Skip to Main Content

Pilot role and plugins guide

Find out more about the additional features and functions you can use with the Pilot role in Moodle.

About Pilot role

The Pilot role provides the same permissions in Moodle as the Lecturer role and also provides access to some new features including:

  • Event Monitoring
  • Journal
  • Workshop

We can't guarantee that Pilot functionality will remain in future versions of Moodle. We switch off Pilot functionality when the feature is difficult to use/inaccessible, becomes unsupported or does not meet teaching requirements.

If a feature has limited usefulness then it remains in the Pilot role for Pilot users to continue using.

If a feature is useful for teaching and learning and is easy to use and accessible, we recommend to IT that it is incorporated into core Moodle for all of our users.

Please log a request on the IT Self Service Portal if you would like to try out any of the features available to the Pilot role

Plugin functionality

The Journal content type allows students to create online, text-based journal entries. A student's submitted work is only visible to the Lecturer and not to other students.

This activity used to be part of core Moodle but was removed as similar functionality could be achieved using the Assignment activity. This activity is now only available as a plugin. 

Event monitoring allows Programme Administrators and Lecturers who are enrolled with the Pilot role to receive notifications when certain events happen in Moodle.

To use Event monitoring, a rule needs to be created for the event to be monitored.  A user (eg the Programme Administrator or Lecturer) will then need to subscribe to the rule in order to be notified.

The rule specifies what the event is and how often it must happen before a notification is sent to the subscriber. 

The Workshop content type is an activity for peer- and self-assessment. It encourages student collaboration and self-awareness. 

This activity requires manual intervention to move the activity between the different phases.

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License