A community hub provides a directory of courses for public use or for private communities.
The diagram shows the basic idea. The systems in this diagram are:
- Ordinary Moodle site
- A typical Moodle site with teachers who want to download course templates and/or users who want to connect (enrol) with external communities
- Publishing site
- A Moodle site that wants to make some of its courses available for download
- Community site
- A Moodle site that provides courses that are enrollable
- Moodle Hub Server
- A new Moodle plugin for listing registered courses that are downloadable or enrollable. The default hub is at moodle.net, but there can be many others.
Community Hubs in Moodle 2.0 video:
<mediaplayer>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFLDOcJ3cbg</mediaplayer>
Downloadable courses
- Sites that want to publish certain courses and make them downloadable can register them with one or more hub servers.
- The hub will check the data and make sure the course zip is downloadable, caching a copy locally. The hub may also have a security process to check the download for trojan horses, bad content, etc.
- The download process may trigger the backup process on the original server if it hasn't been done already.
- Later, Moodle users (who have permissions to do so) can connect to a hub to search for downloadable courses and choose one.
- The Moodle site downloads the file and makes it available to the Moodle user so they can now continue to restore it normally.
Enrollable courses
- Sites that want to publish certain courses for the public to enrol in can register them with one or more hub (including the main one at moodle.org).
- Later, any Moodle user can connect to a hub (via Community block in their site) to search and find courses they want to join.
- They click on a link to be sent to the other site so that they can enrol there.
See also
- Publishing a course
- Hub administration
- Hub FAQ
- Community finder block
- MNet - a Moodle network