It used to be that writing in Moodle, Canvas, D2L, and Blackboard sucked. For most, it still does: the text editors feel like afterthoughts and are best used to “paste” text written elsewhere. Recently, a Canvas exec at a conference told me he “would never recommend students write in our editor.” 

Not a good look for a learning management system. Today, there’s an acute need for secure spaces for students to write due to the rise of generative AI tools. While many might revert to “class only” writing. The LMS is a common property where administrators and schools can exert some control and security to ensure that the writing submitted is a student’s own. 

For writing to remain a viable assessment for students, we need an LMS that can secure assessments, administer them with ease, provide a great experience for writers, and help teachers manage evaluation. Validating learning is an essential role for educators at any level.

Since 2024, I’ve been working on creating tools that secure writing in Moodle so that teachers can design valid assessments focused on writing. Here are a few of the settings and plugins that I think your institution can use to secure and validate learning and why. 

Settings

Timed Assignments

Moodle Docs: https://docs.moodle.org/405/en/Assignment_settings#Availability 

This little known feature for assignments is a core feature where you can turn a writing assignment into a timed event. It’s a way to raise the stakes for an assessment or reflection time where you want to time-box the student writing process. This could be used in a classroom setting or computer lab, during a synchronous virtual class session, or asynchronously. 

AI Subsystem

Moodle Docs: https://docs.moodle.org/501/en/AI_tools 

Moodle’s AI Subsystem is a simple way to plug into several frontier model APIs to bring the power of AI to your site. While the placements are simple to start (summarize, generate text, generate images) the ways that the subsystem can be tied to other plugins is growing in number and power. I’m excited to see how AI in Moodle develops. If you have text generation turned on for your site, you and your students will get a button to generate text right in Tiny (works for images too) which might spark some new ways to provide co-authoring opportunities to students. 

Rubrics/Checklists (Advanced Grading)

Moodle Docs: https://docs.moodle.org/501/en/Rubrics 

Criteria based grading is an easy way to help teachers and evaluators objectively work through the grading process. Moodle’s advanced grading features offer a flexible framework for building checklist- and rubric-based grading. The Rubric system is flexible in providing multiple criteria, and scales in a way that automatically sum scores correctly and directly into the gradebook. 

Plugins

Annotate PDF

Moodle Docs: https://docs.moodle.org/405/en/Assignment_settings#Feedback_types 

(note, this is part of core Moodle but may require additional configuration by your administrator so I am listing it as a plugin)

If you’re stuck thinking that Moodle doesn’t have an answer to Canvas’ Speed Grader you haven’t leveraged Annotate PDF and the “grade” button in your course. 

This simple way of accessing submitted assignments brings you something that looks and feels a lot more like Turnitin’s Feedback Studio and Speed Grader. You can:

1. See student writing as a paginated submission (or the submission itself), 
2. Mark it up with easy to use tools, 
3. Provide comments, 
4. Fill out a rubric, and
5. Move to the next submission with just a click

Marking made easy. 

Cursive 

Plugin: https://moodle.org/plugins/tiny_cursive 

Website: https://cursivetechnology.com/ 

Don’t just take it from me (the designer and developer), we’ve recently met with two Moodle partners that put Cursive at the top of their list for essential Moodle plugins because of its free features. 

Writing in the AI-era is hard to trust, Cursive restores validity by focusing on the writing process. With the free version you can 

1. Watch a replay of writing (including pasted and AI generated text from the subsystem),
2. See how long a student worked on their assignment, 
3. Capture comments from students as they paste, 
4. Add a very good auto-save feature, and 
5. Make the writing on Moodle look like Google docs. 

Plug it into the Cursive API and it can remove the need for a webcam proctoring by leveraging the keyboard: adding authorship verification, analytics, and much, much more. 

Proctoring for Moodle

Plugin: https://moodle.org/plugins/quizaccess_proctoring

Website: https://elearning23.com/moodle-proctoring-pro-details/ 

This free plugin–with a low cost premium option–adds webcam proctoring directly to your quizzes. It’s simple to set up, easy to use, and raises the bar for academic integrity. The paid version adds facial recognition and some automation to the proctoring service. While it doesn’t provide a live proctor or screen capture, when paired with Secure Exam Browser (SEB) it can help to provide significantly better academic integrity for an examination without the significant cost of live or managed record and review proctoring services. If you do want managed proctoring as a service, consider a solution like SMOWL (a Certified Integration Partner). 

AI Feedback Question Type

Plugin: https://moodle.org/plugins/qtype_aitext 

Website: https://github.com/marcusgreen/moodle-qtype_aitext 

Marcus Green of Catalyst IT EU/UK has this nifty Question Type plugin which lets you provide immediate/real time feedback for short answer and long form essays in quizzes.  Great for formative assessment, but also as a potential way to provide some students feedback while questions are marked by an evaluator for summative assessment. 

Marcus joined me recently for a webinar where we dove into the plugin, how it works, how students and teachers responded to it, and how we hope you’ll consider integrating it to classrooms (check out the recording here: https://youtu.be/jKcKFAbx6sw). A lot of the early usage has focused on language, reading, and writing applications but the sky is the limit with good prompting and testing. 

Poodll for Moodle Mini lesson AudioChat activity 

Plugin: https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_minilesson 

Website: https://poodll.com/ 

Poodll is a crazy-good set of plugins for language learning from Justin Hunt. Free features let you embed audio/video essentially anywhere (Poodll Media) and paid versions add all sorts of speech recognition, pronunciation, listening, writing, and automarking activities. 

I’m particularly drawn to one of the new LLM-based activities that was released as part of the package this year: A Poodll MiniLesson itemtype called AudioChat. 

This activity packs amazing opportunities into a simple activity. Upload any source material and you can assign students to use the built in chat interface to talk sort of like an oral examination. Audio is captured and transcribed automatically and the interaction is both engaging (for students) and can be secured.

Justin and I will be hosting a webinar all about oral assessment and Poodll on January 22nd, register here. 

Bonus

(awesome but not necessarily for Writing)

AI Image Repository

Plugin: https://moodle.org/plugins/repository_aiimage

The AI Subsystem is a great first step, but if you want to make things easy for your teachers to create and insert images consider the AI Image Repository. This adds the ability to create images from prompts anytime the user clicks the image button (better placement) using either Poodll API or your AI system of choice (including Gemini). In my opinion, this is much better placement and the image quality is top notch. This is a quick and easy way to add course images or image tiles to dashboards and improve the UX and aesthetics of a Moodle site or course. 

Invitation Plugin

Plugin: https://moodle.org/plugins/local_invitation

Guest access is cool, but if you’re interested in giving people a real taste of being a student, trying out an activity, or providing a course experience without lengthy registration processes, the Course Invitation is amazing. With as little as a single field you can provide 1-click access to a course and give that new (temporary) user the full experience of a student role. We use it at Cursive to let people demo a site with “burner” accounts but there are many more ways this versatile tool can be put to use. Set accounts to be deleted automatically, limit total invitations, change default roles, and customize the landing page language and required fields. 

Click this link to see how easy it is to create a temporary account to try Cursive on our Demo site: https://demo.cursivetechnology.com/local/invitation/join.php?courseid=68&id=bbe10640-538d-41a8-ba7f-9c42d084c62c