User Profiles
Other than guests, each user has a profile that contains information about him or her. We will first deal with the information that is stored for each user and how it is organized in Moodle.
You can view or change your profile by clicking on your name, which is usually found in the header or footer of your system. Select the Edit profile tab to view the most commonly used fields. To see all fields, select the Show Advanced button. The button will then toggle to Hide Advanced.
Profile Fields
Moodle's user profiles are divided into a number of categories such as:
- General: Standard user fields
- Picture of: Image of user
- Interests: Tags for social-networking activities
- Optional: Additional user information
- User-defined: Newly created fields
Let's take a look at these one by one. General, is the first category as shown in the following screenshot:
Most of these items are self-explanatory, but there are a few things you need to know about each of them. Here is a description of each profile element, along with tips to use them effectively:
- Username
A unique username has to be provided. It is highly recommended to develop a naming scheme to which each username has to conform, for instance,
Firstname.SurnameorYearOfEntry-Initial.Surname(different naming schemes are discussed in the Best Practice section of this chapter). By default, only alphanumeric characters are allowed. If you want students to use non-alphanumeric characters in their usernames, you have to enable this by turning on Allow extended characters in usernames in Security | Site Policies in the Site Administration block. It is important to remember that you ought to have administrator rights to change the username. - Authentication method
This menu allows changes to the authentication method for the user, if more than one authentication method has been activated for the site. In the screenshot, only Manual accounts have been set up, and therefore no choice is available.
- Password information
A password should be provided for security reasons. If the user has to change the given (default) password on their first login, the Force password change option has to be selected. You can unmask or show your own password, but not the password of other users. However, you can override the existing password of a user.
- First name and Surname
These are compulsory fields for users, for which diacritical marks are fully supported.
- Email information
There are four entries dictating how Moodle and other users can communicate with the current user through emails:
- Forum information
There are three forum-related entries:
- When editing text
This option determines whether to use plain text or the native HTML text editor of Moodle. This can usually be left on Use HTML editor (some browsers only), which allows for text-formatting options. If a user is experiencing difficulties in editing text, the setting should be changed to Use standard web forms. The setting is also useful if you are entering programming code and wish to preserve indentation.
- AJAX and JavaScript
Moodle has a drag-and-drop interface for arranging items in courses, which requires AJAX and JavaScript. If a web browser does not support these technologies (older versions of Safari on OS X, some Linux browsers, and browsers on handheld devices and gaming consoles have occasional problems with this new technology), the option will be set to No: use basic web features.
- Screen Reader
If selected, pages will be rendered to be accessible via screen readers which are used by visually impaired users.
- Location, Timezone, and Language
City/town and Country are used to further identify users by geographical location. They are both compulsory fields.
Timezone is used to convert time-related messages on the system (such as assignment deadlines) from the local time zone (typically, the server's time, but it can be set to anything) to the correct time in whichever zone you have selected. It is necessitated as your users may be geographically spread across a number of time zones.
The default language of the system is shown and can be changed to the preferred language of the user.
Additionally, a Description field is shown that is used to provide additional information about the user. As an administrator, the field can be left empty. However, when a user logs in to his or her profile, the field is compulsory.
The second category is called Picture of and, as the name suggests, deals with the image attached to a user.
To upload a new picture, click the Browse button and select the image from your hard disk as shown in the screenshot. The image cannot be larger than the maximum size listed (here 2MB), or it will not be uploaded. If your image is too large, it is recommended to reduce its size to a minimum of 100x100 pixels. The formats supported are JPG, GIF, and PNG. However, be careful with transparent backgrounds as they are not supported by older browsers.
The Picture description is used as an alternate text, which is important for accessibility conformance.
Once a picture has been assigned, it will be shown instead of the None label. To delete the picture, select the corresponding checkbox and the picture will be removed when the profile information is updated
Moodle will automatically crop the image to a square and resize it to 100x100 pixels for the larger view, and 35x35 pixels for the smaller view.
Note
Both these small images are created by Moodle in the upload process, which also reduces the file's size to around 4K. Pictures are stored in the user's sub-folder of the Moodle data folder. The two images are called f1.jpg and f2.jpg. All uploaded user pictures can be viewed via the URL<moodle url>/userpix/ (a login is required).
If you suspect that your learners are likely to misuse this feature by uploading unsuitable pictures, you can disallow the functionality. Go to Security | Site policies in the Site Administration block, and tick the Disable User Profile Images box at the bottom of the screen. Bear in mind that once this feature is disabled, pictures cannot be assigned to any user (except the administrator), and nor will it be possible for teachers to represent groups in courses with images:
Interests such as hobbies or professional activities have to be entered, separated by commas, as seen in the screenshot. The given List of interests is used as a tag, which forms the basis for supported social activities such as the Flickr and YouTube block. You can find more information about Moodle tagging at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tags.
More personal details are grouped into the Optional category, the last user category, as shown in the following screenshot:
The options could be listed as follows:
- Web Page
It is the URL of the user's web or home page.
- Messenger Information
Moodle supports a range of popular messenger services. These are ICQ, Skype AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and Microsoft's MSN. While entering any of the service's IDs, Moodle will make use of that service's functionality (for instance, display Skype's status information in the user's profile).
- ID number, Institution, and Department
It will contain IDs of students or staff, and information on school and department.
- Contact Details
It has the user's phone numbers and postal address.
Even when the Update profile button has been pressed, the image might not appear to have changed. If this is so, use the Reload button in your browser. If it still doesn't appear (as it happens in some rare cases), clear the cache of your web browser.
Creating User-Defined Profile Fields
Moodle allows new arbitrary fields to be added to the user profile. This feature can be found in Users | Accounts | User profile fields in the Site Administration block as shown in the following screenshot:
The profile fields are organized in categories (General, Picture of, Interests, and Optional). Additional categories can be created, and the user-defined fields can then be placed within those new categories. A default category called Other fields is already present, which can be deleted or renamed via the standard Moodle icons. To create a new category, select the Create a new profile category button seen in the preceding screenshot.
You are asked to provide a unique category name. The category will be displayed at the bottom of the user profile if profile fields have been added to the category.
Once a category has been created, four types of profile fields can be added to Moodle via the Create a new profile field pull-down menu:
- Checkbox
This allows setting a value to true or false.
- Menu of choices
This allows the selection of a value from a predefined list.
- Text area
This allows entering multiline formatted text.
- Text input
This allows entering a single line of text or a number.
Once you've chosen your field type, you're taken to the setting screen for that field. This has two sections: Common settings deals with settings that apply to all fields. Specific settings are settings that apply only to the chosen field type. Let's look at these settings.
The Short name is a unique identifier of the field that is accompanied by the actual Name, which is the label displayed in the profile. An optional Description of the field can be given.
If the field is compulsory, the Is this field required? menu has to be set to Yes. The field can be locked, that is, the user cannot modify it. If the value entered has to be unique, the setting has to be changed accordingly.
When self-registration is enabled, a number of default fields have to be provided at signup. If the new field should also be displayed on the signup page, the setting has to be changed to Yes. This can be very useful in a commercial training setting, when additional information such as the address of the learner or previous qualifications is required.
The custom field can be given one of three visibility settings:
- The Not visible setting is typically set by an administrator who wants to hold private data of the users
- The Visible to user setting is normally selected for fields that hold sensitive information
- The Visible to everyone setting is used for any other type of information (default)
A Category has to be selected from a list of created values entered before the specific settings have to be provided for each field type. It is possible to select only the newlycreated categories; default categories can unfortunately not be selected. For example, if you wish to extend the existing address field with a postcode, you will have to do this in a separate category.
In addition to the common field settings, specific settings have to be provided for each profile field type.
For the text input type, a Default value, the Display size (size of text box), and the Maximum length have to be provided. Additionally, it has to be specified if the field is a password field, which will lead to the masking being turned on:
For the Menu of choices type, a list of Menu options and an optional Default value have to be provided. The list consists of a single item per line. In the example shown, three options (Father, Mother, and Carer) have been entered, with Mother being the default value:
The text area field type allows users to define a default value on their own along with the dimensions of the displayed field (Columns and Rows):
Once all the required fields have been added, the order in which they will be displayed can be changed by using the up and down arrows:
