Moodle Mentor: May 2026

This is a great instinct — and you’re not alone. A lot of learning starts to fall flat when it stays at the level of content + recall, especially for skills that depend on judgement, behaviour, or context.

Moodle solutions give you a solid foundation for this with tools like Lesson, H5P, and Quiz, which can all support branching, interactivity, and feedback.

But if you’re looking to go further — especially into scenario-based learning, interactive video, or simulations — it’s worth exploring tools designed specifically for that.

One example is Near-Life, a Moodle Certified Integration that lets you build interactive, decision-based experiences using video, slides, or even VR. You can:

• Create branching scenarios where learners make choices and see the consequences.
• Add interactive hotspots and prompts directly into videos.
• Build gamified experiences with scoring, conditions, and feedback.
• Track learner decisions to understand how they’re navigating the experience.

The key difference is that rather than simply presenting information, you’re enabling learners to practise decisions in a safe environment. Near-Life also has a great resource about How to use Near-Life effectively in Moodle.

If you’re trying to make learning more applied, more engaging, or closer to real-world situations, this kind of approach can make a big difference.

You’ve run into a known limitation of the Quiz manual grading report — and you’re right, manual question grading can be a slow process.

When you grade by question, Moodle LMS shows all attempts, and there isn’t currently a built-in way to filter that down to just the last attempt. If you’re working with multiple attempts, that can make things like plagiarism checks more difficult.

A couple of ways to work around it:

• Consider ways of reconfiguring your Quiz settings. For example, set the Quiz to use “last attempt” as the grading method, so only the final submission counts.
• On the manual grading page, sort attempts by date to bring the most recent responses to the top.
• Review responses through the Quiz Grade Results report, which can be easier to navigate by attempt.
• Export responses if you need to scan patterns across learners.

While there isn’t currently a built-in way to filter manual grading down to only the last attempt, approaches like these can make the process much easier to manage.

If this is something you’d like to see improved in future versions of Moodle LMS, it’s also worth sharing feedback through the Moodle Tracker, where enhancement requests and grading workflow improvements are actively discussed by the community and development teams.

Great question — this is exactly what overrides are there for. There are a couple of different uses for overrides in Moodle LMS.

At the activity level, when you apply a User or Group override, Moodle LMS keeps that change separate from the default activity settings. That means you can clearly see who has different deadlines, time limits, or conditions — without affecting the rest of the class.

In practice, this helps you:

• Manage extensions without duplicating activities.
• Avoid accidental changes for everyone.
• Keep a clear record of what’s been adjusted and for whom.

It’s especially useful in courses with multiple instructors or a high number of accommodations.

At the gradebook level, you can also override a grade, which is useful when you need to make an adjustment outside of the activity settings — for example, after a review or special consideration.

In Moodle LMS 5.2 (just released a couple of weeks ago!), you can now also make notes to provide more context for overridden grades in the gradebook. This can be useful for documentation purposes, and helps larger instructional teams stay in sync. If you’re curious to see this feature, and everything else that’s new in Moodle LMS 5.2, check out this recent webinar recording, Designing for success: Simplifying the learner journey in Moodle LMS 5.2.

Short answer: you can’t guarantee it (but then again, what in this life is truly guaranteed?) — but you can design in a way that makes it much more likely.

The most effective approach is to focus less on tracking the video itself, and more on what learners do after watching it. A well-placed question or activity will tell you far more than a “watched 100%” indicator ever could.

A few practical approaches:

• Add a quiz or reflective question after the video — this is usually the most reliable way to check understanding.
• Break longer videos into shorter segments with checkpoints so learners stay engaged (and, yep, add in short, formative assessments after each segment).
• Use interactive video tools like H5P Interactive Video (built into Moodle LMS) to add questions or prompts that the learner interacts with as they watch the video.

If you do need more direct tracking, there are tools that can help. The Video Time plugin makes it easy to embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo and use activity completion to track engagement. The free version can track whether a learner has opened the activity, and additional features (like tracking how much of the video was watched) are available in the Pro version.

But it’s worth keeping in mind: even if you can track whether a video was watched, that doesn’t always mean it was understood. The real shift is from passive viewing to active engagement — and that’s where you’ll see the biggest impact.

This depends a bit on what you’re trying to achieve.

In Moodle LMS, there isn’t a native way to apply conditional access rules to an entire course in the same way you can with activities. Access is typically managed through enrolment methods — Manual enrolment, Self enrolment, Cohort sync, etc. — along with course visibility and permissions assigned to system roles. I’ve seen some impressive alchemy come together over the years that combine restrict access to content and course enrolment keys, but it’s too detailed to get into an advice column.

If you’re looking for a more flexible, built-in way to manage access, it’s worth looking at Programs in Moodle Workplace.

Programs are structured collections of courses that can be assigned — or made available — to specific groups of learners. They’re designed to manage who sees what, when, without needing to manually enrol people into each individual course.

With Moodle Workplace, you can:

• Assign Programs based on role, department, or other criteria.
• Make courses within a Program depended on previous successful completion of other courses (or not — it’s all up to you and what you need to achieve).
• Automate access using dynamic rules.
• And (in Moodle Workplace 5.2) allow learners to self-enrol into Programs through the Catalogue, giving you visibility into what people actually choose to learn.

That last point is a big shift — Programs stop being just a delivery mechanism and start acting more like a discovery layer.

So while LMS gives you solid enrolment controls, Programs in Moodle Workplace are the out-of-the-box way to manage access more dynamically and at scale — without relying on custom plugins or manual workarounds.

Yes — and this is a great use case for Groups and Restrict access.

You can assign learners to groups and then tie specific course activities or sections to those groups. That way, learners only see the content intended for them, even within a shared course.

One important detail: by default, teachers can still see all course content. Restrictions apply to learners. If you need stricter separation between instructors, make sure you’re assigning those instructors the Non-editing teacher role (rather than Teacher role), so that they only see, receive notifications about, and can mark the groups that they’re in.

Good luck out there! Many people don’t realize all the thought and care that goes into setting up a dynamic learning environment that prioritises data privacy and individualized attention to learners. But, believe me, Bekele, here at Moodle, we get it — and we’re really proud of you for all you’re doing to create great experiences for the people at your organisation.

Have a question you’ve been sitting on? Now’s the time. Submit it for next month’s Moodle Mentor — your question might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.