Moodle Workplace is 100% compatible with standard Moodle, also known as Moodle Core. The focus of this book is the delta between Workplace and Core, plus a range of critical concepts that you need for setting up and managing a professional learning environment for workplace learning.

Before we get started, it is helpful to cover some essential elements that you will be using when working with Moodle Workplace and also throughout the book. You will learn about the key players in Workplace, their roles, their responsibilities, and what functions they have in your setup. Also, you will learn about the important user interface interactions, and finally, you will learn about different help sources, both built-in and external.

While Moodle Workplace is very intuitive, it is highly recommended that you familiarize yourself with the basic workings since they are used consistently throughout the book.

We will cover the following topics:

In a typical Workplace learning environment, you have the following key players and their responsibilities (roles) in Moodle Workplace:

Most of the preceding stakeholders should be self-explanatory. However, there are two roles that deserve some further explanation due to their Moodle-esque idiosyncrasies: manager and trainer:

• Manager is a role in Moodle that is distinct from the aforementioned general and department managers. Users with the manager role can access courses and modify them; they usually do not participate in these courses. Manager and department lead are extra permissions granted in positions, which are explained in detail in Chapter 4, Tenants, Organizations, and Teams.
• Moodle distinguishes between a trainer with editing rights (content authoring) and a trainer without editing rights (content delivery). For legacy reasons, these roles are called trainer and non-editing trainer, respectively...

If you are familiar with standard Moodle, you will feel in familiar territory when using Moodle Workplace. However, Moodle has developed a more advanced and modern user interface for Workplace, which you will see in this section.

Once logged in or authenticated with Workplace, the dashboard is shown. As always in Moodle, functionality is only available when it is activated and configured, and the respective user has the correct permissions to make use of the feature. Here, you see a sample dashboard where the user has completed 33% of the Onboarding Marketing program and hasn't commenced with the Health & Safety 01 course:

Figure 2.1 – Sample dashboard

There are four important types of elements you should familiarize yourself with, since these are used throughout Moodle Workplace:

• General user elements and actions
• Header elements
• Dashboard
• Course navigation

Let&apos...

There are a number of sources where you and your users can get assistance when working with Moodle Workplace. By default, a number of "user tours" have been configured that are displayed the first time a user navigates to certain pages. For instance, you will see the following message when you visit the dashboard for the first time:

Figure 2.14 – Moodle dashboard tour

As an administrator, you have the ability to create your own user tours. More details on this standard Moodle feature can be found at docs.moodle.org/en/User_tours.

Throughout Moodle Workplace, you can see the little Help icon beside individual configuration options. Upon selection, a little balloon will pop up displaying context-sensitive help, like so:

Figure 2.15 – Moodle built-in help

The Moodle community is growing continuously and, at the time of writing, has well over 1 million registered users (yes, 1 million!), of which...

In this chapter, we covered some essential elements that you will be using when working with Moodle Workplace and also throughout the book. You learned about the roles and responsibilities of the key stakeholders in Workplace. You further became familiar with the Workplace user interface, namely general user elements and actions, header elements, the dashboard, and course navigation. Finally, you learned about different help sources, both built-in and external.

Throughout this chapter, several core concepts, such as users, courses, and roles, among others, were mentioned without further explanation and, to a degree, taken for granted. If Moodle is all new to you, do not worry. You will be learning the key concepts of users, courses, roles, and any associated constructs in the Moodle primer in the next chapter. Once this has been dealt with, we can finally start working with the Moodle Workplace-specific features.