Course Request If you want users to be able to request new courses, you can enable course requests. A “Course request” button then appears on the “All courses” page. If users then request new courses, you as an administrator will see a “Courses pending approval” button on the “All courses” page. If you enable course requests, you will need to check the “All courses” page regularly for the “Courses pending approval” button. Email notification of course requests is not yet available.
Backups There’s a saying in the computer industry: “There are two types of users, those who have lost data, and those who will.” Eventually, a hard drive will fail or your database will collapse on your Moodle server and you will lose data. Fortunately, Moodle has an automated course backup system that you can run on a nightly basis to export all course content for the entire site. The course backup tool in Moodle actually runs the same functions as an individual course backup. It simply runs automatically on all of the courses on the site at a designated time. It’s a good idea to schedule backups for when your server isn’t usually busy. Running the backup tool over all the courses can be processor-intensive, so you shouldn’t run it when there are a lot of students trying to access the server. The backup page lets you set the types of content to be backed up. If you are running a nightly full-server backup (which is strongly recommended), we suggest you use the following settings: Include modules and module user data Click both of these checkboxes to preserve all student work for each course. Users Set this to All. If you need to restore your Moodle server from a backup, you don’t want to lose any accounts, even if they aren’t associated with a current course. User files Check this as well. You want the restored server to look as much like the original as possible, so all user files should be restored. Course files Again, click this checkbox. You’ll need to deal with a lot of angry teachers if they have to restore all of their course files after you restore the server. Keep This setting determines how many old backups will be saved. Set this as high as you can without taking up too much space on your server. If you need to restore a course a few days after you run the backup, you’ll be glad you have a few weeks’ worth of data. 232 | Chapter 16: Moodle Administration