[Digital Jedi]

NoSpam, and I think most of the admins who frequent here would agree, is probably one of the most essential in terms of curbing (not preventing) unnecessary spam bot registration. You'll still get the odd human user registering one of his bots, but for the most part, especially if you have a large active forum, this will trim down the spamming significantly. If you have a small forum like mine, it will virtually put a stop to it.

Use Force Read sparingly to get the most benefit out of it. But yes, definitely a useful one.

That's a very good start and will get you a good idea as to what installing modifications entails. After you get comfortable with your starting modifications, depending on your forum activity, also look into vBCredits, AME (Auto Media Embedding) and Downloads II (download manager.)

Reason I mention these three is, one, vBCredits is one of those things that can increase forum participation with your already active users, or encourage inactive users to participate more. AME is a media embedding modfication, which I admit, I'm a little biased on because I maintain an Add On for it, but would be useful for you in terms of adding video from various educationally themed video (form places like YouTube or something like 5MIN Life VideoPedia) with no need for uploading video and taking up space on your server and absolutely no need to teach your users how to use it because it converts video URLs in post automatically without need for BBCode, strain on your server or any effort on your user's part. And Downloads II is a useful one for giving your users a means of sharing files, such as PDFs, Word Docs or any other form of media which your educators could make available in a nice neat place, rather then using the attachment system where good files can get lost in tons of threads easily.

Also note, I'd say 99% of all modifications here all install in the same manner. Once you do two or three, you start to get the gist of what to do from then on. Basically, you'll seldom run into a modification that doesn't involve one or more of three basic actions.

Import through Product/Plugin Manager
Template Edit (eg. Find this line of code, add this Lind of code under it)
Upload Files

Beyond that, they're almost all the same thing. Do a template edit to your postbit three of four times, and it registers almost right away how that works. And if the "find this line of code, add this like of code under it" sounds tedious. vBulletin has a search feature in the template editors that searches through the code in a split second.

Also, and this is most important, never underestimate support at vB.com or vB.org. Yes, I know sometimes threads don't get answered. That's inevitable on a forum of this size. But that's the only reason why, and doesn't happen as often as you might think. People here are really more then willing to help, even in spite of the sheer volume of requests. But, ironically, because there's such a high volume of Q&A on this forum, you'll likely find the answer to your question multiple times by doing a site search.