EMPOWER TALENT

MOODLE INSTALLATION & SET UP GUIDE

Planning for Success + Site Configuration

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 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3

TERMS TO KNOW 3

THE PLANNING PROCESS 4

COURSE CREATION 5

COURSE MANAGEMENT 6

SITE CONFIGURATION 8
ADVANCED FEATURES 8

USERS 8

REGISTRATION, AUTHENTICATION,
AND ENROLLMENT 8

COURSE ENROLLMENT 9

USER & SITE POLICIES 10

ROLES & PERMISSIONS 10

DEFAULT COURSE SETTINGS 11

APPEARANCE SETTINGS 14

SETUP BEST PRACTICES AND

RECOMMENDATIONS 15

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 3

TERMS YOU SHOULD

FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH:
These are words that will be commonly used not only
throughout this guide, but during your installation as well.

• Blended Learning
Online content and instructor led sessions

INTRODUCTION • Self-paced or Independent Learning

The course and all of its materials are online
Here’s the scenario: You are about to setup your first Moodle
installation, and you aren’t sure where to start, what to • Synchronous activities
consider, or what you should know. The good news is if Activities that have to be completed during a set
you are outsourcing your Moodle hosting - which is the time-frame and could include involvement with
recommended method - the Moodle installation process other learners (group work)
will be taken care of for you. Moodle hosting vendors, like
• Asynchronous activities
Lambda Solutions, help take away the headache of installing
Activities that can be completed anytime and
the site on a server, and remove stress about optimizing
anywhere
performance. Regardless of whether you have outsourced
hosting or not, it’s best to have a good understanding • Open enrollment
about what is involved in the Moodle process. This guide Learners start and finish the course at
is a compilation of step by step directions, best practices, different times
and tips designed to assist users who are about to install
their first Moodle site, but it also provides great background • Communication Channels
information if you are a more experienced Moodle user. Different types of message outputs that can
be used to communicate such as email and/or
popup window notifications when logged in

• Standard Plugin
Module or program that provides a feature and
extended functionality and is included as part of
Moodle out of the box.

• Contributed or Community Plugin

Module or program that provides a feature and
extended functionality, and has to be installed in
Moodle.

Blednded Learning Webinar

This guide will cover the planning process of your Moodle

installation, as well as provide steps to follow during course
creation, course management, and site configuration.

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THE PLANNING PROCESS
Before getting into the meat of this Guide, there are a few
different things that you need to consider before installing
your Moodle site. Understanding the learning needs of your
organization is crucial, as this can shape the way Moodle is
setup to reach your business goals. The questions below can
be used to help with identifying the requirements of your
setup. Often the answers to these questions will determine
how courses are setup, and how your site will operate.

Q: Who is your learning audience?

Your learners will likely fall in one of three categories:
Internal team members, clients, or partners. The category
that your learners belong to will play a big role in deciding
what kind of training they will need, and who will manage
them.

If your learners are internal team members, the list of

users is likely already known, and will be managed by an
administrator. Courses will focus on products, processes,
and certifications required to perform a job.

If your learners are clients, courses can focus on products,

or they can be related todifferent topics specifically related
to your business such as safety, language, business, or
licenses. With clients, the list of learners can sometimes be
known, but if you have new clients sign up frequently, they
will most likely be unfamiliar. Q: What will the delivery style of your
If your learners are partners, courses can be formatted in courses be?
any of the two ways listed above, either product, or topic, You can format courses to be fully self-paced with no
depending on learning objectives. With partners, your instructor involvement, or you can take a blended learning
learners will most likely be known, save for any new partners approach, with a combination of online material and
you might obtain during the learning process. instructor facilitated sessions.

A blended learning approach, or a self-paced learning

approach is recommended if your learners are
geographically scattered (i.e. not in one place), or if they
have unconventional schedules. An instructor led course
is usually chosen if learners can easily be gathered in one
space.

Q: Do you have some ideas around how

learner accounts will be created?
For example integration with an existing system (LDAP,
HR, SIS) or database, use of a file upload containing a list
of user accounts, or self-based user account creation. You
should brainstorm a few options beforehand.

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COURSE CREATION
There are a few best practices to follow when it comes to
creating Moodle courses. Here are some things to consider.

Keep students engaged by having activity based courses

(with assignments, and quizzes), or socially based (with
forums, chats, and wiki’s). Sticking to only one delivery
method can cause boredom, but changing up the delivery
method keeps the mind stimulated.

Set clear expectations for your courses from the beginning.

This could be the expectation for how long each learner is
expected to spend in each course, technical expectations,
expectations for the course format, or expectations for
how you will communicate in the course. Knowing your
expectations allows you to better measure the outcome.

Be sure to ask questions that force learners to apply the

principles they are being taught.

Provide examples whenever possible.

When determining which activities to include, look at 3-5

activities and learning resources, and try to imagine how
they can be used, and for what purpose. Our Top 5 Picks for
Activities are Page and Book Learning Resource, Label, Forum,
Quiz, and Choice Activity. We will go through each of these
more in depth.

Page and Book Learning Resource

Both of these learning resources allow instructors to build
content right within Moodle. What’s even better is that they
can do this without having to know HTML, thanks to the handy
Text-editor, which functions a lot like any word processing
program. In addition, developed content can contain text, as
well as rich media, such as images, audio, and video to really
engage learners. The benefits of the “Book” over the “Page”
are that the book can contain multiple pages, as opposed to
just one.

Label
Labels are great for creating structure and hierarchy in your
course, while also providing instructions to learning right in the
top layer of the course. To the right, you can see an example
of a course using the Label to provide instruction, and create
structure on the course page.

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Forum
Students learn best by creating, talking, writing, analyzing,
and explaining. For these reasons, the forums can be a COURSE MANAGEMENT
strong communication tool used to discuss and explain
concepts used in the course, while also acting as a catalyst Course Categorization
for thinking and learning. An example of a forum we will Moodle acts as a container for courses, and if you have
share with you is the QA forum, where students can first more than a few, you can organize them under categories.
answer questions posed by an instructor before seeing how Based on the particulars of your organizational context, you
other students have responded. This fosters independent may have, for example, a subject-based categorization, or a
thinking, while also utilizing the power of social learning. level-based categorization.

Quiz Using Course Backups

This is one of the most commonly used Moodle features. You can use course backup files as templates to build other
While this is a very traditional classroom component, there courses. Using the automated course backups can also help
are ways of modernizing quizzes by adding images and with recovering deleted learning resources and activities.
audio. These can include descriptions to help learners who (See next page for screen shots)
have visual impairments. Tip: When setting questions on a
page, it is recommended to include 1-5 per page to avoid
Archiving Course Strategies
issues with performance. Try to think of 100 questions, all
loading media, on a single page. It can really slow things While there is no one correct approach to archiving courses,
down and cause major time lags, so fewer is better. we find it worthwhile to consider taking the following steps:

Make a backup of the course. You can do this either

Choice Activity through a manual course backup, automated course backup,
This feature, used for polling, can be a simple and effective or a full copy of the site. Please note that the last option can
way to build interactivity within a course. It’s also a great sometimes be difficult to restore and manage.
tool for getting feedback from learners on what they have Store the copy of your courses and your site outside of
taken away from a learning resource, how they feel on a your hosted platform, such as on a network drive behind
particular topic, and even how they felt about the material lock and key.
used in the course.
It is best practice to store backup copies on a separate
storage device, NOT an office computer. If anything
happens to the computer, whether it gets lost, stolen, or
damaged, you will lose that data, and you will have a serious
privacy breach issue.

Store 2 or more copies of all content, in case one of the

copy is corrupted or compromised. As well, it’s good
practice to store the backups of content on a separate
storage device.

After making and storing a copy of the courses and site,

make sure you remove all old courses that are no longer
needed from the production site.

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Part 2 of our Moodle Installation & Setup Guide will assist you with
the configuration of your site. There are many default settings in
Moodle that you have the power to manage, but what areas require
configuration, and which ones are okay to leave with the default
settings? We will outline the ones that will likely be of use to you
and which you will need to enable.

SITE CONFIGURATION Registration, Authentication, and Enrollment

For the sake of simplicity, we will break registration into
Advanced Features 3 main categories: User based, Manager or Administrator
based, and Automated. Keep in mind that you do not
There are features in your Moodle site that really extend the
have to pick one in isolation. You can use a combination of
functionality of your Moodle, but are not considered plugin
multiple authentication methods if you wish.
based. These advanced features can be enabled or disabled
as needed. There are quite a few features that you have to 1) User Based: In this case, learners create their own
choose from, so to make things easy, we have highlighted accounts. TIP: If enabled, it’s highly recommended to use
just a couple of key advanced features that are commonly Recaptcha with the registration option to prevent fake
enabled. accounts from being created.

Outcomes: These are goals you can set up in a course and Use cases for the User Based Approach: When conducting
attach to learning activities, to help evaluate a learner’s client/customer based training where courses are being
competency in a subject. sold, or the client is unknown and Moodle is acting as the
primary application for the student information.
Web Services: When enabled, these can be used to
connect Moodle with other applications. 2) Manager or Administrator Based: Learner accounts are
created by Moodle administrators or managers on the site,
Completion Tracking: If you choose to enable this setting,
either manually one-by-one, or by processing a list of users
you can track the criteria for courses, and the activities
contained in a file (like a CSV file for example).
within those courses. Note that once Completion Tracking
is enabled in “Advanced Features”, it then needs to be Use cases for the Manager or Administrator Based
enabled in the “Course Settings” Approach: When learners accounts are contained in a
different application other than Moodle, or registration takes
Conditional Access: Here you can restrict the access users
place using a different method. This list of users is then
have to the learning resources and activities within a course,
exported, and processed. This can be used for client based
based on their different qualifications such as grades,
scenarios where the client base is already known and access
completion status (of other activities), profile fields, and
to Moodle needs to be extended, but most commonly this
groups they belong to.
method is used for partner and internal training.

Users 3) Automated: In this case, a list of learners either already

exists, or it is created in another application. In the latter
User accounts are the profiles created for the learners in the
case, there is an automated approach that creates the
Moodle site, that require the person to login to his or her
learner accounts in Moodle, based on the data being
account using a username and password. There are quite a
transferred from one application to Moodle.
few different ways to create users. Once the accounts are
created, users can then begin enrolling in courses. Use cases for the Automated Approach: This method is
good for client based training (Where the users are known),
internal training, and partner training.

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Course Enrollment
Enrollment is the method of adding users to a course, so that
they can participate and engage within the course. Moodle is
modular in nature, so it offers many different ways to enroll a
user into a course.

•• Self-enrollment is the method that allows users to

manually enroll themselves in a course. This is a great
option if you want learners to be able to choose which
courses they would like to take, or if the courses are
optional. You can see what the self-enrollment window
looks like below.

•• Manual enrollment is done by an administrator, manager,

or instructor. This method works well when there are a
small number of users being added to a course, because
it does not take long to add them manually.

•• A Cohort Sync allows a manager or administrator to add

users into a group called a “Cohort.” They can then enroll
an entire cohort into a course, thus adding multiple,
grouped users. This works well if there are a small to
medium number of users being enrolled. The strength of
Cohorts is when a group of users is taking a number of
the same courses, as it makes enrollment much quicker
and simpler.

•• A Flat File enrollment allows enrollment of bulk users,

without having to manually enter the information from
the user interface. The file created is saved as a comma
separated value (.csv). In some cases, this can be
generated from another system, or manually created
by a manager, instructor, or administrator. This method
works well when there are a larger number of users
being enrolled into a course.

•• There is a PayPal method of enrollment, that allows

users to browse courses, enroll into a selected course,
and pay for it through PayPal. This is the method to use
when access to content is being sold, and when users
are picking their own courses. It is also well suited for
client training, and/or partner training where the list of
users is unknown.

•• An LDAP method allows user enrollment to be driven

by information contained within the LDAP server. This
method works when the list of users and the list of
courses are known in the LDAP server.

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User & Site Policies Define Roles, New Roles, and
The User & Site Policies sections of Moodle contains Role Permissions
feature settings relating to the context of users and •• Role assignments can be useful for all learner scenarios.
learners, or larger features impacting the operations of the In the most simple setup, there is usually:
site as a whole.
•• An administrator, who can do everything
Password Policy: This allows you to configure the
minimum requirements for a password. Moodle has a •• An instructor, whose role is just to teach
strong focus on security, so the password settings require •• Learners, whose roles are designed to learn, and
a minimum of 8 characters, 1 uppercase letter, 1 numeric participate in courses
value, and 1 special character. Of course there is the option
to relax these password requirements, but we recommend The ability to create new roles works well for partners,
keeping the password policy strong. as well as people in internal roles such as managers, and
directors who may only need to carry out specific tasks.
Hide selected user fields: In Moodle, there are a number
of included optional profile fields, which may or may not •• The permissions and privileges of a role can be set to
be of interest to you. For this reason, you have the option either “grant” or “deny.”
of hiding these fields so that they are no longer visible to •• New roles can be created as the need arises.
the user.

User storage quota: When a learner, instructor, or any

user on the site uploads a file, there is the potential of the
file being stored on the hosting package’s storage system,
which contributes to the user’s storage allotment.

Maximum Upload File Size: This setting allows the

administrator to set the maximum file upload size per file.
For example, a maximum of 50MB file uploads can help
prevent instructors and learners from uploading large files.
This setting can then be adjusted to a lower amount with
courses.

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Default Course Settings
Moodle course settings allow a high level of setup for how
you want your course to run. This process is commonly
referred to as “setting up course shells.” There are a few
settings in particular that can really impact the way a course
operates, which we will go through with you.

Configuring the default settings of the

course format

•• Give your course a title - both a full name, and a short

name - as well as a summary. These descriptors can
be made visible on certain pages before a student is
enrolled, or on the front page when specific settings are
used.

•• Identify the learning structure, which will become the

format of the course. The course is broken down into
a number of different sections, and these sections can
then be organized by weeks, or topics.

•• Weeks: Organizing course by weeks is the

recommended method when the course is a
known number of weeks, with a specified start
and end date. This format is often used for an
academic setting, but it can also be used for when
there is a new intake of staff going through the
course at the same time. These types of courses
are often instructor led in a blended learning
format, but they can also be self-paced.
Visibility Settings
•• Topics: Organizing course by topics is the
recommended method in open enrollment type As the name suggests, this is where you can control
courses, where learners start at different times. whether a course is visible to students. By making a course
This works well for client based training, internal invisible to students, instructors and administrators can go
training, and partner training. This method can be in and work on it.
used in both blended learning style courses, and
self-paced courses. Grades General Settings

In the course layout, you can manage whether you want Here, instructors can decide if they want to display the
sections to be fully displayed, or to be collapsed (to show gradebook and activity logs to students. Making these
only one section per page) showing the title, summary features invisible is common in courses where grades are
and an indicator of the number of learning resources and not crucial to the learners success, or if there is a different
activities in the section. A full display layout works in short applications being used to display grades to learners.
courses, and a collapsed display layout works for bigger
courses with a large number of learning resources.

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Default settings of grade format Message Outputs
Moodle has a gradebook area, which offers Moodle Also known as “Communication Channels”, message outputs
instructors a large degree of flexibility. Instructors can use are used for the different types of messages sent in Moodle,
the gradebook to set-up categories and apply different such as forum notifications, grading, and enrollments. These
grading aggregation, using calculation such as means of can be configured and set as a preference for each user
grades, or weighted grades. account in Moodle. Administrators have the capability to set
a default that will be used on the site, and can even restrict
Primary grade export methods the ability to change a messaging preference for important
types of notifications.
Grades can be exported using a number of different file
formats, such as OpenDocument Spreadsheet, Excel, Plain Email recommendations:
Text, or XML.
•• To help prevent email messages being marked as
spam, all the email messages sent out can come from a
Configuring the native plugin functionality
no-reply email address
In Moodle, there are different learning activities and
•• To help prevent email messages being marked as spam,
resources. These activities and resources often have default
setup an SPF record
settings that will apply to the activity when it is first being
setup, to help both with consistency and efficiency when •• To help prevent being email blacklisted, don’t use fake
creating courses. email accounts for users in the site with a live or real
domain name / URL

•• Configure the Support Contact for your site to use an

email that matches your domain name being used. For
example, the email could be something like support@
training.abccompany.com.

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Repositories
Repositories are storage areas where
files can be added and used on your
Moodle site. There are both internal
and external repositories. An example
of an internal repository is the hosting
platform running the Moodle site. A few
examples of external repositories are
YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google Drive.

A good general practice to begin here

is to go into the repositories section,
and see if there are any Repositories
your organization might be interested
in using.

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Appearance Settings Front Page Settings

Menu Navigation Course Visibility

Moodle has a few features that can help users with This is the setting that controls how, and if courses will be
organization. displayed on the front page.

•• On the site level, there is a helpful feature called “My •• You can decide whether to display courses when users
Home/My Moodle” that is good for keeping the learners are not logged in, and/or logged in
enrolled in multiple courses organized. This feature acts
•• You can decide if you want courses to be displayed
like a dashboard for learners, and can be set as the
in a listing, in a combination of course categories and
default home page for the site. That means that when
courses, or not at all
students click on the home navigation menu item, they
will be taken to this page if you wish. •• If learners are expected to find and sign-up for their
own courses based on interest, then displaying courses
•• On this page, you also have a setting called “Show
on the front page generally works well.
Course Categories” that can be disabled or enabled.
If enabled, it will display the course categories in the •• If learning is assigned to the learner, then you can
breadcrumb area and navigation blocks display courses only once the learner is enrolled.

Media players (YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo) Site Name and Site Summary

Moodle has filters that scan the HTML content upload / •• This feature is tucked away, so people tend to forget
created in Moodle, and will display links to media using a to name their Moodle site, and provide a description.
media player. This allows instructors to simply add a link to Consider this your reminder!
a recognized media file, and have it play in the media player
without having to know how to embed HTML media related Maintenance Mode
tags. At Lambda, we have found that clients prefer to enable
If the site is undergoing a large amount of work, such
all the different types of media, and that the Vimeo filter
as an upgrade, then site access for everyone except for
(set to “no” by default), is a popular media filter that is often
administrator accounts can be turned off. A message can
switched on.
also be displayed to notify users of this.

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SETUP BEST PRACTICES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Domain Name SCORM

•• The site can operate with your own domain name. A few SCORM activities recommendations we have are:
For example, it could look something like training@
•• If your packages are passing back a large amount of
yourcompany.com.
data, you may need to disable the setting for strict
•• The site can operate with an SSL certificate providing adherence to SCORM 1.2 standard
HTTPS as an extra layer of security for either the full site,
or just the login pages.

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