Moodle Mentor: December 2025

Moodle Mentor says:
BigBlueButton is one of those tools people often notice only after they need it, and then wonder how they ever lived without it! With every Moodle platform (Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace, or MoodleCloud), BigBlueButton is the built-in virtual classroom tool designed specifically for teaching and learning. It’s also one of Moodle’s Certified Integration Partners, which means BigBlueButton meets our standards for quality, security, and interoperability.

What makes BigBlueButton special is that it isn’t a generic videoconferencing tool retrofitted for education — it’s founded on pedagogy. Everything in it is designed to support instructor-led active learning: whiteboards for modelling thinking, breakout rooms for collaboration, shared notes for building knowledge together, and real-time analytics that help you understand learner engagement. 

BigBlueButton is great for higher education, but it’s also a powerful tool for employee learning (or, really, whatever type of learning you’re facilitating). I highly recommend checking out Fred Dixon and Jesus Federico’s talk from MoodleMoot Global 2025 — From webcam fatigue to learning success: Reimagining Instructor-Led Training — where they explore why instructor-led virtual classrooms still matter in an AI-shaped future.

For the quick summary, with BigBlueButton, you can:

• Host live classes, review sessions, or virtual office hours
• Use the built-in whiteboard and breakout rooms
• Record sessions for learners who couldn’t attend
• View real-time engagement analytics like who has spoken, raised hands, and more

And you do that all right within your Moodle course! No need to send your learners out on a scavenger hunt trying to find the right link for their virtual meetings.

A pro tip: treat BigBlueButton rooms the same way you treat your course design — set expectations early, create a simple structure for how sessions run, and make intentional use of active-learning tools (polls and shared notes are my favourites!).

And if you ever outgrow the free tier, Moodle’s ecosystem includes extended BigBlueButton hosting options with larger rooms, longer recording retention, and more advanced analytics.

Moodle Mentor says:
This is such an expansive inquiry! To know what “improve” means for you, I’d need a bit more detail about the challenge you’re facing. Rubrics behave slightly differently depending on your Moodle site version, and people often mean very different things when they say they want Rubrics to be “better” (more flexible? faster to set up? look nicer? more nuanced scoring?).

While our fearless Product team over here at Moodle HQ is constantly reviewing Advanced grading tools for future updates, here are a few ideas to get more out of Rubrics today:

• Duplicate criteria — A simple way to break down complex skills. If one criterion covers multiple behaviours or steps, duplicate it and score each part separately. This can make your feedback clearer and more actionable for learners.
• Enable criterion comments — Turning on comments gives you space to add personalised notes about why a learner received a particular level. This is especially helpful in skills-based courses where nuance matters.
• Try Marking guides — Marking guides sit within Advanced grading and offer more flexibility than Rubrics (I actually prefer them, because of this flexibility). You can give points within a range, add custom comments, and provide richer narrative feedback — ideal when assessment isn’t easily captured by fixed levels.
• Use the Rubrics Grading Report plugin — Our friends over at Brickfield Education Labs make a cool plugin which gives you a one-page view of all rubric-level marks and comments for an assignment or forum. It’s great for standardised grading, analysing trends across criteria, supporting learner progression, and downloading data for moderation or quality assurance.

If you have a specific improvement in mind, you’re welcome  to join us in the Moodle Experience Lab, where educators and learners help shape new designs, test prototypes, and influence the direction of Moodle LMS’s grading tools and other features.

And, hey, Moodle Mentor is always here, working round-the-clock to answer your most pressing Moodle teaching-and-learning questions. Feel free to write back with a bit more about your workflow or pain points, I’m happy to dig deeper — the more specific the challenge, the more targeted advice I can offer!

Moodle Mentor says:
Large-scale exam delivery is absolutely possible with Moodle LMS — many institutions run national exams, university finals, and certification tests at this scale and beyond — but it does require thoughtful preparation. I’m not an infrastructure expert, so I’ll focus on the learning-design choices that can help reduce load and create a smoother experience for everyone.

Here are a few best practices you can apply right away:

• Use Deferred feedback — This question behaviour mode processes answers only at submission time, not continuously, reducing load during the attempt.
• Avoid random questions from extremely large categories — Each randomised pull adds work for the server. Smaller, well-organised question bank categories make randomisation more efficient.
• Limit heavy on-screen media — Large videos or high-resolution images increase bandwidth demands. Keep exam pages lean whenever possible.
• Keep start windows tight  —If your assessment policy allows it, short start windows help stagger load so all learners aren’t hitting the server at the exact same second.
• Adjust autosave frequency — Changing autosave from every 60 seconds to something more moderate can reduce background processing during peak loads.
• Try the new (Moodle LMS 5.0+) pre-creating quiz attempts feature — This lets your Moodle site generate all attempts before the assessment window opens, which significantly smooths out the load spike when large groups begin a quiz at the same time.

Because high-stakes, high-volume testing depends heavily on the specifics of your hosting environment, you can also consult with your hosting provider. They’re best positioned to review your setup and ensure everything runs reliably when it matters most.

Good luck on all those tests!

Moodle Mentor says:
When a Quiz won’t duplicate, it’s often a sign that something underneath has grown too large or too tangled — usually the Question bank. Very big or long-lived banks, lots of random questions, or years of imports can create hidden complexity.

This is also one of those areas where your hosting setup and Moodle version matter more than the Quiz settings themselves. I’m not an infrastructure expert, but if you’re self-hosting, it’s worth checking server resources or asking a Moodle Certified Partner to review what’s happening behind the scenes.

A few practical steps you can try:

• Reorganise your Question bank — simplify categories and reduce the distance between where Quizzes live and where questions are stored. For pre-5.0 versions of Moodle LMS, check out this page, which gives some tips on minimising question bank duplication issues.
• Consider upgrading to Moodle LMS 5.0 or later — the new Question-bank sharing model is more efficient and helps prevent the duplication issues that can build up in older workflows.
• Review random question usage — very large shared categories can be especially heavy.

If duplication consistently fails, that’s usually a sign you’d benefit from someone looking directly at your setup. Our Partners can help diagnose the root cause and get things running smoothly again.

Moodle Mentor says:
For this one, I went out to our expert, Liz Starbuck Greer, Director of Strategic Partnerships, who works closely with our Premium Certified Partners and supports organisations exploring Moodle Workplace.

Liz explains: You can only access Moodle Workplace through Moodle in the US and India, or through one of our Premium Certified Partners. Workplace is a proprietary product designed for complex organisations that typically require professional support. We don’t allow anyone else to develop for the core product because it’s important for us to retain quality control over the code. However, just like with Moodle LMS, if you’re interested in extending Moodle Workplace, you can develop plugins that add new tools or functionality.

It is possible to self-host Moodle Workplace, and we recognise that’s essential for some organisations — but this is something you would need to agree in partnership with your provider. They’ll ensure that updates, security, and support are handled appropriately.

If you’re exploring Moodle Workplace, a conversation with a Premium Certified Partner (or with Moodle directly, depending on your region) is the best next step. They can walk you through what self-hosting would mean in practice and help you find an arrangement that fits your organisation’s needs.

Moodle Mentor says:
Moodle platforms can support many school-management-style workflows — managing enrolments, communicating with guardians, tracking learner progress, running assessments — but it isn’t a full Student Information System (SIS). 

I’d need to know more about what you mean by “school management system” to give the best answer, but, generally speaking, most schools pair their Moodle site with an SIS that handles:

• Attendance
• Timetabling/scheduling
• Behaviour records
• Billing / finance
• Official transcripts

Moodle platforms excel at the teaching and learning side — courses, assignments, feedback, grading, and reporting — and are designed to integrate deeply with other systems. So whether a Moodle site can be a school management system or not really depends on your unique needs. 

As for streaming assignments:

• If you mean streaming video assignments, yes — Moodle platforms support audio/video submissions, embedded recordings, and integrations with tools like Zatuk.
• If you mean live-streaming an assignment itself, that’s not typical, but you can stream instructional content or host live sessions where learners submit work in real time with a virtual classroom tool like BigBlueButton.
• If you mean streaming content into or out of a Moodle site, you can do that via Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). Moodle platforms support both sides:

• LTI consumer — pulling external tools into a Moodle site (e.g., interactive content, video tools, assessment systems).
• LTI provider — allowing other systems to launch Moodle activities or courses through LTI.

So if “streaming assignments” means connecting your Moodle site to another platform through LTI, that’s definitely possible.

If you want to write back in with some more specifics about your use case, your Moodle Mentors are always here, ready to noodle over the next eLearning puzzle.

Thank you, as always, for the creativity, curiosity, and community spirit you bring to Moodle. Keep your questions coming — whether it’s a “how do I…?”, a “what’s your favorite tool for..”, or a “could Moodle do…?” moment — we’re here for it.