In the US, one thing you might want to do if you have far-flung users entering your site on a daily basis is adding state to the user profile field. This is a really easy process which will help you start capturing state data immediately for new user sign-ups. Here’s how to do it:
First go to your Moodle site and login as admin. Once logged in, using the Administration block, go to Accounts, then User Profile Fields.
To create a new user profile field, just use the drop down to choose one of the options. For state we’ll want to provide a “Menu of Choices” which will include all 50 states by their state abbreviation.
Once the new page has loaded you’ll see the various fields necessary to add a new User Profile Field.
Two important yes/no options are on this page. The first is that I want to require that students enter this field (for a US-based Moodle this will work fine, but for a Moodle that also accepts international users you may want to leave it as an optional field where the default value is blank; just be sure to add a blank line to the top of your list). The second is that I do want it to display on the signup page so that I can capture the data for all new users. Finally, for the Menu options, I’ve included a link to a plain text document [link] which has each of the state abbreviations (and a few major non-states like Puerto Rico) available so you can quickly copy and paste the states to your own state profile field. Once you’re settings are correct, just click ‘Save Changes’ and we can check it out by logging out and clicking to create a new user.
If set up correctly there should be a new user profile field available for new users to enter during registration (see below).
