Upgrade Schedule

Production Environment Upgrade Schedule

Your site will be upgraded according to their regional datacenter and timezone.

• EDU Environments Upgrade: July 9, 2026

• Work Environments Upgrade: July 21, 2026

The timezone windows above apply to both production upgrade dates.

Non-Production (Sandbox) Upgrade Schedule

Non-production (sandbox) upgrades will occur during North American business hours.

• EDU Sandbox environments Upgrade: June 11, 2026 — 9:00 AM–5:00 PM EDT

• Work Sandbox environments Upgrade: June 23, 2026 — 9:00 AM–5:00 PM EDT

Non-production upgrades are scheduled during business hours to improve the quality of the upgrade process and help reduce the production upgrade window.

Downtime will be required for both production and non-production environments during their respective upgrade windows.

Upgrade to Moodle™ Core 5.1.4

As part of this release, the team reviewed the code of Moodle™ 5.1.4 and upgraded the underlying systems, adding the corresponding fixes, improvements, and security patches.

Release Notes

For the full releases notes from https://moodledev.io, please see:

5.0 & 5.1 versions

5.0 Release notes

5.1 Release notes

Server requirements​

These are just the minimum supported versions. We recommend keeping all of your software and operating systems up-to-date.

• Moodle™ upgrade: Moodle 4.2.3 or later.

• PHP version: minimum PHP 8.2.0 Note: minimum PHP version was increased in Moodle™ 5.0. PHP 8.3.x and 8.4.x are supported too. See PHP for details.

• PHP extension sodium is required. See Environment - PHP extension sodium.

• PHP setting max_input_vars must be >= 5000. For further details, see Environment - max input vars.

• PHP variants: Only 64-bit versions of PHP are supported.

Database requirements​

Browser support​

Moodle™ is compatible with any standards compliant web browser. We regularly test Moodle™ with the following browsers:

Desktop:

• Chrome

• Firefox

• Safari

• Edge

Mobile:

• MobileSafari

• Google Chrome

For the best experience and optimum security, we recommend that you keep your browser up to date.

Moodle™ 5.1 highlights:

New AI Providers support

Added support for additional AI providers, including Ollama and DeepSeek, gives you more choices and control over AI-powered features and integrations.

Custom Provider instances per task

Administrators can now configure different AI provider instances for specific tasks, enabling greater flexibility and optimization based on use case, performance, or cost considerations.

Per-model Configuration Settings

Per-model configuration controls are now introduced, allowing administrators to define model-specific limits and settings to better manage AI usage and behavior across the platform.

New “Explain” feature for learners

A new Explain capability is now available, which helps learners better understand content by generating contextual explanations directly within supported learning experiences.

AI Policy Acceptance and usage monitoring

Administrators can now require users to accept a usage policy before accessing AI features. They can also see AI feature usage for improved governance, transparency, and compliance monitoring.

Course & Activity-level AI controls

New granular AI controls allow administrators and educators to enable or restrict AI functionality at both the course and activity level, providing greater flexibility in how AI tools are made available across your site.

Usability, Grading & Platform Improvements

Content  and accessibility

• Added support for longer image descriptions, allowing up to 750 characters for improved accessibility compliance.
• Improved the TinyMCE editing experience with drag-and-drop media uploads and enhanced media editing capabilities.
• Admins can specify MP3 as the audio format in the RecordRTC settings.

Assessment and communication

• Added support for late submission penalties with improved visibility directly within the gradebook.
• Introduced SMS assignment notifications through AWS provider integration.
• Added a new “Graded” filter and manual grading support for BigBlueButton activities.

Other Improvements

• Pre-created quiz attempts now offer improved quiz performance and a faster assessment experience for the learner.
• Duplicate custom reports option now available
• H5P autoplay option now available on the mobile application.
   

Security, Enrolment and Activity Experience Improvements

Security and Enrolment

• Added reCAPTCHA protection to the password reset workflow improves account security.
• Manual enrolment options have been expanded, including:
  • Automatically adding enrolled users to groups
  • Configuring enrolment start dates

Assignments and Tracking

• A new resizable grading panel improves grading workflows and usability.
• Download tracking for assignment feedback files is now available.

Activity Experience

• Improved activity organization by grouping activities by purpose, such as assessment, collaboration, and communication.
• Enhanced activity selection workflows with clearer “Add” actions and double-click support.
• Expanded activity information display, including gradable status and activity categories.
• Improved the Activities overview page with additional key information, including important dates and activity statistics.

Question Bank Improvements

This release introduces enhancements to question bank management, making it easier for teachers to organize, reuse, and discover assessment content across courses.

• Added Course Question Banks under Course navigation > More > Question banks, enabling teachers to reuse and share questions across multiple courses.
• The question bank structure has been revamped to improve efficiency and usability. Importing quiz content from course to course becomes easier as fewer unused questions are included in the process.  Backup of an individual quiz contains only the questions used by the quiz.  A course backup includes all question banks from that course and only the questions shared from other course question banks that are required for the current course's quizzes.
• Added six new filtering options in the Question Banks interface to improve question discovery and management workflows.

• These new question bank improvements depend upon a post-upgrade data migration to the new structure, processed through ad hoc tasks.  On sites with especially large amounts of question bank data, this migration may continue through the weekend.
  
  During the question data migration:
  > Existing quizzes may still be delivered to students.
  > Instructors will not be able to create new questions in quizzes or question banks.
  > Ability to add existing questions to quizzes may be limited (availability of this action is dependent upon the progress of the data migration).

Open LMS highlight for 5.1

Snap - Customizable Activity Category Colors

Snap now allows administrators to customize the color groupings used for activity icons to better align with institutional branding or visual preferences.

Color settings can be configured for the following activity purpose groups:

• Administration

• Assessment

• Collaboration

• Communication

• Interactive Content

• Content / Resources

The selected colors are applied not only to activity icons, but also throughout activity cards, creating a more visually consistent and recognizable course experience.

Location: Site administration > Appearance > Custom theme settings > Snap

Enhanced Activity Selection Experience

Activity and resource selection workflow have been improved to make course creation faster and more intuitive for instructors. The activity chooser now includes clearer "Add" actions, making it easier to understand how to add an activity or resource to a course. Additionally, double-click support has been introduced, allowing users to quickly add items directly from the activity chooser without requiring an additional confirmation step.

This improved activity selection experience is available across all Open LMS themes, ensuring a consistent and familiar workflow regardless of the theme being used.

Unified Open LMS Experience

With Open LMS 5.1, we have unified the best of our platform features to deliver a single, consistent experience for all clients.

This new version provides access to the same Open LMS feature set and plugin offering across all environments, reducing fragmentation and ensuring a more streamlined and consistent experience for administrators, teachers, and learners.

Here are some of the powerful features that all SaaS clients can now access as part of this new version.

*Note: The Multi-Tenancy feature is not enabled by default. Please contact your Account Manager for more information about enabling and accessing this functionality. 

Please use caution: enabling this feature is permanent and cannot be reversed on either Sandbox or Production environments.

Saas 5.1 plugin Matrix

A new Open LMS 5.1 plugin compatibility matrix is now available, providing a complete overview of the plugins and integrations supported as part of the new unified platform experience.

Open LMS Saas 5.1 Plugin Matrix

New plugin: Inactivity Manager

To help you take ownership of your platform usage, we are making the Inactivity Manager plugin available to all clients. The plugin automates the management of dormant user accounts:

• Automatically suspends users who have been inactive for a configurable number of days

• Supports separate thresholds for users who have logged in before and users who have never accessed the platform

• Optionally deletes accounts that remain suspended beyond a configurable period (opt-in, disabled by default for safety)

• Removes accounts from the deletion queue automatically when an administrator manually reactivates them

The plugin is not active by default. To enable it on your environment, please raise a support ticket.

For full configuration details and recommended setup, see the Inactivity Manager documentation.

Updated Plugins

Additional fixes and minor improvements.

Atto Editor Removal

In Open LMS 5.1, the Atto editor has been fully removed as part of the Moodle™ 5.1 upgrade experience, following previous deprecation announcements in earlier releases.

The Tiny editor is now the standard editing experience across the platform. Open LMS has continued to expand and enhance Tiny with additional plugins and capabilities to provide a more modern, flexible, and consistent content creation experience for administrators, instructors, and learners.

Clients previously using Atto, or allowing users to choose between Atto and Tiny, should ensure their users are fully transitioned to the Tiny editor experience as part of their upgrade planning.

Please refer to this article Tiny Editor Available Plugins in 5.1 to validate plugins and supported integrations.

Removal of Chat and Survey Activities (Effective July 2027)

As part of the Moodle 5.1 upgrade, the mod_chat and mod_survey activity modules have been fully removed from the Moodle™ core codebase.

To help ensure a smooth transition for clients upgrading to 5.1, Open LMS has temporarily reintroduced these activity modules into the platform. This means existing Chat and Survey activities will continue to function and remain available through the July 2027 release cycle.

We encourage clients to begin planning and preparing their platforms for the permanent removal of these activities next year, including reviewing existing course content and identifying alternative solutions where needed.