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).

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.