Thanks for welcoming us into your inbox! This month, we're digging into AI agents in the LMS — turns out they're not as invisible as everyone thinks. There's also a User tours hack, screen reader design tips, and a simple but mighty plugin that just might change your Moodle life 👀
Oh, and Moodle LMS 5.2 releases 20 April! We'd love to see you at our live session, so be sure to sign up. (Full details below!)
🧡 Lauren, Head of Solutions Marketing
Field Notes
The AI agents are here… so what next?
AI agents can submit work, complete activities, and move through a course — invisibly, or so the assumption goes. Field Notes this month: how Moodle LMS can actually detect AI agent activity, and what to do with that information.
Moodlers live Come and say hi! (or sign up and watch the recording)
Moodle LMS 5.2 arrives 20 April! 🥳 This release is all about navigation that makes sense, clearer restricted content, collaborative grading, and more AI flexibility.
Join us on Thursday, 23 April, at 2:00pm CEST (GMT+2)for Designing for success: Simplifying the learner journey in Moodle LMS 5.2, a practical session with our learning and product experts. And yes, we'll send the recording to everyone who registers!
Give learners a guided tour of your course (and lots more)
User tours are built-in step-by-step walkthroughs that appear automatically when someone visits a page in your Moodle site. Most people know them as the occasional onboarding tooltip — but they're much more versatile than that.
To create one: Site administration → Appearance → User tours → Create a new tour. Determine where the User tour will appear, add your steps, and enable it.
Some less obvious uses:
A pop-up to encourage learners to complete a site satisfaction survey (or other surveys you might want to run).
A "what's new" tour that orients staff to new features after an upgrade.
A scavenger hunt for learners that motivates them to complete onboarding tasks like updating their profile or enrolling in an introductory course.
Free resources to up your Moodle skills, multilingual course design, H5P and grades, language learning tools — the April Moodle Mentor mailbag is a good one. See what other Moodlers are curious about and send in your own question!
Around 80% of learners with accessibility needs never declare them — so you can't wait to be asked. This practical guide from Moodle Certified Integration Brickfield Education Labs covers the course design choices that make the biggest difference: structure, navigation, descriptive naming, and format.
Give learners a choice — and build pathways around it
The Group choice plugin lets learners enrol themselves into a group within your course. Combine it with Moodle's Restrict access settings to show different activities or sections to different groups. This provides differentiated learning and personalised pathways, with learner agency built in from the start.
A free library of 33 facilitation methods — for any learning context
Liberating Structures is a free collection of practical alternatives to presentations and open brainstorms — each one a simple, reusable method with clear instructions, examples, and tips for adapting it to your context. Whatever you're running, there's something here worth trying.
Last month we asked: how do most learners access your courses?
Laptop or desktop: 45%
Mobile device: 17%
A mix of both: 28%
I'm honestly not sure: 5%
Add "mobile" and "a mix of both" together and that's 45% of learners regularly on a phone. So it’s worth checking how your courses feel on a small screen.
This month we're asking:
When you build a course, where do you spend most of your time?