Practice those moodle tasks - so when you need to - you can

10,000 hrs to efficiency. 

Practice the things that you do in support of your moodle sites, so when the time comes when you need to do it for real, you can.

I was doing this today.  I do it when my day to day tasks are quiet.  Not always, but when I am avoiding complacency,  I do.

When the request comes, and the blood pressure rises, be calm and just do what you have practiced for.  I am sure this approach is modeled in many industries, like police work, EMTs, soldiering, fire fighting and many others.  Practice, so when the heat is on, its just another day.


Practice makes perfect.  Practice improves efficiency.  Practice readies.

Today - I restored an old DB to a backup instance of my moodle - changed a couple admin. settings and saw what I expected.  I practiced finding a students grades and uploads from a course taken over a year ago. 

Practice doing things that you typically do not do (for me, that's someone that gets done a couple times a year).  Another example is restoring a course from a backup file, adding content to it, creating a new backup from it.

Practice finding specific records for specific accounts in courses, for example.  When questions come about what students did in a course, or did not, be ready to jump into the Admin | Site logs.

Practice finding accounts and spotting issues with them - like authentication type.

Look at how you have your plugins set up, like external authentication and enrollment.  Study them, look at it, remember it, so when you have to, you can troubleshoot it.  Set up a test instance of your site so you can experiment with these type of settings.

Lift your head out of the sand and stay on a higher, more conceptual level.  From here, you can assess the site better, see things that could be improved.  Read the forums and glean from them.  Contribute too.  Give back when you learn some things or figure some things out.  Share you experience.

Help the people who champion your moodle site, be champions.  Help them feed the system.  I help by creating scripts that automate tedious tasks - like changing content options or quiz settings.  Make it easy for your customer to add new content, people and processes.  Do not be ridged or brittle and in-flexible.  Look for ways to be adoptive and flexible.

Update your moodle code when you can.  Do not get stuck sitting in an old version.