Category: News

New Moodle LAE Releases for February 2025

There are four new Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition releases. There are no new LAE features; these are maintenance releases only. You can download the updates from the CLAMP code release archive. The new releases are for versions 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5. Please read CLAMP’s question bank advisory before installing these updates.

The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-April 2025. Moodle 4.5 has been released; CLAMP evaluated it at the Winter 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Lafayette College.

Winter 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Lafayette

CLAMP held its Winter 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The primary focus of the event was evaluating Moodle 4.5. We’re happy to report that we encountered no major issues and no blockers to upgrading to Moodle 4.5 this year, although you should take careful note of the new image redaction functionality. Please read on below for for details of the various issues we discussed.

Issues

Subsections

Sub-sections (mod_subsection) are a new feature in Moodle 4.5. This is a great way to organize materials within a topic block. In the past, you needed to use labels and indented items to group items within a section. With this feature, you can create a subsection that is collapsible within the section. We found it difficult to drag-and-drop items from a local folder directly into the subsection, but it is easy to move items into the subsection once they have been added to the topic block itself. You can click on “Add an activity or resource” within the subsection to add content directly to the subsection. You can have multiple subsections within the topic block, but you can’t nest another subsection within an existing subsection.

Scrolling across pages when annotating Assignments

Assignment annotation allows only for clicking through multiple pages. This is cumbersome when trying to flip across multiple pages when annotating. A proposal to allow scrolling instead made some headway in 2020 before the author abandoned it. CLAMP has updated and resubmitted the fix and will work with Moodle HQ to get this feature added.

Image redaction

There is a separate blog post discussing the new image redaction feature in Moodle 4.5. The short version: if you enable it, make sure that you also install exiftool and configure Moodle to use it.

Assignment submission default order

The first time you view submissions in an assignment, they’re sorted by the internal Moodle userid of the submitter. It appears non-deterministic and can confuse faculty. Once you’ve sorted by something else (last name, submission date) that choice persists through logout, but the initial presentation is confusing. CLAMP has submitted a feature request and patch to change this behavior to last name of the submitter.

New notifications

Moodle 4.5 adds new options to notify students of upcoming assignments and quizzes. By default, each user decides what notifications they want. Administrators can change this default. New notification options include the following:

  • Assignment due in 7 days
  • Upcoming assignment due (48 hours before the due date)
  • The assignment is overdue.
  • Quiz opens soon

There is no way for an individual instructor to configure these options or to force a push.

Optional questions for Quiz

Carleton was interested in a Quiz-like activity where students have the option to answer specific questions within a category. They would only be graded for the questions they answered. This is an example point system:

  • 15 multiple choice questions worth 2 points each
  • 5 essay questions about terms (only 3 are required)
  • 5 more essay questions (only 4 are required)

We looked at ways of accomplishing this:

  • A teacher can add a multiplier to the Quiz activity only if all questions are worth the same number of points
  • Changing the Maximum grade to be below the total number of points will only cause the question points to be recalculated in the Results page
    • It still counts all the optional questions
    • Unlimited Grading does not fix this issue
  • Workaround: Create Quiz questions listing all potential question prompts a student can answer.
    • Example: three essay questions with all five essay prompts.
    • Students have to write out what question they are answering

Other avenues to explore:

  • Try lesson activity
  • Maybe branching (conditional formatting)
    • Branching depends on whether want to give students the option to answer all questions for extra credit.
    • Branching is available within a Questionnaire, but not within a Quiz. However, the Questionnaire does not appear to have any auto-grading features (beyond assigning a grade for completion).

Exploring Competencies in Moodle

We took another look at Competencies, a perennial topic at these events. Coming out of Butler in 2016 we called them “a complicated new system with an inherent workflow that isn’t well documented.” Occidental published some documentation about them at Smith in 2019. We took another look at them as an offshoot from the optional Quiz questions work. Findingss:

  • Administrators can build a site-wide template: Site administration > General: Competencies > Competency frameworks
  • Taxonomies are just labels for nesting: 4 level options.
  • Teachers cannot create competencies; they can only pull competencies out of existing frameworks.
  • Teachers can assign competencies to specific activities and resources or just add the competencies to their course in general.
  • This could be useful for programs with a graduation requirement. An example is Carleton’s Writing Portfolio where students upload 3–5 pieces of writing from different courses plus a reflective essay.

We helped unearth two bugs while looking at Competencies this time around: MDL-84147 and MDL-84148.

UX changes to the assignment submissions page

The assignment submissions page has new menus, filters, and headers (See https://moodledev.io/general/releases/4.5#assignment-improvements—phase-1 for a full list). More changes are planned. We liked the new assignment options. All the selection options moved to the top. You can filter by submission status (i.e. submitted, not submitted, draft).

Moodle assignment interface with filters active

AI subsystem

There is a separate blog post discussing the new AI subsystem in Moodle 4.5. OpenAI and AzureAI are supported; we were able to evaluate OpenAI.

Open Badges 3.0

Moodle is working toward supporting Open Badges 3.0. This work will be spread across multiple releases. Two improvements landed in Moodle 4.5:

  • MDL-43938: The uniqueness requirement for badge names has been removed.
  • MDL-82057: Badges can be imported from one course to another using Course Reuse> Import. The imported badge has all the metadata of the first badge, but none of the issuing criteria. It’s also not active. The image is properly deduplicated.

Report Builder

We evaluated numerous improvements to Moodle’s Report Builder, all of which worked as advertised. The biggest is the ability to delete multiple cohorts at once:

  • MDL-52046: this is the option for deleting multiple cohorts at one time.
  • MDL-81330: can now filter based on the cohort within the class participants window.
  • MDL-80123: admin preset reports now work correctly (previously, there was a bug around deleting presets).
  • MDL-82331: time filtering can now go down to the minute (previously could only go down to the hour). It passes.
  • MDL-82529: adding the option to filter cohorts by custom fields.
  • MDL-81399: The relational database now has fields for users’ time zones and languages. As a result, it’s possible to use these to filter custom reports.
  • MDL-82114: Can now filter by the plugin when creating a custom report from the “Files” source.
  • MDL-82512: Can now filter by the plugin when creating a custom report from the “Author” source.

Audio-video recording in TinyMCE

Tiny MCE offers built-in features for recording audio and video. These updates expand the offerings so users can create screen recordings and recordings can be paused and resumed.

  • MDL-81212: Tiny/RecordRTC: Add Screen-recorder button.
  • MDL-81111: Tiny/RecordRTC: TinyMCE conversion – add a “Pause” button for recording A/V.

Completion tracking

Restoring old courses brings up a weird assortment of completion tracking settings. Sharon Strauss from Haverford created this short video about completion tracking to show people what these settings are and how they can quickly change the settings:

What’s next?

Save the date! The Summer 2025 Hack/Doc Fest will be at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, from June 10-12.

AI Subsystem in Moodle 4.5

One of the many new features in Moodle 4.5 is the AI Subsystem. Given the buzz around AI development and the wild pace of change with LLM based tools it isn’t a surprise to see the beginnings of AI incorporated into Moodle. At the Lafeyette College-hosted Winter Hack/Doc 2025 I spent some time exploring the functionality. The development task for AI was documented by Moodle as “AI subsystem MVP”. The functionality released in Moodle 4.5 consists of three primary user facing interfaces into AI tools, “Generate Text”, “Generate Image,” and “Summarize”.

AI Implementation

For the new features to be available an admin needs to visit the AI section of the Site Administration menu. In Moodle 4.5, two AI providers are supported, OpenAI and AzureAI. Without a valid configuration, UI elements regarding AI are not shown.

AI Provider Configuration

The configuration for the AI providers is broken down into two areas. The first involves configuring the API keys and other requirements for your connection.

Image of the configuration options for Azure AI inside Moodle 4.5 the options. The Options are: Azure AI API Key, Azure AI API Endpoint, a checkbox to enable/disable a site-wide rate limit (default: off), the field for the maximum site wide requests per hour (default if enabled: 100), a checkbox to enable/disable user limits (default: off), and the field for the user requests per hour limit (default if enabled: 10).
Azure AI Configuration options

You can enable a maximum number of requests per person and/or at the server level for communications with the AI provider.

Below the AI provider configuration there are three configurations for each of the user facing interfaces. In addition to individual toggles these include configuration of API versions (these vary slightly between providers, OpenAI screenshot provided below), but also contain an area for a set of System Instructions. These are instructions passed along to the AI Model prior to the content of the user’s prompt:

Screenshot of the configuration of the Generate Text for ChatGPT under Moodle 4.5 showing the 3 configuration options. Those options are: AI model, the AI endpoint and System Instructions. The default for system instructions are: "You will receive a text input from the user. Your task is to generate text based on their request. Follow these important instructions: 1. Return the summary in plain text only. 2. Do not include any markdown formatting, greetings, or platitudes."
Generate Text Settings

AI Placement Configuration

Located below the provider configuration are AI Placement configurations. These allow for UI based control over enabling/disabling of AI elements in the text editor (generate text/image) and course pages (summarize).

User Experience with AI Tools enabled in Moodle

The “universal” sparkle/diamonds symbol indicating AI are added to the toolbar when Text Editor placement is enabled (and an API provider is configured). In further confirmation that Atto editor is being deprecated the Atto editor doesn’t have the AI buttons. Under the sparkles the user experiences two options if everything is enabled: Generate Text, Generate Image. If one or the other is disabled, the sparkles are replaced by a pictogram indicating the one remaining enabled option instead of pure sparkles.

The first time a user first clicks any of the AI tool options, an AI Usage Policy appears. If the user declines, the AI dialog closes. If they accept they are allowed to proceed into the tool.

Screen shot of the AI policy default settings in Moodle 4.5: <h4><strong>Welcome to the new AI feature!</strong></h4> <p>This Artificial Intelligence (AI) feature is based solely on external Large Language Models (LLM) to improve your learning and teaching experience. Before you start using these AI services, please read this usage policy.</p> <h4><strong>Accuracy of AI-generated content</strong></h4> <p>AI can give useful suggestions and information, but its accuracy may vary. You should always double-check the information provided to make sure it's accurate, complete, and suitable for your specific situation.</p> <h4><strong>How your data is processed</strong></h4> <p>This AI feature uses external Large Language Models (LLM). If you use this feature, any information or personal data you share will be handled according to the privacy policy of those LLMs. We recommend that you read their privacy policy to understand how they will handle your data. Additionally, a record of your interactions with the AI features may be saved in this site.</p> <p>If you have questions about how your data is processed, please check with your teachers or learning organisation.</p> <p>By continuing, you acknowledge that you understand and agree to this policy.</p>

The policy text lives in the language pack under core > ai.php. It’s named “userpolicy”.

The summarize button appears in lots of places by default but the portion of the page that it sends to the AI provider for summary doesn’t always make sense. For example, on this quiz page with a description of the assignment (well, sort of) the student doesn’t get any useful information from the quiz description that the instructor “provided”.

A bad AI summary of a Quiz

Limiting AI availability inside Moodle to specific courses

In the event that your institution has the appropriate subscriptions and you think someone might need to access the functionality in Moodle but you don’t want to make it available to your whole community we suggest the following implementation.

Set the following permissions to PREVENT at the site level for the teacher, student, and other roles at your institution that shouldn’t see the tools:

  • aiplacement/courseassist:summarise_text: controls access to the Summarize text button
  • aiplacement/editor:generate_text: Controls access to the generate text button in the TinyMCE interface
  • aiplacement/editor:generate_image: Controls access to the generate image button in the TinyMCE interface

Once they are set to prevent you can override these capabilities to ALLOW at the course (instructor capability under Participants -> Permissions) or category level where appropriate.

Note: CLAMP didn’t have access to both providers so I can’t provide insight into what happens if both providers are enabled. Do users get two “generate image buttons/summarize/etc” or a choice after clicking the button? If you experiment with this let us know!

Image redaction and orientation in Moodle 4.5

Moodle 4.5 introduces many new features which we’ll be covering in the forthcoming report out of the 2025 Winter Hack/Doc Fest. Here, I’m going to highlight one in particular: image redaction. This is a new security feature that will automatically strip out geolocation data from uploaded images. It’s important that you configure it correctly, because at the moment there’s a bug that could cause many images that have a portrait orientation to display in landscape.

Exif and GPS data

Exif is a metadata standard implemented by images. You can specify a dizzying array of information, but we’re concerned here with just a few fields: geographic coordinates, image width and height, and orientation. When smartphones take images they include latitude and longitude unless you disable that behavior on your phone. For example, here’s a photo I took from the rear of the California Zephyr in 2018:

Railroad tracks disappear into the horizonMy notes say that I took it in Utah. The encoded GPS information says that I took in near Mt. Elliott, about twenty miles northwest of Green River. Here’s what that data looks like:

GPS Altitude  : 1419 m Above Sea Level
GPS Date/Time : 2018:10:21 00:14:56Z
GPS Latitude  : 39 deg 9' 39.62" N
GPS Longitude : 110 deg 20' 33.62" W
GPS Position  : 39 deg 9' 39.62" N, 110 deg 20' 33.62" W

This is pretty useful for knowing where I when I took this! This might be less useful if I’d taken this picture somewhere private–say from a dorm room when I’m uploading an assignment to Moodle. Location data can be a major privacy risk if disclosed inadvertently.

Exif and Orientation

Another use of Exif data is to store the width and height of the image and its orientation (portrait or landscape). Some smartphones, particularly the iPhones we tested at Hack/Doc, store all images in the landscape format but then set the orientation to indicate that they should be displayed in portrait mode:

Orientation  : Rotate 90 CW
Image Width  : 5712
Image Height : 4284
Image Size   : 5712x4284

An image with the width greater than the height would imply landscape except that Orientation is set to “Rotate 90 CW”: rotate ninety degrees clockwise. When you view that image, you’ll see it in portrait mode so long as the browser or image software respects that Exif data.

Redaction

Moodle 4.5 adds a new feature called EXIF remover to strip out GPS information. It’s located in Site administration > Server > File redaction > EXIF remover. If you’re installing a new 4.5 instance it’s enabled by default; if you’re upgrading an existing instance to Moodle 4.5 it’s off by default and you have to choose to turn it on. By default, it uses the GD library to reprocess the image. GD doesn’t have special features for managing Exif metadata; GD will remove all fields, including Orientation! That’s undesirable at best, and probably a bug (see MDL-84128).

Moodle HQ doesn’t recommend running this way and CLAMP doesn’t either. The recommended approach is to install exiftool on your server and configure your Moodle instance to use it. Exiftool is a common command-line application; it’s available for Windows and Mac and most Linux distributions. I used it to extract the Exif examples in this post. Once you’ve installed it (or your hosting provider has), you need to configure the path in Site administration. Below is an example of a working configuration:

Moodle configuration page. Enable EXIF remover is checked. Path to ExifTool is set to "/usr/bin/exiftool". The EXIF tags that will be removed is set to GPS only.

Exiftool will output a new image with the given Exif tags removed but won’t change anything else. I assume that the GD option was provided as a fallback since it doesn’t require new external tools or new PHP libraries, but I don’t think it should be enabled by default because of the real possibility that it breaks image uploads from smartphones.