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.
CLAMP has become aware of a significant bug involving the Moodle question bank. This bug affects Moodle platforms on versions 4.3.8, 4.4.4, or 4.5.0 (and higher). CLAMP recommends that schools do not upgrade to those versions until this bug has been fixed. Please continue reading for a full explanation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
There is no way for an individual instructor to configure these options or to force a push.
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:
We looked at ways of accomplishing this:
Other avenues to explore:
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:
We helped unearth two bugs while looking at Competencies this time around: MDL-84147 and MDL-84148.
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).
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.
Moodle is working toward supporting Open Badges 3.0. This work will be spread across multiple releases. Two improvements landed in Moodle 4.5:
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:
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.
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:
Save the date! The Summer 2025 Hack/Doc Fest will be at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, from June 10-12.
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”.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
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”.
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:
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!
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 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:
My 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.
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.
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:
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.
