These settings are specific to the ELMS environment and have been abstracted from the traditional Drupal settings backend to make things easier to manage.  In a perfect world, users of ELMS should never need to know they are using Drupal, and this settings section tries to help keep the two abstracted.

To access the ELMS settings dashboard, click on the small black wrench at the bottom left corner of any page.  This will slide out a left-hand menu that is black with white text.  This is effectively how you would configure and control Drupal (see next section fore more details on how to do that).

If the world ELMS is not visible, click Administer, then click ELMS.  There are several settings pages that can show up here based on the options in installation but the most common ones are ID Best Practices and System Defaults.

ID Best Practices allows you to establish some best practice defaults at a global level.  This way you can start to define what your best practices are in terms of help, syllabus usage, and references to resources.  To add new resources to the system open the Drupal control panel (small wrench in bottom left), click Create Content and then click ELMS Resource.

ELMS Resources are systems and services external to your system that you utilize.  This can help give students instructions / help info about other systems they can expect to utilize in their course.  For example, if the Library on campus is used in many courses you could create the library as a resource with information on how to access e-reserves or what the hours of operation are.  YouTube, Vimeo, Google Docs, and other external vendors that you may use in courses are also good services to include documentation on how to use.  These resource defaults can then be set globally in the ID best practice settings page globally and then tweaked per course version based on needs of that offering of the course.

System Defaults have to do with the default options for content authors.  Currently this is just what themes they are allowed to select for courses as well as what the default theme is.  This way you can have a default / best practice theme for all your courses as the default but still allow flexibility in design going forward.