Overview of changes since version 4.2 and recommended procedures
Since August of this year, the Moodle platform of the First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, has been running version 5.2. The previous version was the 4.2 series, so the upgrade covers six releases at once. Most of the changes will not affect your everyday work. This overview therefore focuses only on the changes that affect teachers and provides a recommended procedure for each of them.
Contents
This is the most significant change. Previously, the question bank was a part of the course accessible through the course settings. It is now a separate activity, i.e. an object of the same type as a quiz, page or forum. It appears in the list of activities and can be moved, hidden and deleted in the same way as any other activity.
During the upgrade to version 5, one question bank was automatically created in every course. In most courses it is named “System shared question bank” and contains all the questions that were previously available in the course.
Newly created questions are not available in another quiz. In such cases they are almost always stored in the bank of the first quiz. You can move the questions to the course question bank, or change the bank from which the second quiz selects its questions.
The “random question” question type has been removed from Moodle. It has been replaced by a question set reference: instead of storing a specific random question, the quiz stores a rule such as “select n questions from this category”.
From the teacher’s point of view, nothing changes on the surface — the quiz appears to students exactly as before. The only difference is that such an item is managed via a button next to the category, rather than as a question in the bank.
Existing quizzes were converted automatically and are fully functional. Problems may only be caused by old backups — see the next section.
A .mbz backup created in version 4.2 or earlier may contain random
questions in the original format. Moodle 5 does not accept them and the restore process
ends with the following error message:
Coding error detected, it must be fixed by a programmer: You cannot restore a question with qtype “random”. It must be converted to a set reference instead.
The restore stops right at the beginning, usually at around 0.4 %. Restoring into a new course does not solve the problem — the error occurs while the question bank is being processed and is not related to the target course. Repeated attempts will therefore end the same way.
This is not new in version 5, but we would like to remind you of it, as choosing the wrong option can have serious consequences. When restoring a backup into an existing course, Moodle offers, among others, the following option:
“Delete the contents of this course and then restore” — this option first deletes all content of the course: activities, sections, groups and student enrolments. Only then does it start the restore. If the restore stops on an error along the way, the course is left empty.
If you only want to add content, choose the option that keeps the existing content (“Merge the backup course into this course”). Before using the option that deletes content, always create a backup of the course — it takes about a minute and is the only way to return to the original state.
Deleted activities can be recovered. Each course has a recycle bin in which deleted activities are kept for 7 days. The recycle bin is accessible from the course menu. After this period, the activities are permanently deleted automatically and can only be recovered by the administrator from a backup. If you delete something by mistake, please contact us immediately.
The former Atto editor has been removed from Moodle. All text fields now use the TinyMCE editor. It offers the same functions and more, but its controls are located differently.
| Function | Location in TinyMCE |
|---|---|
| Inserting an image, video or file | Buttons in the top toolbar, Insert menu |
| Equation | Insert → Equation menu |
| HTML source code | View → Source code menu |
| Enlarging the editor | Drag the bottom right corner |
If you cannot find a procedure in TinyMCE that you were used to in Atto, please contact us — usually it is just a button in a different place.
After the upgrade, the number of questions in the question bank may appear lower than before. On the main Moodle instance, more than twenty thousand records were removed during the migration. However, no actively used question has been lost — we verified this against a backup, record by record.
Three types of records that were not visible in the interface were removed:
Should a specific question or category nevertheless be missing, please contact us — backups are available and we will locate the missing items.
Moodle 5 includes a built-in AI assistant. It is currently enabled on a trial basis and available to teachers only; students do not have access to it.
| Function | Location |
|---|---|
| Generate text | Button in the editor when creating content |
| Generate image | Button in the editor, maximum resolution 512 × 512 pixels |
| Summarise text in the course | Menu next to course content |
| Explain text in the course | Same location |
The model runs on the faculty’s own server. No data entered into the assistant is transmitted to OpenAI or any other external party.
The drawback is lower speed: the server has no graphics card, so responses are displayed gradually and generating longer text takes tens of seconds. Generating an image takes approximately two minutes, and only one request is processed at a time. If nothing seems to be happening, the request is most likely waiting in the queue.
The trial is intended to assess the benefits of this feature and to decide whether it is worth acquiring more powerful hardware. If you use the assistant, we would welcome your feedback.
Since the question bank is now an activity, it is deleted in the same way as any other activity.
If any quiz in the course draws questions from this bank, deleting the bank will remove those questions from the quiz, leaving it empty. Please check each quiz (Quiz → Questions) and verify which bank it draws its questions from.
The correct order is quizzes first, then the bank. If you deleted the bank first, the quizzes would contain references to non-existent questions.
For a bank containing thousands of questions, deletion via the web browser may time out before it is completed. If a bank contains more than approximately one thousand questions, please contact us and we will delete it directly on the server — deleting 3,246 questions took slightly over two minutes.
In that case, there is no need to modify the question bank at all. When using Import from the previous year’s course, simply do not select the question bank for transfer — it will not be copied to the new course and will remain unchanged in the original course.
Prepared by the Moodle administrator, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, 23 September 2026 · Moodle version 5.2.3 · For any questions regarding this overview, please contact moodle-admin@lf1.cuni.cz.