UCL Moodle will be updated to version 4.5 on the 2nd of January 2025. 

The main change staff will notice is that the Moodle assignment submissions interface has been revamped with a new full width display, fixed headers and footers that allow for better navigation, improved filtering as well as easy access to key actions at the top and bottom of the page.

Staff can learn more by watching Moodle’s Assignment improvements in Moodle 4.5 video.  

Other improvements include: 

• Students will now receive notifications when a Quiz is about to open, when an assignment is due (in 7 days or 48 hours) and also when an assignment is overdue. 

• Staff will be able to set assignment resubmissions to be offered automatically if students are allowed more than one attempt.  

• Staff will now be able to regrade specific questions in a Quiz and question categories can be organised using drag and drop or using the three dots action button (for accessibility requirements).  

• The Tiny MCE Editor will now include the option to record the screen and computer audio as well as record video. 

• There are several administrative enhancements, speed improvements and bug fixes. 

You can read more about the changes on Moodle’s 4.5 new features page.  

Please note that UCL has NOT enabled Moodle’s AI subsystems or subsections at this stage as our current focus is on improving UCL Moodle’s performance and reliability. However, those features may be reviewed in the future if there is sufficient demand 

The Feedback Tracker has been updated today (Thursday 12th December 2024).

The update introduces improvements for staff. The display for students will not change.

The display of the Feedback tracker configuration page has been changed to align it with UCL’s design system and improve accessibility and useability.

The update also introduces two new features to assist staff in marking and returning feedback:

• a progress indicator showing the % of marking completed for each assessment, and
• a count of extensions applied on Moodle assignments and quizzes based on user and group overrides.

Configuration options have been relocated to make the editing of the Feedback tracker more intuitive.

Several bugs have also been resolved, with any outstanding issues listed under Known issues.

To learn more about the Feedback tracker, please see the Feedback tracker documentation.

UCL Moodle quizzes now support the CodeRunner question type.

CodeRunner questions allow students to submit code and for teachers to run a program in order to grade a student’s answer.

CodeRunner will be of most benefit to programming courses where students are asked to write program code to some specification and that code is then graded by running it in a series of tests. CodeRunner questions are also relevant for areas of computer science and engineering to grade questions in which a program must be used to assess correctness.

UCL Moodle has support for the following common coding languages: Python, Java, C, SQL, PHP.

CodeRunner questions are an advanced question type. You should always run a practice assessment with students prior to any summative assessments to ensure your questions are working properly and that students are familiar with answering CodeRunner questions.

If you wish to run a summative assessment using Moodle Quiz. Please follow UCL guidance and notify Digital Education in advance to ensure any necessary checks can be completed.

To learn more, please see the CodeRunner documentation.

Moodle Exam guard

Exam guard will prevent users from editing their course from 10 minutes before the start of a Moodle quiz until 10 minutes after the quiz has finished. Exam guard does this by looking at the “open the quiz”/ “close the quiz”  setting when a Moodle quiz is created. The course editing freeze will only apply where the Moodle quiz is open for less than 5 hours as it is designed to target Moodle quizzes being used for controlled condition exams.  To avoid any disruptions, we recommend setting the “Open the quiz” time to match the exam start time when creating the quiz, as well as leaving the quiz availability setting on “Show on course page” rather than “Hide on course page”. 

A banner will appear at the top of your course when Exam guard is in effect.

For further details, please refer to our wiki guide.

23/24 Moodle course read-only date

The read-only date for many Moodle courses from the 23/24 academic year will be activated on 29th November, 2024.  Once the Read-Only date is reached a course becomes uneditable.  If you will need any 23/24 courses to remain editable after 29th November, please adjust the read only date on the course as needed, and while the course is editable.

For guidance on amending the read-only date before it is globally activated, please refer to our Moodle miniguide.

If you need additional assistance, please contact us via MyServices.

Kind regards

Digital Education team

Portico mappings on Moodle pages were globally deactivated on 1 November 2024.

AI is a fast-moving field, and just a year after we wrote the text for the UCL Generative AI hub, some of it was looking out of date. We wanted to give it a refresh, but also make it less text-heavy. One of the team suggested we might do a series of short (90 second) video clips, similar to the popular UCL Micro-CPD series.

This was a great idea, but videos of real people always cause a problem. They are time-consuming to make, but they are even harder to update. You have to get the same people together again, and editing in a new clip can break the continuity of the original. Even something simple as wearing the same clothes can be a challenge. The web is full of listings of continuity bloopers, even for major movies.

So we looked for an alternative, and saw a growing market in synthetic video generators. One of them, Synthesia, was co-founded by UCL’s Professor Lourdes Agapito, so it seemed a natural choice for us to try. We particularly valued Synthesia’s extensive discussion around its own views on ethical AI use, in-keeping with UCL’s values.

So, we started building a trial video in Synthesia. At the start, it feels like a bit of a cut-down PowerPoint. You have a scene (similar to a slide) and you can add text and graphics to it, with animations. But then you can do something that PowerPoint doesn’t do; add one of many avatars to the scene. Then at the bottom (similar to where PowerPoint notes would be) you add the text that the avatar will speak. You then join your objects on the slide to the point in the text when they should appear. And for a simple video, that is it.

You can see how this looks in the screenshot below:

Once done, you can preview how your avatar will sound. This is useful, as the AI-generated speech will not be perfect. Where it doesn’t sound quite right, you can add an extra pause, or give specific diction that it should use to say a word or phrase. Once you are happy with the speech, press a button and your video will be generated in the background. Our 90-second videos took about 10-15 minutes to be ready to download.

You can watch the first video that we made below, and visit the UCL Generative AI hub to see the full set of eight videos.

The nice thing about this is that when you need to make a change, you just open it up, change your graphic or text, and generated the video again. It’s really simple – in fact, getting the captions right for each video was the most time-consuming part of the process. I’d estimate each video took about a day to discuss, write, make, amend, caption and deploy.

For us, this is a bit of an experiment. We know some people prefer video to text, and vice versa. But we’ve got very little experience of how people – particularly our university community – will respond to synthetic videos. If you have any thoughts on whether this format works well for you, or how it could be improved, please do let us know in the comments below.