Christmas has come early for course administrators and academics looking to reduce their administrative workloads: the DLE team has now released automated extensions in Moodle for students with approved Delayed Assessment Permits, Extenuating Circumstances and Reasonable Academic Adjustments! This is available now for use on postgraduate and undergraduate Moodle courses (2025-2026).

Following the recent changes to the process for Reasonable Academic Adjustments, the DLE Team has been working with the SITS Integration Team to complete updates to their code and final testing with end users.

Approved extension data can now be pulled into Moodle from SITS to automatically create user or group overrides for Moodle Assignment or Moodle Quiz which can be used to adjust individual deadlines in Moodle.

Turnitin assignments are not supported. However, it will be possible to use this with the forthcoming  Coursework double marking tool. Reassessments are not yet supported.

The benefit of automated extensions is that they will save a huge amount of administrative time but it is still important to check extension details are correct in Portico beforehand!​

Further guidance

For user guidance on how to import extensions into Moodle, see the automated extensions guide and for help with marks transfer, see the SITS Marks Transfer guide.

Merry Christmas!  

The Digital Learning Environment (DLE) team is currently developing a new double marking tool for UCL Moodle, with an expected release in December 2025. The marking tool, called “Coursework”, is designed to support complex marking workflows, especially double marking, all within the Moodle platform.  

We are pleased to share an overview of the key features of the forthcoming Coursework double marking tool, which may be of interest as you plan assessments for Term 2 and Term 3. 

Double marking 

The Coursework tool enables markers to complete their marking independently, eliminating the need for multiple inboxes or external spreadsheets. As one user who helped pilot to the tool noted, “Finally, we have an option for blind second marking.” 

Marking workflows can be configured as either: 

• Open marking – where marks and feedback are visible between markers. 

• Blind marking – where each marker’s input remains hidden until both have submitted their marking. 

The Coursework tool maintains a comprehensive marking history, including first marks, second marks, and the final agreed mark. This history is accessible to external examiners for review and audit purposes. 

Markers retain control over what is released to students, with the option to share either all marking or only the final agreed mark. 

In cases where consensus cannot be reached between two markers, a third marker may be added to provide an additional independent mark. 

Candidate number anonymisation 

Coursework introduces the use of Candidate Numbers for anonymising student identities and submissions. This long-awaited feature will now be available within UCL Moodle, making it easier to manage assessments whilst maintaining compliance with UCL policies. 

Marking features

Coursework incorporates several time-saving features to support markers whilst giving them full control over what feedback they return to students. 

• Mark suggestions: Based on UCL academic policy, the tool will suggest a final agreed mark if the first and second marks are within 10% and do not cross classification boundaries. This suggested mark can be manually adjusted if necessary. 

• General feedback: Option to release cohort-wide feedback independently of individual student feedback. 

• Flexible marker allocation: Markers can be assigned manually, via spreadsheet upload, or distributed evenly across submissions. 

Suitable assessment types 

Coursework is particularly well-suited for: 

• Dissertations 

• Research proposals 

• High-stakes coursework requiring documented double marking 

It may also be used for: 

• Essays 

• Reports 

• Other written coursework 

While Coursework offers comparable functionality to Moodle Assignment and Turnitin, its key advantage lies in its support for independent double marking. It can also accommodate single marking workflows, and moderation workflows. 

Further information and engagement 

For questions, feedback, or to request an early demonstration, please contact the Digital Learning Environment Team via MyServices. 

To stay informed about Moodle developments: 

• Subscribe to the Digital Education blog 

• Join the Moodle Development User Group on Microsoft Teams for early access and opportunities to contribute to ongoing development.

To support academic and course administration staff with creating accessible content on Moodle, Ally’s AI Alt Text Assistant has been enabled on UCL Moodle.  An ‘Auto-generate description’ option is now available in the Instructor Feedback panel for ‘Images without a description’, providing a suggestion of a possible alternative description. Instructors will remain in control to review these.

The Digital Accessibility Team recently completed testing on the tool and were impressed.  They think that this AI assistant will be beneficial for staff wishing to improve the accessibility of their Moodle courses as it provides a head start on writing image descriptions and will save time as well as improving the overall student experience.

The tool uses the latest Claude Sonnet 3.5 model from AWS Bedrock to tackle more complex images—including STEM diagrams, charts, graphs, images with embedded text, even handwritten notes.

You can review, tweak, or rewrite the suggestions as needed and nothing gets saved or made available to students until you say so. Anthology advise that this is central to their “human-first approach to AI: making sure the content stays accurate and useful.” 

In addition, as part of Anthology’s Trustworthy AI Approach, this feature and underlying service work to maintain user trust and ensure data privacy by not utilizing any data or information for training or regenerating models.

For more details on how to use the tool, please see Anthology’s guidance on adding image descriptions.

Anthology have released several other new Ally features for staff and students and once we have reviewed these and tested them with digital accessibility champions from different subject areas, we will share more information.

The Digital Learning Environment team will be making improvements to how Portico enrolments and Moodle interact on the 3rd November 2025. 

Instead of un-enrolling users from a Moodle course when a student is unenrolled from a module in Portico, students will remain on a Moodle course with a suspended status.  

Suspended students will no longer have access to a Moodle course. However, any grades they have received remain accurately recorded on Moodle.  

Tutors and Course admins will be able to easily identify suspended students by the suspended flag shown below, which will appear in the Course Participants list. 

Suspended students are not shown by default in assignments, quizzes and other activities or in the Gradebook. However, they can be shown if required by selecting the appropriate filters. 

The introduction of the suspend status will reduce the need for Moodle data restores and remove the need for manual Portico global deactivation (which was usually done six weeks into each term to prevent students with grades being unenrolled from Moodle). 

Additionally, Moodle courses will now only allow Portico mappings from the current academic year. This ensures that Moodle course enrolment reflects the current academic year’s cohort. 

These changes should ensure better enrolment and data management within Moodle without any additional work for staff. 

For further information and actionable steps, please refer to our knowledge article.

If you have any questions or queries, please reach out to the DLE team on MyServices. 

To enable continued access to migrated recordings, essential integration work is being carried out to link over 30,000 Moodle course pages with Panopto, UCL’s new recording platform replacing Lecturecast (Echo360).  This work is critical to ensuring that recordings appear in the correct Moodle spaces and remain accessible to staff and students during the Late Summer Assessment period and beyond.

The process will begin on Friday 11 July and may take up to 10 days to complete.  During this period Moodle may experience slower response times, due to the increased processing load which we are unable to mitigate.

Unfortunately, there are no alternative pathways to achieve this outcome, and we sincerely apologise for any disruption this may cause to Moodle-based activities.  The timeframe has been carefully selected to coincide with a period of historically low usage, in order to minimise the impact as far as possible.

If you have any concerns or experience significant issues, please contact Digital Education Support via our MyServices Request Form.

The Digital Learning Environment (DLE) team will be making updates to the Moodle Quiz activity soon (expected date Thursday 31st July 2025). This update is designed to enhance both accessibility and usability, ensuring a more inclusive and user-friendly experience for all students and staff.

All existing quiz functionality will remain unchanged. The update focuses on improving the interface and aligning the Quiz more closely with UCL’s design system, resulting in a more consistent and intuitive look and feel.

These changes are part of our ongoing commitment to improving the digital learning experience at UCL. If you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch with us via MyServices.

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