Best Practices
Attend Regular Professional Development
Attend at least one Moodle Moot each year. There are many to choose from both locally in Michigan or virtually. Having a broad perspective of Moodle will help you in supporting your educators, students and users.
Promote Professional Development for your Educators
Regular professional development is very important for educators both in mechanics of Moodle and eLearning practices. Take advanatge of the Michigan Learns Online and Blending Learning in the Classroom projects by REMC. Also contact your local REMC or ISD for local traning opportunities.
Batch Add Your Users
Several times a year batch add your students into the system using the import feature, your teachers will thank you for this.
Allow Self Enrollment
Encourage your teachers to use self enrollment for adding students to a course. This will save you time and your teachers will appreciate being able to do just-in-time enrollment.
Setup LDAP
Setup your users to authenticate via LDAP.
Clean Up!
At the end of the school year, remove old courses and students that aren't needed any longer.
Keep Logs
Don't purge your Moodle logs, this is the best way to gather statistics on your LMS usage. You never know when a grant opportunity might require some stats.
Small Front Pages for Courses
Keep your page loads quick by limiting the content on the front page of courses. A quick test is, if you have to scroll through a couple screens, the course main page is too long. The course should break things up into sub pages or maybe even into multiple classes (make unit based).
One Theme (Or Two)
There's some pretty good research that shows if you have a standard theme across your site, it lowers the congitive load needed by students to understand the organization of the site. There are some solid new themes that are responsive by design (look good on Mobile, Tablet and Desktop) that are becoming pretty popular. They are Elegance and Moodle Essential Theme. If you run into problems, the trusted default them is handy too.