Community hubs

A community hub provides a directory of courses for public use or for private communities.

Click to enlarge

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:

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.

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.