Moodle 4.5 available at ETH Zürich

Usability improvements

As we can’t mention all the improvements here, we therefore present you with a selection (for the full list, see the release notes linked below): Students now receive notifications on upcoming or overdue assignments and when a quiz opens. The long-awaited subsection feature helps lecturers to add structure, by arranging content in subsections within a topic. In the assignment activity, handling the submissions of students is much easier. The table header is now «sticky», the filters offer more features and there is a «sticky» footer with the available actions for lecturers.

In the Moodle quiz and question bank: The ordering question type is now integrated in the Moodle core and available at ETH Zürich, a quiz can now have multiple grades (e.g. for each section of the quiz), selected questions in a quiz can be regraded and most importantly the question category management UI has been totally revamped. A list of additional new features is found in the release notes linked below.

Check the accessibility of your course-content

With Moodle teaching rights, you can now easily check the accessibility of your course content. To do so, turn on course editing and add the block «Accessibility+ Review» to your course. Then submit your course for analysis and have a bit of patience, as the course content is then analysed for accessibility.

After the analysis is done, you will see a report in the «Accessibility+ Review» block. As a teacher, you will also see which content is accessible and which content needs accessibility improvements, as the content’s background will be colour-coded depending on its accessibility. For more information on accessibility in general, please have a look at https://ethz.ch/de/die-eth-zuerich/lehre/e-accessibility.html.

AI subsystem

Moodle 4.5 introduces the new AI-subsystem, which constitutes the technical foundation for further AI functionalities in later Moodle versions. This first version of the Moodle AI-subsystem provides limited initial AI user-functionalities including text generation and summarize capabilities. These functionalities will be piloted at ETH Zürich with a limited number lecturers in their Moodle courses in Spring Semester 2025. The pilot will form the basis for the decision to make the Moodle AI-subsystem functionalities available to all Moodle users at ETH Zürich in the future.

Build the reading list for your students with Leganto

Leganto enables Moodle teachers to manage and share library resources and more by making relevant course literature directly available in a Leganto reading list in Moodle. Log in to Moodle to read more about creating your own course reading list. Please also see additional information on Leganto.

More information on new features

If you like to dig deeper into the new features of Moodle 4.5, have a look in the Moodle-docs on the new features-pages for Moodle 4.5 and Moodle 4.4. Release note aficionados will be happy with the detailed release notes for Moodle 4.5 and Moodle 4.4.  ETH Zürich’s Moodle service is also available via moodle(at)ethz.ch.

Upcoming discontinuations in summer 2025

A preview for Moodle 5.0, expected to arrive at ETH Zürich in Summer 2025: The activity «Chat» will be removed from the Course Moodle. It is only rarely used at ETH Zürich (most users prefer the forum or Moodleoverflow activty, therefore «Chat» won’t be part of the Moodle core anymore. We recommend you check your courses and remove any instances of «Chat». The depreciated Atto text editor will also be removed, as the editor TinyMCE replaced Atto as the standard editor on ETH’s Moodle in June 2024.

Happy Moodling!

PS – To learn more about using Moodle, visit the self-paced Moodle course «Building an effective Moodle course«.