Multi-tenancy with Moodle is the extension of the Moodle services to create multiple versions of the LMS from one LMS instance. Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers.
In a multi-tenant architecture, all the customers are called as tenants. You can allow the tenants to customize some parts of the application, such as color of the user interface (UI) or business rules. However, they cannot customize the application’s code like adding new plugins.
Why use Multi tenancy?
Multi tenancy an be economical as the maintenance costs and development costs are shared among the tenants. In contrast to single tenancy architecture, where each customer has its own software instance, in a multi-tenancy architecture the provider has to make updates only once.
Multi tenancy in Moodle core?
In past there was some interest shown by the Moodle HQ team but later dropped the plans to include Multi tenancy support in Moodle core. However, the Scottish Moodle partner – E-Learn Design, developed IOMAD to support Multi tenancy. IOMAD allows for the ability to create Companies which sit on top of Moodle, providing a space where users and courses can be assigned.
Introducing IOMAD 3.3
By using IOMAD, you can serve a single course to many ‘institutions’, ‘companies’ or hierarchies which are set up within the system. Recently, IOMAD 3.3 is released with exciting new features and is fully inline with Moodle 3.3. Here, I am reproducing the latest features of IOMAD 3.3, as mentioned on the E-Learn Design blog:
- Child companies – A company can now be created as a child of another company. All of the company managers from the parent company automatically become company managers for the child company as well.
- Company role templates – Once you have defined the company capabilities for a company, these can now be saved as a template which can be applied to other companies either through editing them or on company creation.
- Company course group management – Company managers can now create and edit course groups for all of the courses assigned to them.
- Department selection – This is moving towards a more intuitive department picker which has been set up on most of the page.
- Manage company page – This has been updated to show the company overview report for that company and also to allow for selecting a company for management in the dashboard.
- Iomad emails now HTML – The email templates for IOMAD are now sent in HTML format instead of plain text.
- Auto enrol courses – These can now be defined per company instead of all manual enrol courses allowing for better flexibility.
If you are interested in implementing multi tenancy in Moodle with IOMAD, check out its official website here.
Your turn now
Do you know any other solution to implement Multi tenancy in Moodle? Let us know in the comments section below.
