CEU Moodle Development

The development work spans a broad range of CEU Moodle workflows, including SITS and Timeedit integration, MS authentication, assessment, accessibility, security, course management, and everyday teaching and learning improvements.


Alongside major institutional developments, the work includes hundreds of smaller changes across workflows, interfaces, integrations, plugins, and platform behaviour, gradually shaping Moodle around the specific needs of the CEU community.

10+major developments
100+practical workflow, form, and interface improvements
15+new plugins or 3rd party tools adapted or substantially extended
20+security, accessibility, reliability, and upgrade fixes

Summary

  • Built CEU-specific enrolment, invitation, and external-user workflows.
  • Developed SITS-based course creation and synchronization support. Timeedit-based manual extension for a smoother process.
  • Created Microsoft login routing for CEU, external, alumni, automatic user creation for SITS-registered users.
  • Statistics module (for specific CEU data)
  • Designed protected-exam access restrictions for special exam windows.
  • Redesigned course import, copying, course search, and dashboard behaviour.
  • Reworked assignments, grading, extensions, notifications, and Turnitin processing.
  • Rebuilt important course navigation, section, activity, gradebook, participant, group, and category interfaces.
  • Extended Tiny editor control, plugins and autosave behavior.
  • Implemented accessibility improvements across shared templates, forms, menus, messaging, and mobile navigation.
  • Adapted and maintained additional teaching plugins, blocks, and local tools.
  • Implemented security controls and applied important Moodle fixes.
  • Built parallel full and cleaned personal-data exports and improved background processing, SITS reliability, PDF handling, filenames, and scheduled tasks.

Key developments

  • Enrolment, invitations, and accounts: bulk enrolment from email lists, support for valid CEU users without completed Moodle accounts, authorized external-account creation, pending-invitation messaging, welcome messages for every enrolment method, and clearer dropped-student handling.
  • SITS integration and course creation: a controlled workflow for reviewing external course data, creating courses without uncontrolled automatic creation, spotting course changes during the academic year, and confirming current unpublished registrations to students. Extended with Timeedit data allowing instructors to easily create missing courses directly from current scheduling data.
  • Identity and Microsoft sign-in: CEU-specific routing that distinguishes institutional, external, alumni, unknown, and invited users; prevents unintended OAuth account creation; and gives users more meaningful next steps.
  • Protected examinations: time-window and course-based access restrictions with role-aware exceptions, management controls, and clear messages that direct affected students back to the exam course.
  • Course reuse: course-code-aware import search, source-check links, current-course exclusion, course-image transfer, safer copy defaults, duplicate main-forum prevention and precise course search
  • Assignments, grades, and Turnitin: faster setup, prominent plagiarism controls, visible Turnitin status, retroactive Turnitin submission, resend support, clearer grading actions, one-week extension defaults, CEU grade display, and better student-state messages.
  • Blind marking and bulk feedback: student-visible submission codes, coordinator downloads, improved anonymous ordering, and feedback ZIP matching by either username or blind-marking code.
  • Course experience and navigation: hidden empty sections, collapsed course index logic, single-section navigation, clearer availability controls, restored familiar icons, CEU-specific theme logic, and redesigned gradebook, participant, group, and category screens.
  • Accessibility and usability: keyboard, focus, screen-reader, contrast, semantic, heading, label, and template repairs across shared templates, course pages, messaging, books, feedback, menus, drawers, and forms.
  • Security and reliability: Strengthened authentication, account creation, access controls, input handling, and file and URL security.
  • User-centred data exports: parallel full and cleaned downloads, simplified full-export navigation, course-based file organization, and readable HTML conversion of selected forum, assignment, wiki, and grade data.
  • Maintenance and data quality:  accented usernames, filenames with spaces, background tasks, and PDF conversion.
  • Access Control menu for easier course controls. Teachers can allow CEU students to join with or without a course key. This provides Moodle access but does not replace official SITS registration. Self-enrolment is restricted to CEU users. This prevents external accounts from self-enrolling. Guest access and welcome messages can be controlled at one central place as well.

Breadth of the smaller work

  • Defaults, labels, messages, icons, ordering, and top save buttons across many forms.
  • Direct actions for assignments, forums, sections, grading, categories, groups, and participants.
  • Course index, section view, activity summaries, hidden-state display, and previous/next navigation refinements.
  • Forum wording, pronoun display, anonymous discussion support, group messaging, and notification refinements.
  • Backup, restore, import, duplicate prevention, image transfer, copy-form, and export-navigation improvements.
  • Accessibility repairs across shared templates, messaging, feedback, books, menus, drawers, and mobile views.
  • Compatibility and usability work for Turnitin, Board, Publication, Active Quiz, Checklist, Unilabel, Mass Actions, campus course overview, bookmarks, catalogue, course-category upload, show-faces and other local tools.
  • Upgrade and compatibility fixes for grading, quizzes, forums, cache maintenance, filenames, scheduled tasks, external services, and data processing.
Overall impact: the work combines a handful of large institutional systems with a very large number of practical refinements. The major developments solve CEU-specific requirements; the smaller changes remove repeated friction for teachers, students, and coordinators.
Last modified: Monday, 31 August 2026, 1:28 PM