Publishing a course - MoodleDocs (2024)

Publishing a course is a method of sharing your course on a special Moodle site called a community hub. Moodle.net is an example of a community hub.

When you publish a course, you can choose whether to make it available

for download (as a course backup file) OR
to enrol in on your site

1 Connecting to a community hub
2 Publishing a course for download
- 2.1 Updating a course backup
3 Publishing a course for people to enrol in
4 Hub listing
5 Removing a course from a hub
6 Capabilities
7 Disable course publishing setting
8 Enabling teachers to publish their courses

Connecting to a community hub

An administrator first needs to check in Administration > Site Administration > Registration that your Moodle site is registered with the community hub(s) that you wish to publish courses to.

Thus, if you'd like to share your course on Moodle.net, your site needs to be registered with moodle.org.

Note: Only sites which are publicly available on the Internet can register with moodle.org.

Publishing a course for download

First page of the backup process

Updating a course backup

If you improve the course and wish to update the course backup, firstly remove it from the hub, then re-share it. You may also share different versions of the same course.

Publishing a course for people to enrol in

You can display a link to your course on any hub your site is registered on. The hub will redirect users your course.

Go to Settings > Course administration > Publish (only available to users with the capability moodle/course:publish)
Click the button 'Advertise this course for people to join'
Select the hub where you want to advertise your course
Enter information about the course
Click the 'Advertise this course' button

The course will then need to be approved by the hub administrator before it appears in the course listing.

You can change the information about the course by clicking the 'Update' button in the actions column.

Note: You also need to make sure that users can actually enrol in the course you have just published. This normally means having email-based self-registration enabled for the site and enabling self-enrolment for the course.

Tip! When you advertise a course try to make the course easy to see for people not registered on your site (allow guest access in your course settings / allow Auto-login guests / allow people to register themself).

Hub listing

You can check whether your course has been approved by the hub administrator and is listed on the hub as follows:

Go to Settings > Course administration > Publish
Click the 'Check it now' link in the hub listing column

Your Moodle site will contact the hub and will then update the status of your course.

Removing a course from a hub

If you wish, you can remove your course from a hub at any time.

Go to Settings > Course administration > Publish
Click the 'Remove from hub' button in the actions column

Capabilities

Only users with the capability moodle/course:publish (by default only users with the role of manager) can publish their course to a community hub. The capability moodle/backup:backuptargethub is also required for publishing courses for download.

Disable course publishing setting

Course sharing feature can be disabled/enabled site wide by changing the enablecoursepublishing setting, you can also add that setting to your config.php to enable or disable course publishing on your site.

Enabling teachers to publish their courses

An administrator can enable teachers to publish their courses on a hub by allowing the capability moodle/course:publish for the teacher role.

Go to Settings > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles
Click the edit icon opposite the teacher role
On the editing role page, paste moodle/course:publish into the filter box
Tick the checkbox opposite moodle/course:publish to allow the capability
Click the 'Save changes' button