Administration Features 

An administrator can set Moodle to authenticate new users in several other ways (Fig. 74), including: 

Manual accounts only (individual enrollments by admin) 

No authentication (as name implies, no authentication allowed) 

PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) 

Use a FirstClass server 

Use a POP3 server 

Use an IMAP server 

Use an LDAP server 

Fig. 74 

Use an NNTP server 

Use an external database 

Edit user accounts: When you click this link Moodle allows the administrator to browse a list of all site 

users, and edit or delete their account. 

Add a new user: When the admin uses  Manual accounts only  as an authentication scheme they can add 

a new user to the site from this screen. 

Upload user: If you are sure you want to import multiple user accounts from a text file, then you need to 

format your text file as follows: 

a.) Each line of the file contains one record  

b.) Each record is a series of data separated by commas  

c.) The first record of the file is special, and contains a list of fieldnames. This defines the format of the 

rest of the file.  

Required fieldnames: these fields must be included in the first record, and defined for each user 

username, password, firstname, lastname, email 

Default fieldnames: these are optional   if they are not included then the values are taken from 

the primary admin 

institution, department, city, country, lang, timezone  

Optional fieldnames: all of these are completely optional. The course names are the 

"shortnames" of the courses   if present then the user will be enrolled as students in those courses. 

Group names must be associated to the corresponding courses, i.e. group1 to course1, etc. 

idnumber, icq, phone1, phone2, address, url, description, mailformat, maildisplay, htmleditor, 

autosubscribe, course1, course2, course3, course4, course5, group1, group2, group3, group4, 

group5 

d.) Commas within the data should be encoded as ,   the script will automatically decode these 

back to commas.  

e.) For Boolean fields, use 0 for false and 1 for true.  

f.) Note: If a user is already registered in the Moodle user database, this script will return the userid 

number (database index) for that user, and will enrol the user as a student in any of the specified 

courses WITHOUT updating the other specified data.  

Here is an example of a valid import file: 

username, password, firstname, lastname, email, lang, idnumber, maildisplay, course1, group1 

jonest, verysecret, Tom, Jones, jonest@someplace.edu, en, 3663737, 1, Intro101, Section 1 

reznort, somesecret, Trent, Reznor, reznort@someplace.edu, en_us, 6736733, 0, Advanced202,  

Section 3 

Enrolments: On page 45 different authentication schemes were discussed, with the default method being 

 Email based authentication . Authentication and enrollment are two  different  processes  in  Moodle.            

Authentication is the process whereby a student creates an account that allows them to login to the site. 

The enrollment scheme you select controls how the student will access a specific course on the site. 

Moodle allows you to make one of four selections from the Enrolments screen: (Fig. 75)  

Internal Enrolments: This is the default and used 

in most situations. A user will enter a course by  

clicking its link on the site front page. The course 

owner can establish an  enrolment key  with the 

courses Settings properties. 

External Database: an external database can 

control who is enrolled in courses, provided it  

follows a table structure that Moodle expects.         

See the help file on the properties screen if you 

use this selection. 

Fig. 75 

http://moodle.org 

46