes place. Teachers upload their learning resources, create activities, assist in learning and grade work, monitor progress, and so on. Students, on the other hand, read, listen to or watch learning resources, participate in activities, submit work, collaborate with others, and so on.
• Moodle users: These are individuals accessing our Moodle system. Typical users are students and teachers/trainers, but also there are others such as teaching assistants, managers, parents, assessors, examiners, or guests. Oh, and the administrator, of course!
• Moodle roles: Roles are effectively permissions that specify which features users are allowed to access and, also, where and when (in Moodle) they can access them.

Bear in mind that this articleonly covers the basic concepts of these three core elements.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

A high-level overview

To give you an overview of courses, users, and roles, let's have a look at the following diagram. It shows nicely how central the three concepts are and also how other features are related to them. Again, all of their intricacies will be dealt with in due course, so for now, just start getting familiar with some Moodle terminology.

Let's start at the bottom-left and cycle through the pyramid clockwise. Users have to go through an Authentication process to get access to Moodle. They then have to go through theEnrolments step to be able to participate in Courses, which themselves are organized into Categories. Groups & Cohorts are different ways to group users at course level or site-wide. Users are granted Roles in particular Contexts. Which role is allowed to do what and which isn't, depends entirely on the Permissions set within that role.

The diagram also demonstrates a catch-22 situation. If we start with users, we have no courses to enroll them in to (except the front page); if we start with courses, we have no users who can participate in them. Not to worry though. Moodle lets us go back and forth between any administrative areas and, often, perform multiple tasks at once.

Moodle courses

Moodle manages activities and stores resources in courses, and this is where learning and collaboration takes place. Courses themselves belong to categories, which are organized hierarchically, similar to folders on our local hard drive. Moodle comes with a default category called Miscellaneous, which is sufficient to show the basics of courses.

Moodle is a course-centric system.

To begin with, let's create the first course. To do so, go to Courses|Managecourses and categories. Here, select the Miscellaneous category. Then, select the Create newcourse link, and you will be directed to the screen where course details have to be entered. For now, let's focus on the two compulsory fields, namely Coursefullname and Courseshortname. The former is displayed at various places in Moodle, whereas the latter is, by default,used to identify the course and is also shown in the breadcrumb trail.

For now, we leave all other fields empty or at their default values and save the course by clicking on the Savechanges button at the bottom.

The screen displayed after clicking onSavechanges shows enrolled users, if any. Since we just created the course, there are no users present in the course yet. In fact, except the administrator account we are currently using, there are no users at all on our Moodle system. So, we leave the course without users for now and add some users to our LMS before we come back to this screen (select the Home link in the breadcrumb).

Moodle users

Moodle users, or rather their user accounts, are dealt within Users|Accounts. Before we start, it is important to understand the difference between authentication and enrolment.

Moodle users have to be authenticated in order to log in to the system. Authentication grants users access to the system through login where a username and password have to be given (this also applies to guest accounts where a username is allotted internally). Moodle supports a significant number of authentication mechanisms, which are discussed later in detail.

Enrolment happens at course level. However, a user has to be authenticated to the system before enrolment to a course can take place. So, a typical workflow is as follows (there are exceptions as always, but we will deal with them when we get there):

• Create your users
• Create your courses (and categories)
• Associate users to courses and assign roles

Again, this sequence demonstrates nicely how intertwined courses, users, and roles are in Moodle. Another way of looking at the difference between authentication and enrolment is how a user will get access to a course. Please bear in mind that this is a very simplistic view and it ignores the supported features such as external authentication, guest access, and self-enrolment.

During the authentication phase, a user enters his credentials (username and password) or they are entered automatically via single sign-on. If the account exists locally, that is within Moodle, and the password is valid, he/she is granted access. The next phase is enrolment. If the user is enrolled and the enrolment hasn't expired, he/she is granted access to the course. You will come across a more detailed version of these graphics later on, but for now, it hopefully demonstrates the difference between authentication and enrolment.

To add a user account manually, go to Users | Accounts|Addanewuser. As with courses, we will only focus on the mandatory fields, which should be self-explanatory:

• Username (has to be unique)
• New password (if a password policy has been set, certain rules might apply)
• Firstname
• Surname
• Email address

Make sure you save the account information by selecting Create user at the bottom of the page. If any entered information is invalid, Moodle will display error messages right above the field.

I have created a few more accounts; to see who has access to your Moodle system, go to Users|Accounts|Browselistofusers, where you will see all users. Actually, I did this via batch upload.

Now that we have a few users on our system, let's go back to the course we created a minute ago and manually enroll new participants to it. To achieve this, go back to Courses|Manage courses and categories, select the Miscellaneous category again, and select the created demo course. Underneath the listed demo course, course details will be displayed alongside a number of options (on large screens, details are shown to the right). Here, select Enrolledusers.

As expected, the list of enrolled users is still empty. Click on the Enrolusers button to change this. To grant users access to the course, select the Enrol button beside them and close the window. In the following screenshot, three users, participant01 to participant03 have already been enrolled to the course. Two more users, participant04 and participant05, have been selected for enrolment.

You have probably spotted the Assignroles dropdown at the top of the pop-up window. This is where you select what role the selected user has, once he/she is enrolled in the course. For example, to give Tommy Teacher appropriate access to the course, we have to select the Teacher role first, before enrolling him to the course.

This leads nicely to the third part of the pyramid, namely, roles.

Moodle roles

Roles define what users can or cannot see and do in your Moodle system. Moodle comes with a number of predefined roles—we already saw Student and Teacher—but it also allows us to create our own roles, for instance, for parents or external assessors.

Each role has a certain scope (called context), which is defined by a set of permissions (expressed as capabilities). For example, a teacher is allowed to grade an assignment, whereas a student isn't. Or, a student is allowed to submit an assignment, whereas a teacher isn't.

A role is assigned to a user in a context.

Okay, so what is a context? A context is a ring-fenced area in Moodle where roles can be assigned to users. A user can be assigned different roles in different contexts, where the context can be a course, a category, an activity module, a user, a block, the front page, or Moodle itself. For instance, you are assigned the Administrator role for the entire system, but additionally, you might be assigned the Teacher role in any courses you are responsible for; or, a learner will be given the Student role in a course, but might have been granted the Teacher role in a forum to act as a moderator.

To give you a feel of how a role is defined, let's go to Users |Permissions, where roles are managed, and select Defineroles. Click on the Teacher role and, after some general settings, you will see a (very) long list of capabilities:

For now, we only want to stick with the example we used throughout the article. Now that we know what roles are, we can slightly rephrase what we have done. Instead of saying, "We have enrolled the user participant 01 in the demo course as a student", we would say, "We have assigned the studentrole to the user participant 01 in the context of the demo course."

In fact, the term enrolment is a little bit of a legacy and goes back to the times when Moodle didn't have the customizable, finely-grained architecture of roles and permissions that it does now. One can speculate whether there are linguistic connotations between the terms role and enrolment.

Summary

In this article, we very briefly introduced the concepts of Moodle courses, users, and roles. We also saw how central they are to Moodle and how they are linked together. Any one of these concepts simply cannot exist without the other two, and this is something you should bear in mind throughout. Well, theoretically they can, but it would be rather impractical when you try to model your learning environment.

If you haven't fully understood any of the three areas, don't worry. The intention was only to provide you with a high-level overview of the three core components and to touch upon the basics.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Moodle for Online Communities [article]
• Gamification with Moodle LMS [article]
• Moodle Plugins [article]