eClass Upgrade 5.1: What's New for Instructors
Coming May 2nd
Quick Links
Course Organization
The icons have been removed from the course navigation bar to simplify course appearance and provide more space to display course content.
Topics format has now been renamed to “Custom Sections” to better reflect how people are using this customizable format.
Sections and activities are more clearly organized with defined boundaries. You can also now break up content and activities with subsections. Even better, for instructors who use the Menu/Tab course format, these subsections will automatically become tabs within your course (no need to enter the HTML code!).
And navigating these sections has been made even easier with the new Expand all/Collapse all option in the course index (left-side menu).
Bulk actions are now available to modify your course homepage more efficiently, including changing visibility settings, duplicating, or deleting multiple items at once.
Text Editor
The Atto text editor has been removed as Moodle no longer supports it. Instead, with improved accessibility and usability, TinyMCE is now the only text editor for users. Editing text in eClass is now as intuitive as using any popular word processor, and creating content has never been easier with the added drag and drop option for uploading media and the new screen recording feature. Embedded third-party buttons from the previous Atto editor will still be included in the TinyMCE editor.
AI
Generate, Summarize and Explain
Moodle has introduced AI features that allow users to summarize, explain, and generate text. As an Instructor, you have complete control over which AI tools can be used at the course level and at the activity level---you can leave AI tools off across the course or turn them on and choose exactly which tools are available and where they appear. If enabled, instructors can use the generate text tool directly in editing spaces to quickly produce text to support course content. And for students, while generating text is limited to instructor-use only, AI summarize and AI explain are two new features that instructors can enable on individual activities and resources to enhance students’ learning experience.
Note: If AI tools are enabled at the course level, any activities or resources created will have AI summarize and AI explain turned ON for student use by default. This can be changed within each activity’s or resource’s settings.
You can also be assured that any course content and prompting is not shared nor used to train the AI.
Click on the two videos below to see the tools in action and visit AI in eClass for more information on the AI available in eClass.
Accessibility Fixer
The new AI accessibility fixer is available to all users for an easy way to both flag and fix issues within content created with the text editor. Using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the fixer makes suggestions and is colour-coded (red when improvements can be made; green when no issues are detected) for quick checks.
Activities
It's now more intuitive to add activities to your course with the redesigned Activity Chooser, which groups activities by purpose: assessment, collaboration, communication, resources, and interactive content—so that you can quickly find what you need.
Activity icons have been redesigned with an accessible color palette, so that you can spot what you need faster.
File resource icons now display the file type with a simplified, consistent design, making it easy to identify PDFs from PowerPoints from Word documents, etc. while still maintaining a cohesive course page.
There’s now an Activities Overview page to allow you to view all key dates and details for all course activities and resources in one convenient, organized place.
And for those who use groups, instructors can now filter the activity completion reports by group to track their progress.
External Tools
The External Tool activity type has been removed from the activity chooser. Now, each external tool will be its own item in the activity chooser, and you can manage the external tools in your course by selecting LTI External tools under More in the course navigation bar.
Gradebook
You can now collapse individual grade items in the grader report to reduce horizontal scrolling when viewing the report. You can also search by user to find student grades faster and view feedback for grade items directly from the grader report.
Quizzing
You can now create grade items within your quiz structure, assigning grade totals to groups of questions and allowing yourself and your students to review achievement by content focus or question type.
Additionally, the question bank has been modernized to be more organized with less effort. While questions created within a quiz are now added to a quiz-specific bank and cannot be reused or shared, you can now create multiple question banks to easily share and modify questions across all of your courses. Find your questions with ease using the six new filters within the question bank, including searching by question type, time modified, and question text or general feedback; and stay organized with the ability to drag and drop question categories within the bank.
For more information on question banks in 5.1, check out Moodle’s documentation .
Discussions
Within discussion forums, the “Post to all groups” option is now easier to find. You can keep everyone updated with just one click.
Assignments
To make grading more intuitive, bulk actions are visible on the grading screen and key assignment actions are now at the top of the screen. You can now also filter assignments by graded status.
And for those who utilize advanced grading options in eClass, the assignment grading space has been updated to allow resizing of the grader panel, giving you more space to view rubrics and marking guides when providing feedback.
Removal of Progress Bar
The Progress Bar block is no longer supported and has been removed. Instead, the Completion Progress block should be used as it serves the same purpose with improved usability (go to for more information).
Playground Courses
The button to create playground courses has been moved to the My courses space to keep all your courses and course creation in one place.
