CLAMP has prepared its first Moodle 5.0 release. This contains updates to all the contributed modules to ensure compatibility with Moodle 5.0. You can download the release from the CLAMP code release archive.
We expect the next stable releases from core in mid-August. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 5.0 at June’s Summer 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Swarthmore College; please read the recap for details.
This was CLAMP’s third visit to Swarthmore College, but the first time we’d gone there during the summer (see the 2020 and 2023 reports). After some rain on Tuesday morning, good weather moved in for the rest of the conference. Points of interest on campus included the Scott Amphitheater, the Dean Bond Rose Garden (pictured above), and “Crumhenge“, a Stonehenge-inspired art installation along the Crum Creek trail.
Indoors, we evaluated Moodle 5.0. The consensus among the attendees is that schools planned to upgrade to Moodle 4.5 for the forthcoming school year and give the Moodle 5.0 series (see below) time to develop. Please read on for a discussion of issues at this summer’s Hack/Doc Fest.
We have a separate blog post detailing the various changes to the Question Bank in Moodle 5.0. These are over and above the fixes for the Question Bank import issue that CLAMP flagged in February. The short version is that courses may now have multiple question banks, questions created in quizzes may not be shared, and category-level question banks have been eliminated. Please see the linked post for further details and recommendations.
Moodle has a new version naming convention starting with the Moodle 5.0 release. In terms of the operational calendar, we can expect a new long-term support (LTS) release in the October of even-numbered years, and new major features in the April of odd-numbered years. Read on for a fuller explanation.
Previously, the first two numbers indicated the major version of Moodle, while the third number indicated the minor version. So, Moodle 4.5.0 would be the first release of Moodle 4.5, while Moodle 4.5.3 would be the fourth release of Moodle 4.5.
Going forward, the first number will indicate a series, the second number a version within that series, and the third number the patch version. Therefore, Moodle 5.0.0, released in April 2025, is the first release in Series 5. Moodle 5.0.1, the first patch release, was released in June. In October, Moodle HQ will release Moodle 5.1.0, the second minor release in Series 5. The fourth release in a series, in this case Moodle 5.3.0, will be a LTS release, and will be followed by Moodle 6.0.0, the first Series 6 release.
The following plugins are no longer included in Moodle, beginning with Moodle 5.0:
As of writing, these plugins are published on various GitHub repositories but not available through the Moodle plugins database. They have not been explicitly tested on Moodle 5.0. If you intend to keep using one of them in Moodle 5.0, it’s important to ensure that you’ve downloaded the code before executing the upgrade, otherwise data from the plugins may be removed as part of the upgrade process.
The Activities overview has been redesigned for Moodle 5.0. This appears to be a partial reimplementation: supported modules include Assignment, Workshop, Feedback, Resources, but not Quiz, which still has the pre-5.0 page. The page is available to teachers and students. The information given for Assignments includes Assignment name, location of assignment within the course (section name), due date, number of submissions received, and quick actions/grading. There is no sort functionality although it’s been proposed. Entries are sorted in the order that they’re on the course page except all subsections fall after all sections. Moodle HQ has additional development planned for future releases.
Media can now be dragged-and-dropped into the TinyMCE editor. Depending on the size of the original image, you may need to resize the dimensions so that the image fits the size you’re looking to obtain. You can resize the image by clicking on the picture icon in the TinyMCE toolbar. The measurement is in pixels. You are not prompted to add alternative text but you can go back and add it later. It appears in some cases to pull alternative text from the image metadata but this behavior wasn’t consistent.
The AI subsystem was introduced in Moodle 4.5, and we reviewed it at the Winter 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Lafayette. A new feature is an “explain” button in addition to “summarize” on pages. The prompts that are sent along with text are different between explain and summary. Those are configured inside the Action Settings of a provider instance.
Both summarize and explain contain the instructions by default:
“Important Instructions:
Explain has instructions along the lines of Elaborate, Simplify, Provide Context and Organize logically. Summarize is more concise; it includes “Condense and Simplify”.
You can also configure multiple providers, setting up the future possibility of using different providers for different tasks. Configurable options include rate limits and the model to use (gpt-4o is the current default). You can also use an OpenAI compatible API such as a locally-hosted Ollama instance.
Moodle now supports SMS notifications as part of the Messaging system. This is a pluggable interface; core ships support for AWS SNS and Modica, while Twilio is available as a plugin. CLAMP doesn’t possess a suitable phone number so we only evaluated the configuration side. In General > Messaging > Notification settings, you can enable SMS. You can then scroll down to unlock SMS for assignment notifications only; that’s all that’s supported in this release. If you leave them off by default, users can choose to enable them.
We did find an interesting bug. If you have enabled SMS in Messaging but disabled all available gateways, various parts of the Moodle Messaging system don’t work properly.
When using TinyMCE as the editor and also typing in Hebrew on a Mac, a specific keystroke triggers the TinyMCE Help menu and does NOT type the intended character. The specific keystroke is alt-0 and in Hebrew it should appear as a small diacritic below the typed character. An aleph character without the diacritic looks like this: ש but with the diacritic, it looks like this: שְ. This is actually a bug in the upstream TinyMCE project and not specific to Moodle, but we’ve reported it in both places.
Moodle allows you to upload images to the forum activity as attachments, instead of inserting them inline in the TinyMCE editor. When images are added in this way, they are displayed at the bottom of the post. However, there is no option for adding alternative text to images added in this way. We’ve reported this to the tracker, and we recommend for now that users not upload images (as opposed to other types of documents) to the forum as attachments.
There was interest in hiding the safe exam browser functionality from teachers. This can be accomplished by modifying the teacher role and setting the following capabilities to Prevent:
At times users don’t see the correct overridden dates on the timeline and/or calendar (in various places). This appears to be the case primarily if a user is a student in one course and a teacher in another. See links below for related tracker issues.
Please see below for a list of all tracker items that we collected during the Hack/Doc Fest. Please be aware that Moodle migrated to JIRA cloud hosting the weekend after the conference and some users have reported challenges logging in since then.
In February 2025, CLAMP posted about serious question bank issues in Moodle versions 4.3.8, 4.4.4, and 4.5.0. While those issues were addressed, With the release of Moodle 5.0, the Question Bank has been radically revised and appears to be a work in progress.
Up through Moodle 4.5, the course Question Bank stored all quiz questions within a course. Teachers could either create or edit questions directly in the Question Bank or from within any quiz in that course. All questions created from within a quiz would also be available from the course Question Bank.
Starting with Moodle 5.0, a course can have multiple Question Banks. However, questions created within a quiz in this environment will not store questions in the course-level Question Bank; instead those questions are restricted to the context of that specific quiz.
It is still possible to add a question from the course-level Question Bank(s), and when you do, the question will display with a clear tag indicating the name of the Question Bank from which it is sourced.
Further, a teacher can access any Question Banks to which they have been allowed access from any quiz or course. Access to Question Banks is granted to all teachers on a course.
This is how you add a question from a Question Bank in another course in Moodle 5.0:
In Moodle 5.0, it is now possible to control access to your question banks separately through the Assign Roles feature.
There are three roles available to assign within a question bank: teacher, non-editing teacher, and student. Students in a question bank have no permissions within the bank, so assigning that role has no functional difference as having no role in a bank.
Users who are assigned a teacher or non-editing teacher role in a question bank are able to access the question bank within their separate courses when adding questions. However, the user must be enrolled in the course the question bank is native to in order to be assigned a question bank role. Users’ roles within the course and roles in the course question bank may be different and are assigned separately (i.e. a student in a course may be assigned as a teacher in the question bank for the same course).
Within our Moodle 4.5 test environment, we added questions to question banks at the course level, the category level, and the site level to document their new place within Moodle 5.0. Upon upgrading, this is what happened to the questions and question banks within each level.
The course-wide question bank questions are all added into a new question bank named “[course short name] shared question bank” with the description “This question bank was created automatically when the site was upgraded.” The name and description can be changed and the question bank can be renamed in the Edit settings page. Categories within the course question bank from before the upgrade are preserved (see below).
One of the major changes to the question bank structure is the handling of category-wide question banks. Moodle no longer allows users to see the site-wide or category-wide question banks. When navigating to the edit categories section within the course, users are only able to see question categories for the course question bank.
If category-wide question banks exist, this prompts the creation of a course entitled Shared teaching resources for category: [Category name]. This course is created with no participants and no content besides the question bank. Users must be enrolled to access the question banks on the category level.
👉 It is important to note that even the authors of questions within category-wide question banks will not have access to these unless specifically enrolled in the newly- created teaching resources course. Once a user has been enrolled in this course, they can access these questions when populating quizzes with questions using the Switch bank function. The category question banks can only be updated within the newly-created course.
Site-wide Question Banks function in a similar way as before—they are available on the site’s homepage under the Question banks tab (for admins, not all users on the course). This question bank is not available unless users have been assigned a teacher or editing teacher role in the question bank. All users are available in the role assignment page.
CLAMP has three specific recommendations for schools proceeding with Moodle 5.0, and we’ll explain each of them below:
Before upgrading to Moodle 5+, CLAMP recommends you ensure you know about any system-wide or category-wide question banks/categories and with whom they were shared. While these will upgrade well, how they are shared will change. After upgrade, you will want to re-share those question banks/courses through assigning question bank roles and/or enrolling users in the appropriate courses.
Questions created within a quiz environment will not be added to the course question bank and will not be shareable or available outside of the quiz. Therefore, CLAMP recommends creating questions intended for reuse within the course question bank, rather than within the quiz.
CLAMP strongly recommends not relying on exporting questions with categories from the questions area of another site, and then importing that into your Moodle 5+ environment. If your questions export includes categories, Moodle 5+ will import each category as a separate Question Bank in your Moodle course, even if the category contains no questions.
Any questions export will import the questions into a new question bank, that will be named “System Shared Question Bank”, with the description of “This question bank was created automatically when the site was created.”
There are three 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, 4.4, and 4.5.
The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-August 2025. Moodle 5.0 has been released, and CLAMP evaluated it this past week at the Summer 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Swarthmore College. We will be posting our findings over the next several weeks. The consensus from this week is that schools planned to upgrade to Moodle 4.5 for the forthcoming school year.
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.
The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-June 2025. Moodle 5.0 has been released, and CLAMP will evaluate it at the Summer 2025 Hack/Doc Fest at Swarthmore College. If you are interested in testing the latest version, or have any issues, features, or best practices you’d like to bring to the table, please check out the itinerary and considering joining us on June 10th.
