Hello everyone and welcome to this Moodle Academy webinar, Introduction to Moodle for Administrators. I am Mary Cooch, Education Manager at Moodle HQ and with me I have Anna Kraser who is Education Advisor. Anna. Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. I'm sorry it's going to be a very interesting session, we follow you here. Good, so during the session just to let you know we will be pausing the presentation at intervals so that we can read out and answer any of your questions and queries. Okay, so let's begin and we're going to look at learning Moodle from the very beginning and it's important to understand that if you're new to Moodle there are two parts to understanding how it works. There is what we call the administration part and that is for example making your Moodle site look attractive, branding it, adding teachers and students, adding spaces for the learning materials and resources but there's also what we call teaching with Moodle which is what you do in a course, how you add your activities, your examinations, your quizzes, your files and so on and that is something that we're not looking at today, we're focusing on administration but we have a webinar next week, same time next week, Introduction to Moodle for Educators and in that webinar you will be introduced to how you can use Moodle's activities for your teaching. Together both of these webinars hopefully will give you a good beginner picture of how to use Moodle. Now of course Moodle is entirely free and open source to anyone in the world so you could go to our downloads site and download Moodle and install it yourself and start using it, perhaps some of you have. That's fine, it's not for everyone though because you do need some technical understanding so another way of getting Moodle is to have a Moodle that's already hosted online by a company, there are many companies out there by our officially certified Moodle service providers, our Moodle partners or again if you're not particularly technical and you just want to try Moodle and then use it for yourself you can use Moodle Cloud, Moodle Cloud is our Moodle HQ provided ready to use Moodle service and you simply go to Moodle Cloud sign up and you can have a site, you can try it for free for 45 days and then you can either continue by paying or get Moodle in another way but what we're going to look at in our administration webinar today is not the technical side of installing Moodle and all of that on the server, we're going to look at how you can be a Moodle administrator from within the admin interface of Moodle and we're going to focus on well we're going to look at Moodle Cloud sites but everything we say also applies to a Moodle site that you have hosted online somewhere else or even that you've done yourself and so this is what we're going to look at, we're going to explore the main admin settings that you need including how you can customize your site, make it more colorful, add images, brand it and so on and in fact that's the first thing we're going to do, both of those, then we're going to look at how you can add what Moodle calls the courses so that's the teaching and learning spaces where you add the materials then once we've got our courses set up and hopefully we've added some teaching materials how you can add your teachers and students and then I'm going to give you a few quick tips as to where you can go and what you can do to find out more because of course we cannot do everything just in a short one hour webinar so let's get started exploring the main admin settings and customizing our site to a basic degree of course to do all of this we need to log in as an administrator to our brand new Moodle site I'm logging in here to a Moodle Cloud site and an important difference by the way is if you're using Moodle Cloud you don't see an open to the world front page site home we call it you just see the login page until you're logged in if you have a Moodle site from a hosting company or you set it up yourself normally you would be able to see that front page without a login so we're going to log in to a Moodle site for the first time this applies to all sites and this is what we see it's very empty we have a nice welcome message to us as the new admin there are no courses available because we haven't done anything and if you look top left it says your school which is not my name of choice this is the the name for my site that I was given when I set it up obviously I'm going to want to change that and you'll see at the top there are some links dashboard my courses site administration now site administration is only seen by us the admin and that's where we will spend most of our time today dashboard and my courses are useful for your teachers and students but obviously if we looked on this site here we'd see nothing because we haven't done anything so I'm going to take you quickly to another Moodle site where a student has been working in courses over several months so you can see what it looks like in action so if we click the dashboard link to go to another Moodle site our student here sees a timeline of assignments activities that she needs to complete she has deadlines in them she also sees a calendar of events which can be personal to her or set up by the teacher in the courses and she may well also have a little block showing her where she was last in a course so she can go back to that course and continue where she left off in fact you the admin you can define what is seen on this dashboard page for everyone in the site in terms of her courses if she clicks the my courses link at the top of the page she sees all of the courses she's enrolled in she can filter them by as she has now in progress you see the tab at the left or she can click to to find the past ones the completed ones the future ones and you'll see there are some nice images with the names of the courses the teacher or the admin can add these images to make it look more attractive you don't have to and you also notice that it has completion percentages so our student can see how much of the course she's already completed what she has yet to do and if you are thinking well I don't want that because my courses will only ever have some files and they won't have a start or end date that's fine you can turn that off if you want to okay but all of those things obviously you need to do as an administrator and our student doesn't have site admin link at the top because she's just a student so let's go back to our completely blank moodle site as a site administrator and click the site administration link and now you can see that we have various links or tabs across the page which take us logically to different parts of the site admin for example if we want to start making courses we would click courses if we want to improve how our site looks which is what we're going to do now we would click appearance now you don't need as an admin to remember where everything is so you can quite simply click where it says search type in a word and then moodle will suggest you some places that you might want to go to now I think the first thing that we should do is change that annoying your school top left which is the short name of the site and change it to the name that I want for my moodle site and that is actually already on this first general tab if we move down a little bit where it says site home site home is moodle's front page and if we click the link site home settings this is where we can change the full name and the short name so the full name is in big the short name is up there on the left as you can see they can be the same if they're not too long I'm just going to change mine to cloud control I just thought the name up it's whatever you need your site to be called you can give it a summary here however this summary as it is now appears in the side of your site it might not be exactly what you want but if we go a little bit further down there are a couple of other settings useful to know if your site is not a moodle cloud site and the front page is visible to everyone you can define from the top drop downs what you want people to see when they come to your site for example the list of available courses and for every every type of moodle site you can also define what you want to be visible on the front page once people have logged in now there are other settings but we're just going to get started for now and a very important tip to remember is always to go to the bottom of your page and click save changes so that we've saved our changes and if I now move on you'll see where my number one is top left I've now changed the name of the site cloud control it's no longer your school and so what we're going to do now is to see if we can improve this very bland white appearance of the site and so we need to click the appearance tab so if we click where I've got my number two if we click appearance we have a section called appearance and in there just to point out for example if you see we have default dashboard page so if you wanted to decide what people would see on that dashboard page as the admin you can do it there and I also want to point out to you the link navigation because if we click navigation perhaps you might be someone who was thinking I don't need a timeline of activity deadlines or a calendar because my site is always my courses are always available and they're just files from navigation you can actually untick or uncheck so the dashboard isn't seen by anyone equally on start page for users you can decide where to send your teachers and students once they've logged in do you want them to go straight to the my courses page do you want them to stay on the home page or do you want them to be able to decide for themselves so these are just a couple of examples of what you can see from the navigation link which is in appearance let's go back to that appearance tab and if we look at themes towards the bottom themes is basically a skin or a background to make your site look more attractive moodle cloud sites have one theme which comes as standard called boost if you have another site from another hosting company or you you installed it yourself you'll also see there right at the bottom as well as boost there is a theme called classic and what's good about these themes is if you just click the name of them so if I click where it says boost it takes me to the settings page for that theme where I can make some simple changes so we have a general settings tab and an advanced settings tab any of you who are good with css you can click the advanced settings tab and add some css to improve the color and the display of this theme on your site I'm not very good at that but I am interested in the general settings tab so for example if you have a colleague or a friend who is good at creating a set of of settings for a theme which we'd call a preset you could upload it here and that would change your site very easily what I like is if we scroll down a little bit on this page you can upload a background image so you wouldn't have the plain white you could also upload a login page background image so that when people log into the site they can it looks more attractive and this is where you can do branding of your site also it's if you look to the very bottom of the screen you can just by clicking in the colors there you can choose a brand color and decide what kind of colors you want for the text and the titles and so on to show you as an example I actually uploaded a login page background image to the amount to my site or to one of my sites and so now people come to the site and they see beautiful sunflowers this might not be to your taste but it's just demonstrating that even though you have a simple site you can easily customize it but it might be possible for you to do even more than that so this does not apply to Moodle cloud sites because in Moodle cloud sites you cannot install extra things extra themes however if you have your own site or with a different company you need to click where it says plugins and if you click plugins if you can actually see the words install plugins this means that you can upload from that link one of our many free themes which Moodle offers which Moodle contributors have given to Moodle and you can upload install one of those a theme is a plugin because it's something extra to the standard and then you can have many other different ways of showing your Moodle site so you can go from the very simple color changes to a quite different look by installing a theme from install plugins okay not on Moodle cloud but elsewhere in other Moodle sites now that's quite a lot to begin with so I'm going to pause there and before we go on to the next part of the webinar I'm going to stop and I'm going to ask Anna if there are any comments or questions that we can cover for a couple of minutes about setting up your site okay well we have lots of greetings from all over the world as we mentioned before and we have a question from Andrew he says he asks so why can you install themes on Moodle cloud? The reason is quite simply that Moodle cloud that offers a limited but very very easy to use set of features for Moodle and it's the same for everyone and we have hundreds and hundreds of sites around the world so also so so in order to keep it secure and safe and modern and up to date there are certain limitations but we do say that if you want to have extra plugins and you want to have more functionality more users then we we strongly recommend you go the next step up which is to our Moodle partners there is a Moodle cloud FAQ if you go to Moodle cloud or if you have a site and you go to your portal and this question is dealt with in more detail there. Great and we have Robert who's asking what are the image sizes required for the home page images? Do you mean the images for courses or for the front page? For courses I tend myself and we're going to look at this in a moment to use 600 by 400 for the actual for the the login page or the background image. I can't remember immediately but I think if we go to the documentation and again I'm going to show you the quick way to go there it should say there if it doesn't I'll make sure that it does yeah because one of the the ways that you can learn more about Moodle is by accessing the documentation and of course if we have any people in the chat who are already using Moodle you might know the answer if we don't. Okay as far as remember for the front page you need a high quality image it's good to have a big one. Yes now Lin says can I customize the login on Moodle cloud side? Can you customize the the login page? Oh yes you can yes you can yes and Stefan says what is the size and format preferences for a logo? The size and format preferences for the logo are also in the documentation so unless someone has the answer there I will suggest that you go and look at the documentation as well and after this webinar I'll go and check it myself to make sure it's up to date. Okay well for sure the format is an image so it could be a PNG or JPEG image something like that. Yeah because it's an image I'm not sure about the size but we can find out for you. Okay would you go on? And one last one for Merrick can we change at will all the settings? Can we change at will all of the settings? Well as an administrator there is a lot that you can do yes so you have great power but also great responsibility yes and there are some settings in Moodle cloud that you can't change but you will notice those because when you go into the site admin in Moodle cloud if it says something like defined in config PHP that means you can't change it in Moodle cloud but most of it you can do you can change in Moodle cloud just as with other Moodle sites. Okay shall we move on? Yes yes I think we are ready. Right so now we've got our site set up and we've added an image and it's quite attractive we're going to look at how we can add what Moodle calls courses which are the the spaces or the pages where teachers teach and learners learn and so it makes sense that we click site administration and then we go to the link called courses now here I'm going to explain three ways of adding courses to your Moodle site my one two and three and the first way add a new course is quite simply where you the administrator you manually manually create one single individual course this is very easy it's fine if you are for example homeschooling and you only need a few courses it's not so good if you want a lot of courses on a big site so we'll look at other ways as well if you click the link add a new course then you're prompted to give it a full name and a short name again they can be the same and I was just to explain I was a languages teacher for 28 years before I joined Moodle so I always think of French it's always my example but you can call your courses whatever is relevant to the topic you're teaching and then and then in a category Moodle comes with a default category which is either called category one or miscellaneous and this can be changed by you if you don't like the name if you're very organized and you like to organize your courses into different categories you can also create other categories and move your courses into there I'll show you where in a moment but for now if we scroll down out of the many settings something else that is useful is to add a description of the course and also a course image and this is what we saw when we were this is what we saw when we were looking at the dashboard no the my courses page our students had quite a few images with course descriptions so I'm going to add that okay and then another thing that you might be interested in is the course format so this is how the activities are divided up on the course page in the sections weekly formats means that they will show the weeks depending on when your course starts however if you're not using weeks if your course is available and it's not time dependent you could use topics format I prefer topics format for example because you get numbered sections and me in my french course I would change the numbers to listening reading speaking writing and add relevant materials in there and anytime you're not sure of something click those question mark icons next to a setting and it gives you some pots and help in a pop-up there are other settings you would click to expand them we will look at more of these next week in the moodle educator webinar but for now again as always we click the button at the bottom save and display and we have a first new course and if you remember when we first came to our home page we had nothing on it available courses none now we've got one course and you can see the image and you can see its title now that's fine however as I said to you if you're going to make a lot of courses or if you've already got a course that someone has made and given you add a new course number one is not very helpful so we're now going to look at number two which is called restore course this is where you would go if you've got a ready made existing moodle course maybe your colleague has given it to you or maybe you went on a training day you created a practice course and the trainer got you to save that so you could add it to your new moodle site so you're basically here if we click restore course you are uploading what moodle calls a backup file that is an existing course okay so this is where you go to upload a ready made course a backup and you need to ensure that your course ends in dot mbz that is the format the correct format of a moodle course backup to add to this restore course link and I strongly advise you and I'm sure Anna will too go to our site moodle net which is where we have lots of resources for everyone using moodle and we have nearly 70 sample or example courses that you could add you could restore to your moodle sites and to try to adopt to explore you don't have to use them as they are you can look at them and change them to fit you or just to see how moodle activities work so please do try that okay so we've looked at adding a course individually we've looked at how you can upload or restore an existing course but if you've got a large site or you're expecting to have a lot of courses then you would need to click the link number three upload courses upload courses is not a very good name because you're not actually creating the courses yourself you are uploading a spreadsheet with course information so that moodle can then create the courses for you so if we click this link again we're going to choose a file and we need to make sure it's the correct format so these are not ready made courses you're uploading the course information not an existing course and it should end in dot csv it's a csv file with the name the category and so on of the courses and you could have a long list of them again if you need help click that question mark icon but here is a good time for me to point out to you that on moodle four courses moodle four is the latest version of moodle bottom right you'll see a question mark icon and wherever you are as an admin or a teacher on your moodle site if you click the question mark icon you will see a link that says help and documentation and that takes you directly to the moodle documentation page that's relevant to the place where you are at the moment in context help so if for example you need to know how to format your csv file to upload course information clicking there will take you straight to the documentation page where you'll see an example csv file that you can use okay so that's three ways you can create your courses on your new moodle site before we pause again i want to point out two other useful links manage courses and categories is where you can go if as i said you wanted to change the name of the default category from category one or miscellaneous to a name that suits you or you want to organize your courses into other categories and subcategories course default settings is also useful for you to explore if you want to ensure consistency across all the courses on your site for example you want them all to be topic format or you want specific ways people can enroll in them so those are two useful links once you've created your courses okay there is much more we can say but i feel it's time to pause again and answer any more questions or any more issues which are being raised so i'm going to pass over to ana again yes uh taguchi says um his own experience um they have organizing a self-based learning course for the thousand learners worldwide and they started from a pilot and received the lots of feedback from the learners uh that the platform was not intuitive and the interface was not user-friendly now they want to improve it before the second phase of the project and how they can uh he's asking how they can receive a customized support from moodle um well i had already this case as a case that would be better to to be dealt with uh the expertise of moodle certified provider um this one uh uh provides some information about the the the logo and the optimum size and he says that uh the optimum size of uh the logo depends on the theme uh that is used and but with some css tricks i'm always you can get the look that you want that's true if you have the technical uh background um uh also uh this one i've informed that um moodle was not initially set up as a platform for mooks uh and um there are though variations of uh moodle that are more tailored in uh for mooks and uh there are information in moodle org forums yes i would question that a little bit because if you think about it the site itself moodle.org which is over 20 years old has million users and has been used regularly and in a sense that is a kind of a permanent ongoing mook uh up until a couple of years ago we had a site learn.moodle.org which was a completely regular normal moodle site which again we used for a twice week twice yearly moodle mook so it is it is available it depends on again uh how you can how the performance is set up and so on and so forth i do very much agree that uh for questions like this and other moodle admin related questions do please go to our community forums on moodle.org that's one of the places i'm going to remind you of in the last section where we look at where you can find out more okay anything else or shall yes uh martin says uh how can i backup courses and can i then restore them just when needed because he needs to save uh disk space yes absolutely if you go to site administration courses or if you can't remember then remember to go to the search the search box and you can type it in then backup you can see various options for backing up the whole site uh regular course backups and if you go inside a course now this is something that we will look at next week in the moodle for educators webinar if you go inside a course and you click the more link inside a course course reuse is where you can go to backup your course and then you can simply download it and put it somewhere else for safekeeping so you don't have to keep it on your moodle site so you can very easily do that in different ways okay and that is where you would go if you wanted to share a course with someone else and then they would use the restore course option to restore it okay yes uh riza said that uh on my moodle site the courses in my courses tab are displayed as a list where can i go to change how courses are displayed okay i'll have them as a card layout yeah so so when you go to that page you should have an option at the top left right right too and you can choose from card view or list view so there are various ways to display the courses i just showed you the one which has what we call cards because it's more attractive with the images but you can go to the top and change it if the admin has allowed so there is an admin setting in appearance where these kinds of things are that might force people only to use one course display but then again if you don't have that option to view them as cards as i've shown you then uh you need either to ask your administrator to give you that option or as the administrator go into the appearance section and find it for yourself but there are ways of of displaying it in other ways okay and william says that moodle has course backups inside backups that are very good and suggests that uh to check uh backup and restore just the parts they want or the whole course and he says that i often uh copy activities from one course into another this way with just a few mouse clicks and lisa says that she has a difficulty restoring the moodle site due to its size of the range suggestions she has frequently problems restoring courses in terms of difficulty restoring the moodle side because the site is too big right okay these are the kinds of questions that i suggest you ask in our forums on moodle.org because it's not exactly a kind of a beginner admin question here where we're just covering the very starts of admin but i'm so glad that uh you're asking these questions so that you understand the best place to go for some help so moodle.org and there are various forums there for instance an installing and upgrading forum where you can get some advice on topics like that we'll focus on the basic beginner admin here and the last one we have it's for uh verena how can i display the whole picture in a course not only a small part of it um do you mean i'm not quite sure what can you understand what she means anna i think she's referring to the dashboard where other courses appear as times so i think it depends on the size of your of your emails perhaps you should play with that yeah what you will see in that tile depends on on what you've got on the image so if you want to show all of the all everything that's in the image you would have to play as anna says with the size of the image and it might not look quite right i i always try to find images that that display well sometimes it takes several tries different um attempts to get an image that that looks okay really and not with text because that possibly could be too small and not particularly accessible okay i think we'd better continue so that we are not too over time and we have a very important section now extremely important which is adding teachers and students let's assume that we've created our courses and that perhaps we've been to next week's webinar we learn how to make great moodle teaching activities so it's worth adding teachers and students it's very important before we do this to understand a little bit about how moodle's hierarchy works and how moodle thinks about teachers and students so in your moodle site and here is a graphic of a blue and orange house which you can imagine is your moodle site you are the administrator you can do anything everywhere so as i already said that is great power but also great responsibility because it means you can break everything that's why it's good to have training such as this webinar and the subsequent links i'm going to give you so you are comfortable being a moodle admin and if you want a friend or colleague also to be the admin do make sure they also have got some understanding and training on how to be an administrator everyone else who comes to your site when they log in they are an authenticated user that's just the term moodle gives for anyone else on the site they can go to your site they can log in but they can't do anything they only become a teacher or a student when they go into individual courses you don't log in to moodle as a teacher you don't log in to moodle as a student what you are depends on what course you're in and what the admin has decreed okay and there are two terms which it's important to understand for this because it's a two-step process first you need to get on the site then you need to get into the course authentication means getting getting people onto your site giving them accounts letting them create their own accounts and then enrollment means getting people into your courses adding them yourself or letting them sign up yourself to your courses enrollment with 1l if you are a british or australian english enrollment with 2l if you're american english neither both are correct it's not a spelling mistake and it's important to know these two terms because if you do have a problem with your moodle site then you can use these terms correctly if you go to the forums on moodle.org or you ask in the portal of your moodle cloud site or the support in your hosted moodle so obviously the first thing we need to do is authentication that's we need to get people moodle calls them users onto our moodle site and so we click the site administration link and then we click users and there are many ways of getting people onto moodle i'm just going to show you the two most popular ways and then a third way that i'm anticipating you're going to want okay and i hope you do so the first way number one add a new user is equivalent to when we went to courses and we clicked add a new course so this is where you would individually and manually add one new user you would give them a user name i suggest if you're going to add several you try some full consistency adding moodle users and you need to give them a password add a first name last name email now a helpful hint is you can tick a box called generate password and notify user and that means that instead of you making a password moodle will create a password and it will send that person an email telling them that they have a new account their username and password so that saves you some work you can also i have a second orange arrow pointing to a box for force password change if you tick that the first time this person alex in our case comes to the site they will be prompted to change their password to something they can remember okay and as ever go down and click to save the changes and then we've got our very first manually created moodle user and as an admin if you go to the list of users you'll see that we are no longer lonely in our cloud control site we have alex who is another moodle user however just like when we went to add a new course that's not very helpful if we think we're going to have hundreds of people on our site so the second option is to click upload users and again this is equivalent to upload courses in that you're not actually creating them yourself you are giving moodle the information in a spreadsheet csv file so that moodle can create them for you so if we click upload users again we're prompted to choose and upload a file what's good in this case is that moodle actually gives you an example text file that you can download and use to help you so it shows you the formatting of the dot csv file that you're going to use to add your users and a little hint we don't have time in this webinar but you can include in that csv file not only the user's information but the courses you want them to go into and even whether you want them to be teachers or students in the courses and again if you click the question mark icons to go to the documentation you can see examples of how to do that now that's fine that's two ways that you the admin can add people onto your moodle site but i very much hope you're thinking that's a lot of work i don't want to do that i want them to come to me in other words you want them to create their own accounts so you don't have to perhaps you've gone on moodle sites and you've seen uh is this your first time here and you've seen a button where they need to create a new account you want to do that so that you don't have to do anything well for that we need to click inside administration plugins and we need to look at another authentication method and again don't worry if you can't remember this use the search box top right and type in there so if we actually go to authentication we need to click manage authentication because we need to manage the authentication method for letting people create their own accounts and when we go to that page we see something called email based self registration this is basically the name for people can create their own accounts to get onto your site and you need to open the eye so there's a number one next to a closed eye click to open the eye that will make it visible so people can sign up create their own accounts on your moodle site there's an extra security setting if you go further down in common settings make sure that email based self registration is also enabled and when you've done that and it's saved then your people will be able to create their own accounts so they're now on your site but they can't actually do anything until they can get into your course which is the other step which is enrolment okay now enrolment takes place in courses so what we'll do now is we will go into that course we created you remember we manually created basic french so if we just click into the basic french course that we created before it's very empty next week in the webinar moodle for educators we'll look at how you can populate this with interesting resources and activities for now if you click the participants link then when you click the participants link the first thing you'll notice is a button blue button enrol users this is where you can manually add people to the course because at the moment if you look it says not participants found nothing to display there's nobody there so one way is to click the enrol users button and then we have a search box and we can search for people on the site who we want to add to this course we only have alex at the moment so we can only add alex and then you need to assign their role do you want alex to be a teacher or a student as an admin you have more options here than a teacher a teacher doesn't have all these options but you're the admin you can do anything so we've selected alex we're going to make alex a student in the course and we then click bottom right the enrol users button and alex is now enrolled in that course and it says enrol users one participant alex and i do hope again that you're thinking that sounds like a lot of work i want them to sign up to the course themselves just like they signed up to my site themselves okay so if that's what you want we're going to take a look at that now and this is an enrolment method so there are various methods of enrolment so to do this we have to go to the drop down next to the enrol users button if we click the drop down next to the enrol users button we'll see something called enrolment methods and here we can see the various ways people can get into your course what we did is called manual enrolment and you normally always have that but we also have here um it grayed out self enrolment and there is an eye icon my orange arrow is pointing to an eye icon which is closed we need to open the eye icon and that will be it our students will be able to enrol themselves if you wanted to there's some extra things that you can do by clicking the cog icon next to it so if you wanted to optionally if you click the cog icon you can for example set a password on the course or an enrolment key as Moodle calls it and only people who know that key can get into the course you can also put a limit on the number of people to go into the course if you are running a four week course and you don't want more than 25 people you can set a limit and also something nice is from there you can personalize the welcome message that people will get once they have enrolled in your course so those are extra options plus other options as well from there but again as long as you have opened the eye of self enrolment then when someone logs into your site and then clicks on to the course they will see the button enrol me and they will be able to enrol themselves into that course okay this one doesn't have an enrolment key because we didn't set it up now that's a lot to take in particularly because there are two steps to adding teachers and students but I hope it's a little bit clearer and I'm going to pause for one final time here to see what we have and then after that as we draw to the close of the hour I will give you some hints as to where you can go for more information so Anna what do we have now well we have some interesting discussions in the chat and I'm saying discussion because we have questions and we also have answers all right so I will quickly go through them okay Robert asked if Moodle supports single signing on and the answer is yes and this one I have offered a more professional I would say answer saying that it might not have yes in principle but it might not have the SSO you have in your institution in that case you need to make a plugin for that and he also provided a link to the plugins for authentication that's it Thazin said that okay about the zoom recording and I clarify that zoom recording will be available as soon as we have it but tomorrow probably as a draft the inside the course and a little bit later we will provide the edited version and it will be also shared through YouTube Andrea asked about LTI what is LTI and Alex responded that is the learning tools interoperability with the link we have really professional people here that's good okay Edward asked how to have users created through social media accounts well you can yeah you can create some via Gmail or Microsoft Outlook or Facebook it's called OAuth2 we didn't cover it here because again it's an extra step and we only have an hour but there is some documentation if you look up OAuth2 to explain the process for that Dawn is asking as an admin is there a facility to view dashboard as a student I would always advise if you are an admin to have a separate account where you are a student because however you view things whether you're a teacher viewing it as a student or an admin viewing it as a student it's never quite the same so I would always have some test students on your site to see things for real I don't know if you would agree with that Fana absolutely it's I think it's the only way to do things I usually have the main admin account a second account for a student and perhaps a third account for a teacher I usually I don't want to mess up the accounts they change all the time logging and log out so I'm having I'm using different browsers with different login safety every time I'm doing those changes Elin is saying that do all site users see all courses even if they are not enrolled well on a normal noodle site they can see the names of the courses but they can't get into them unless they're somehow enrolled yes there are ways to hide it but the short answer is they can only see the titles Hilary says that I would like my teachers to be able to access all the courses and see information on students in all the courses but I don't necessarily want the teachers to be able to make changes to the courses what is the best role for the teachers in this case there what you could do and again as long as this is safe in terms of privacy and GDPR and so on is you could create a a site-wide non-editing teacher role that could go into all of the courses and I do remember there is a page in the documentation about this it reminds me that if you have some extra questions then you're very welcome to ask your extra questions in one of the forums of our Moodle admin basics courses that I'm going to share with you in a moment and the community members or often me because I love answering questions can give you some more details or point you in the right direction so there are various site roles that people could have to access all courses and yet not be visible but it's it involves more than we have time to explain in this webinar and a nice comment from William says that I will I always enrolled my dog as a student excellent idea your dog must be very clever then I would imagine yep and that's all from the side at the moment okay well I just have one oh is that all I know sorry yes yes yes I just have one more section that just one more slide to share with you and then we will start to wrap up the session and in this one more slide find out more we've covered such a lot and you had so many other questions obviously we don't have more time so I want to point out three areas first of all a reminder that when you are an admin on your new Moodle site Moodle 4 click the question mark icon bottom right of each page and go to the help and documentation which is the Moodle docs or you could go directly to docs.moodle.org which is the full link to all of the documentation and you see the link there says Moodle.org which again is our global site where the community discuss download Moodle how to be an administrator or a teacher and so there are many forums in different languages on there I'm in the French German Russian and English ones at the moment and you're very welcome to ask questions in there but if you are completely new to Moodle admin on this site Moodle Academy we have a program of courses called admin basics specifically designed for you and in fact in there are also discussion forums and so Moodle admin basics program and certificates is entirely free you get you can go through everything free you get a free badge for each of the courses if you want to you can purchase a certificate I know some employers appreciate that but it's not obligatory you can complete the courses and the program with badges for free without but it takes you through in much more detail what we've done in this one hour webinar okay now and I do advise you if you haven't already to look up for that at the end of this webinar unless there are any more questions I'm just going to share with you some other general things about getting involved in Moodle Academy well actually there is one more question from Andrew which is okay it's a bit big what are the key changes from Moodle 3 to 4 right this short answer go and do two courses one is called Moodle 4 for admins one is called Moodle 4 for educators they are on Moodle Academy and they tell you the key changes from Moodle 3 to Moodle 4 yep and Alex already provided the link of the new features from the documentation thank you Alex oh thank you right so yep you we can move on very right then so thank you for attending our webinar I'd love to see some of you again next week in our Moodle for Educators introduction to Moodle for Educators and we'd love you to help us grow our site Moodle Academy ways that you could do this would be to join our Get Involved course the link is on the front page and suggest topics to be covered in future webinars and courses and also if you are an experienced Moodleer you might like to volunteer yourself to contribute to webinars we've had a few already and we have a few in preparation where you then you will get a presenters badge and you can help us and again to contribute to our courses contribute to creating courses and get a course build a badge so go to the Get Involved course to find out more about how you can help us spread the word and grow Moodle Academy in terms of spreading the word as I said do please go to other courses here on Academy and earn some badges which you can then display on social media tell others about Moodle Academy go to Twitter Facebook tell people about this webinar next week's webinar and not necessarily applicable to our admin basics unless you're also a teacher educator as well as an admin but if and when you become an experienced teacher with Moodle you might like to explore doing our Moodle Educator certification program which is a paid program through our Moodle partners but if you're curious to know if you have the right level of skills and experience we have a a quiz are you ready for the MEC which you could take just to see the kinds of level you need so all of these are things related to Moodle Academy and we've been very grateful and thankful for your attendance today and thank you very much from me and from Anna


A long-term note payable is also a very common way for companies to finance operations and growth. A long-term note payable is a contract between a lender, a bank for example, and a borrower, a company. The lender lends cash to the company. We call this the principal amount. The company agrees to repay the principal plus interest at some point in the future as detailed in the loan contract. There are a lot of different types of loans, but I want to introduce you to the three most common for long-term business loans.  Many of you might be familiar with the concept of an installment loan. If you've ever taken out a loan that requires regular monthly payments, chances are it was an installment loan. A common characteristic is that the monthly payment amount is fixed. Additionally, a portion of the payment goes to pay accrued interest and the remainder to reduce the principal amount. This continues month after month until the loan has been paid off. A balloon loan isn't very common for individuals, but it is for businesses, especially large businesses with access to a lot of cash. A common characteristic is that no monthly payment is required. Payment for both the accrued interest and principal are due at the end of the loan. An example might be a company that is starting a new product line and they might want to repay a loan several years after the product line has been established and is quite profitable. A mortgage is a type of installment loan that is secured by real property, meaning land and or building. I want to mention this one because business loans are secured differently than loans for individuals. Large organizations often provide no specific security for long-term notes. Small organizations might be required to list all of the business assets and possibly the owner's assets too in order to secure a loan. The focus of this video is going to be on mortgage payable. So let's wrap up this topic with an example. On July 1, Joy Division signed a 24-month promissory note to borrow $11,000 plus 6% annual interest to acquire a small recording studio. The note payable will be secured by the property, making this a mortgage. They will be making monthly loan payments of $500 beginning on August 1. So what's the journal entry to record the long-term note payable? You can see it's a debit to cash and a credit to mortgage payable for $11,000. In order to easily make the journal entry to record the monthly loan payment, companies prepare an amortization schedule. I've shortened this one to fit on the screen, but it would show each month until the loan balance is zero. You might recall that interest is calculated by taking the principal times the interest rate times time. In this example, that's how the interest column amounts are calculated. The principal reduction is the difference between the payment amount and the amount of interest expense. We can use the amortization table to find the data needed to record the journal entry for the monthly loan payment. We need the payment amount, the amount of interest expense, and the amount that the note's payable is reduced. Using the information from the table, we debit interest expense for $55, debit mortgage payable for $445, this is how we reduce the liability, and credit cash for $500. We could have just as easily recorded the journal entry for November 1. You can see the data highlighted in the amortization table. Also we would debit interest expense for $48, debit mortgage payable for $452, and credit cash for $500.


Okay. Hello everyone. My name is Daniel and I'm with my friend, Rhys, and I'm excited to bring this talk, Oh, Tell Me How to Build a Data Pipeline for Observability. Before we get started, I'm going to tell you a little bit about me. I'm a developer relations engineer at New Relic. I'm really passionate about getting developers better visibility into their systems. And yeah, who are you, Rhys? My name is Rhys. I am also a developer relations engineer. I also work in the open telemetry community on the end user working group. So I hope to be talking to most of not all of you at some point about your adoption and implementation experiences. Yeah. So let's just scooter right into our presentation. So when you're starting to develop your applications, you're probably not worried about the amount of observability data that you're generating, right? You start with a couple thousand metrics, a couple hundred traces, a couple thousand logs. It's not a huge deal.  And that's because doing anything with data costs a lot of money, whether you're processing it, storing it, moving it. And that could go to a particular vendor to do that for you. Or you could be paying a team of engineers to maintain your Prometheus Grafana staff. Whatever you decide is going to cost you money. So how do we make sure that you get the most bang out of for your buck? So here's a couple of things that we at New Relic think that you can do to make sure that you can increase the ROI of your observability setup. The first thing you should do is have a centralized data pipeline for all of your observability data. And this is because as you have more and more complex cloud environments, you might have multiple sources of observability data. You might have multiple silos that are processing only logs or only traces or only metrics for various parts of the application. And when you have scenarios like that, it's really hard to optimize because you don't have a holistic view of your entire environment and how you're generating observability data and how your engineers and your teams are leveraging that data. So having a single source of truth for all of your data is really important in your journey to optimize and kind of clean up your observability environment. The second thing you do is increase the usefulness of the data. How can we make sure that the data that we collect has all the context as well as the information we need to make sure it's as useful as possible? The third thing you can do is control the amount of data that you're exporting to your back ends because a lot of the data that is generated by our systems, whether it's through logs or metrics, are kind of never used. So how do we make sure that we're really cognizant and mindful of what we export to our back ends? So Open Telemetry has an awesome solution for this and I think our previous lighting talked a little bit about the Open Telemetry Collector. So the Open Telemetry Collector is an open source data pipeline for your observability data. So it's made out of three different parts. The first part is the receiver. So this part of the system kind of collects all of your data, whether it's through Open Telemetry SDKs or frameworks or it's through like other observability sources, whether it's like Prometheus or Fulumbit, and receivers kind of connect all of that data into the pipeline. Then with the processor you're able to take all that data that you collect and decorate it. You're able to batch it. You're able to do a bunch of things to make it more valuable as well as to reduce the overall amount of data that you're trying to export. And finally, with the exporter, you're able to take all the data that you collect and process and send it to whatever back end you want, whether it's a managed back end or a open source back end. So with the Open Telemetry Collector, how can we have a centralized data pipeline? So let's jump right into it. So because Open Telemetry is a community driven project, there are so many open source receivers that you can leverage out of the box.  You can still connect those to your Open Telemetry Collector data pipeline. So an example of doing this is collecting infrastructure data. So if you already are running Prometheus and in your Kubernetes environment, you can directly connect Prometheus, using the Prometheus receiver to the Open Telemetry Collector. So you can continue using Prometheus data that your Kubernetes clusters are generating in their endpoints, but just make sure that you stream the data through the Open Telemetry Collector. And if you leverage platforms like AWS or Azure, they have also written receivers specifically for their various services that connect directly to the Open Telemetry Collector. So recently, I actually had to instrument Kafka environments for a particular customer to get metrics. And there were three different ways that we could pull data specifically metrics from Kafka clusters. And here's a couple of ways that you can do it using the Open Telemetry Collector. So the first way is through the Kafka Metrics receiver. So the Kafka Metrics receiver leverages the admin API to pull data directly from the Kafka server to get very specific like partition topic specific metrics for your Kafka clusters. That's like one way to do it. But what if you don't want to give your Open Telemetry Collector access to your admin APIs, which is very understandable? Then what you can do is use the JMX receiver. So the JMX receiver basically uses targeted, basically targets specific ambient servers to directly pull metrics from Kafka, JVM, Cassandra, whatever you want. And we were able to collect health and performance metrics from our Kafka servers using the JMX receiver and putting that all through the Open Telemetry Collector. But let's say you don't want to do that and you want to just use Prometheus. That's fine too. You can deploy the JMX Prometheus exporter directly in your Kafka cluster and leverage the Prometheus receiver to constantly scrape the publicly available endpoints in the Kafka server. So this is a very long winded way of saying that Open Telemetry is very powerful because it puts the decision in your hands. There are so many different ways to get data out of your environment. And if you don't see an open source way that's already in the contributions repo to get data the way you want, you can write your own. So that's the real power of Open Telemetry. It's very flexible. And there are so many ways to do one thing. So yeah, once we've gotten all of that data, whether it's from Kafka or other technologies into the pipeline, how do we increase the usefulness of the data? So a really cool processor that I use at New Relic is the Kubernetes Attributes Processor. And it's really cool because it really dramatically increases the value of the logs, traces and metrics being generated from my application. And that's because the Open Telemetry Collector with this Attributes Processor injects metadata about my pods, about my deployment. So in the back end, I'm able to correlate application level metrics with infrastructure level metrics. And the reason that's so cool is because, let's say I have like an outage or a lot of spikes in error rate or latency, I'm able to correlate that if it's an infrastructure issue immediately with a CPU usage or other infrastructure metrics, so I can ping the right person if there's an outage. And this is really important because as we collect more and more data, we need to make sure that it is as valuable and as contextual as possible. And doing things like metadata injection to be able to correlate different pieces of data together is a really easy and powerful way to make your data more valuable. So now that we talked a little bit about first collecting data and then making it more valuable using things like metadata injection reads, can you tell us a little bit about how we can control the amount of data exporting that we're exporting from applications? Yes, this part is going to be very lightning. Okay. There are multiple ways to control the amount of data that you're generating as well as exporting. I'm going to specifically talk about how you can control the amount of data that you're exporting using the following two processors. The first one is the filtered processor, which can be used to you can configure it to include or exclude specific metrics, logs and traces. For example, you can use it to filter logs based on severity level or even the text itself. The second one is going to be the tail sampling processor, which is specifically for trace data. Let's say these are the traces that your system is producing. That sounds so loud. If you're using head based sampling, you are either one going to get a lot of noise because you are keeping all the traces that your system is producing or two, you're getting a randomized sampling based on the probabilistic rate that you've configured. So for simplicity's sake, let's say you've configured it to be 10%. As you can imagine, that means you're getting one out of roughly every 10 traces your system is producing, which could mean that if there's errors going on, it could be a little bit longer before you see them because it might take longer to surface them depending on how often these issues are occurring. By setting up the tail sampling processor, you can implement one or more policies to keep traces that are important for your system. So you can keep traces with errors, specific span attributes or that have cross-certain latency threshold. This helps to ensure that you're exporting only the data that you've determined is important for understanding your systems. Finally, as Daniel mentioned, you're going to want to export all this data somewhere to either a managed or open source backend so you can analyze it. The component that you're going to use to do this is called the exporter. You can use the default OTLP exporter since most backends now support OTLP data natively. And you can also use different exporters to send multiple data formats as well as to multiple backends at the same time. You could even export your traces and metrics to one backend and your logs to another if that's what makes sense for your observability strategy. This is a quick recap of all the components that we mentioned and where they fit into the OTLP collector architecture. Once you've got your receivers, processors and exporters set up, you now have the ability to build your data pipelines using the OTLP collector. All the configuration is handled within a YAML file so updating is fairly trivial depending on, of course, the complexity of what you have. And you now also have a centralized location for your observability configuration. These are just some challenges that we want to leave you with before we go to take into consideration with using the collector. The first one is it can be complex of scale. You will have to consider deployment patterns as well as load balancing the more data your system is producing. Monitoring the collector is only available with the collector at this time, which is not an ideal situation. And the current stability status is mixed since the core components are also at varying levels of stability. And that's it. That is all we have for you. Before we go, we hope to see you tomorrow at a vendor neutral open telemetry community event that is going to happen at the Colony Club Detroit. Go to that tiny URL to register and find more info. And thank you all so much.