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• Grade Item Settings: Grade item settings are the various settings that the administrator is
able to edit for all gradebooks used by teachers. These settings will change what items are
displayed for each grade. Let’s suppose that you want the grades to be displayed on the
form of Letters (to represent a range of percentages) to the students then you have to set
the grade display type option to letters so that the actual grades entered by the teachers
will be displayed as letters to the students.

• Scales: Scales are a way of evaluating or rating a students’ performance. Administrators
can create standard scales which are available across the site, and teachers can create
custom scales just for their own course. We have discussed about Scales in chapter 18.

• Letters: TO define the range of percentage in the form of letters you can define the letters
on this page. Moodle will provide you with some default letter grades. You can customize
the same by clicking Edit Letter Grades anytime.

• Report Settings:
– Grader Report: Here you can define the default preferences for the Grader report
to be displayed sitewide to all teachers. You can define how many students to be
displayed on a page, quick grading, quick feedback, AJAX to be enabled by default
or not, etc. However, teachers can still be able to change the default settings by using
the “My Report Preferences” link.
– Overview Report: The overview report lists all the courses a student is enrolled in
together with the total grade for each course. You can define whether to Show the
rank of the students in relation to the rest of the class for each grade item and whether
totals which contain hidden grade items are shown to students or replaced with a
hyphen symbol.
– User Report: The user report shows the currently logged in user’s grades in the
current course. It includes:
* A breakdown of the grades for each assessment (grade item) in the course.
* The optional teacher-given feedback for each grade.
* The overall grade for the course (called course total).

Teachers can choose whether to show or hide rank and percentages in the Gradebook
course settings.

Badges

• Badge Settings: Here you can set the name and email address of the badge issuer. You may
set the name of the institution in this field as this name will be displayed while viewing
the badges. You can also set the connection to the external backpacks like Mozilla’s Open
Badges.

You can also enable the course badges on this page which allows the teachers to create
and award badges.

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• Manage Badges: On this page you can manage the Site Badges. Site badges can only be
awarded to users for site-related activities. These include completing a set of courses or
parts of user profiles. Site badges can also be issued manually by one user to another.

Badges for course-related activities must be created at the course level. Course badges can
be found under Course Administration > Badges.

You will find a link on this page to “Add a new Badge” to add a new badge to the Site
badges.
• Add a new badge: You can add a new site wide badge using this link. You have to enter
the details like the name and description of the badge along with the badge image.

You have to enter the Issuer details on this page like the Name and Email address in the
Issuer Section.

You may also enter the expiry date for the badges awarded by your institution. Optionally,
badges can expire on a specific date, or the date can be calculated based on the date when
the badge was issued to a user.

Location

• Location Settings: The location settings page includes the following options:
– Default TimeZone: This sets the default time zone for date display. This can be
overridden by a user’s profile setting unless the default time zone is forced.
– Default Country: Select your country so that it appears by default on the new account
page.
– IP Address Lookup: By default Moodle uses the free online NetGeo (The Internet
Geographic Database) server to lookup location of IP addresses, which is not
maintained anymore. It is recommended to install local copy of free GeoLite City
database from MaxMind. IP address location is displayed on simple map or using
Google Maps.

• Update Timezones: This page will search for new information about world timezones (in-
cluding daylight savings time rules) and update your local database with this information.

Language

One of Moodle’s many strengths is its language-handling capabilities. As we mentioned in
Chapter 2, you can provide users with a choice of language or force a language in a particular
course. Even if you want your site in English only, you may well find the language editing facility
useful for making changes to the standard text in Moodle.

• Language Settings: The language settings page includes the following options:
– Default language: This sets the default language for the site. The setting can be
overridden by users using the language menu, or the setting in their personal profile.

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If a preferred language is set in a user’s browser, then this will override the default site
language.

– Display language menu: This sets whether the language menu is displayed on the
login page and the front page. If it is turned off, the only places where a user can
change the language setting are in her user profile or in the course settings if she is
a teacher.

– Languages on the language menu: If you want to limit the number of languages
students and teachers can select from, enter a reduced list here.

– Cache language menu: If enabled, the list of available translations is cached.
– Cache all language strings: Caches all the language strings into compiled files in the

data directory.
– Sitewide locale: It’s generally best to leave this setting empty, as it’s set through each

language pack.
– Excel encoding: Leave as default (Unicode) unless you have a particular reason for

wanting Latin encoding.

• Language Customization: The language editing interface enables you to easily change any
word or phrase used on the site. For example, you may want to change the word “Course”
to “Unit.”

To change a word or phrase:
– Go to the Administration > Site administration > Language> Language customization
page.
– Pick the language to customize from the pull down list.
– Click on the “Open language pack for editing” button. This may take some time to
process.
– Once the language pack has loaded, click on the “Continue” button.
– Click or Ctrl+Click to select the files in the “Show strings of these components” list.
Notice that the files are grouped. For example, you will find the lesson strings under
“mod” and moodle.php under “core”.
– After selecting the file(s), it is possible to use the “Only strings containing” filter
along with other filters. For example, to look at only the string text that has the word
“teacher” the file(s) you selected.
– Click on “Show strings”.
– Make your changes in the appropriate “Local customization” box.
– Click on “Apply changes and continue editing” if you want to use another filter or
edit other file(s).
– Click on “Save changes to the language pack” to save all of the changes you have
made.

• Language Packs: At the time of this writing, over 100 language packs are available for you
to install on your Moodle site. Simply select the languages you require from the list of
available language packs and click the “Install selected language pack” button.

All language packs, apart from English, are stored in the moodledata/lang folder.

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Figure 19-6 Editing word or phrases

Plugins

As mentioned in the beginning of this book, Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object Oriented
Developmental Learning Environment. It has a modular design which can be extended by using
the Plugins designed by the community members.
You can extend the functionality of your Moodle site by choosing Plugins from the large
collection of plugins on Moodle Community site.

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Install Plugin

In Moodle 2.7 you can install the plugins right within the Moodle site from your browser either
directly from the Moodle plugins directory or by uploading a ZIP file. No need to install plugins
through your FTP interface. Alternatively, an add-on code may be deployed manually at the
server.

The web server process has to have write access to the plugin type folder where the new
add-on is to be installed in order to use either of these methods.

To install a plugin from the Moodle plugins directory to your Moodle site:

• Go to Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Install plugins.
• Click the button ‘Install plugins from Moodle plugins directory’.
• Search for a plugin with an Install button, click the Install button then click Continue.
• Check that you obtain a ‘Validation passed!’ message, and then click the button ‘Install

plugin’.

Plugins Overview

The Plugins overview page in Administration > Site Administration > Plugins > Plugins overview
lists all installed plugins, together with the version number, release, availability (enabled or
disabled) and settings link (if applicable).

Figure 19-7 Installing plugins

A ‘Check for available updates’ button enables admins to quickly check for any updates
available for plugins installed on the site (from the plugins directory). Any updates available
are highlighted, with further information and a download link in the notes column opposite the
plugin.

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Activity Modules

The activities page, as shown in Figure 19-8, enables you to manage Moodle’s activity modules.

The Hide/Show column allows selected modules to be hidden, so they do not appear in any
course “Add an activity” drop-down menu and cannot be used in any course. To hide a module,
click the eye icon so that it changes to a closed eye.

For various reasons, few modules are hidden by default. For example, the Assignment 2.2 and
Feedback modules are included in Moodle for historical reasons but kept as disabled by default.

Figure 19-8 Managing activities

The activities page also lists how many activities for each module there are on your Moodle site.

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If you click on a number, the list of courses containing that activity will be displayed.

Apart from the basic standard modules, any module can be deleted using the link in the Delete
column.

There is no reason for standard modules to be deleted. However, nonstandard modules may need
to be deleted before upgrading.

To delete a module completely, in addition to deleting it on the activities page, you also
need to remove/delete the actual module folder from the moodle/mod folder. Otherwise,
Moodle will reinstall it next time you access the site administration. This also applies
to blocks.

Many of the modules have additional settings, which can be accessed via the links in the Settings
column. Settings you may want to change include:

• Assignment: You can set the default feedback plugin, submission statement and various
other default assignment settings.

• Book: Here you can define the available options for chapter formatting and the default
option for chapter formatting.

• Chat: By default the chat method is Ajax which can be changed to Normal method or
Chat Server daemon. Ajax method works everywhere but if many people are using chat
simultaneously then it can put a large load on the server. On this page you can define the
settings for the chat method you have chosen.

• Database, Forum & Glossary: If you have enabled RSS across the site (in the Server > RSS
section of the Site Administration block), you will also need to enable RSS in the Database,
Forum, and Glossary modules. You can also set the default settings for Forum and Glossary
activities.

• IMS Content Package: IMS content package settings page allows you to set whether the
description for the activity is required or not and how many packages should be archived.

• Label: Label module settings page allows you to set whether Moodle should offer to create
a label when media files are dragged & dropped onto a course and the resized height and
width of the image.

• Lesson: You can define the slideshow and popup media settings and the action which has
to be taken after a correct answer.

• External Tool (LTI): You can add external tools providers (LTI providers) from this page.
We have discussed about external tools in Chapter 17.

• Page: You can define the available display options for the page resource. By default only
open is selected. You can also display a page resource in a popup window.

• Quiz: You can define the default values that are used in the settings form when you create
a new quiz. You can simplify the “Add a new quiz” page by selecting a number of options
to be hidden from teachers by default and only displayed when teachers click the “Show
More” button.

• File: You can define the available display options and the default values available to the
teacher while adding a file resource.