Lesson 1: Managing user accounts and roles

Managing user accounts and roles is a critical part of Moodle administration. As an administrator, you have the power to control who can access your Moodle site and what they can do once they’re in.

User Accounts:

User accounts are the basic building blocks of any Moodle site. Each person who accesses your site will need a user account. As an administrator, you can create user accounts manually, or users can create their own accounts, depending on your site settings.

When creating user accounts, you’ll need to provide some basic information, such as the user’s full name, email address, and a username. You’ll also need to set a password for the account, which the user can change later.

Once a user account is created, you can edit the account to update information, reset the user’s password, or delete the account if necessary.

User Roles:

Roles in Moodle define what a user can and cannot do within your site. Each role is a collection of permissions that can be assigned to specific users in specific contexts.

Moodle comes with several predefined roles, including:

Administrator: Has full access to the site. Can do everything.
Course Creator: Can create and manage courses and teach in them.
Teacher: Can teach in courses and grade students, but not create new courses.
Non-editing Teacher: Can teach in courses and grade students, but can’t alter activities or resources.
Student: Can participate in courses but not alter them.
Guest: Has minimal privileges and usually can’t enter text anywhere.
As an administrator, you can assign roles to users at the site level, the category level, the course level, or the activity level. This allows you to control access and permissions with a high degree of granularity.

In the next lesson, we will delve deeper into the process of enrolling and unenrolling users in courses. Stay tuned!