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Installing into Moodle

How to install the coursekit Moodle plugin from a ZIP so your educators can author inside Moodle.

This page is for the person installing coursekit into Moodle. It assumes you administer a Moodle site and have site administration access.

The coursekit Moodle plugin is a native activity module (mod_coursekit). Educators add it to a course as a regular activity; learners see the rendered page; grades flow through Moodle’s gradebook.

What you need

  • A Moodle 4.5 or later site you administer.
  • Site administration access.
  • Write permission for the Moodle server process on <moodle>/mod/.
  • A mod_coursekit.zip package, either built from source or downloaded from the coursekit GitHub releases page.

Install from a ZIP

Coursekit isn’t on the Moodle plugins directory yet, so the install goes through Moodle’s Install plugins from ZIP flow.

  1. Log in to your Moodle site as a site administrator.
  2. Go to Site administration → Plugins → Install plugins.
  3. Drop the mod_coursekit.zip into the Install plugin from ZIP file area and click Install plugin from the ZIP file.
  4. Moodle verifies the plugin and shows the install steps. Continue through the prompts.
  5. The next page asks you to confirm and run the database upgrade. Click Upgrade Moodle database now to complete installation.

The plugin lives at <moodle>/mod/coursekit after install. You should see “Coursekit” appear in the activity chooser when adding new activities to a course.

Install from source

If you’re building the plugin from source instead of using the release ZIP:

pnpm --filter @coursekit/adapter-moodle build

Then copy or symlink adapters/moodle/coursekit from the coursekit repo into <moodle>/mod/coursekit and run the database upgrade via the Moodle admin UI or php admin/cli/upgrade.php.

Add it to a course

In a Moodle course, turn on edit mode, open the activity chooser, and pick Coursekit. Configure the activity the same way as any other Moodle activity (name, intro, grade settings). Save.

The activity opens with the coursekit editor. Authors edit the page; learners see the preview when they open the activity.

Where the data lives

Coursekit stores author content, learner-safe content, and assessment contracts in Moodle tables created by the plugin’s database schema. The plugin uses Moodle’s standard APIs:

  • Files go through Moodle’s File API in the media file area for any uploaded blocks or attachments.
  • Submissions and grades use Moodle external functions called through core/ajax.
  • Official grades are written through Moodle’s gradebook API.

You see the result in the Moodle gradebook in the same place you’d see any other graded activity.

Adapter behaviour worth knowing

  • Single author per page. Real-time collaboration is disabled in the Moodle adapter; the activity is treated as a single-author surface.
  • Server-side grading. Submissions are graded server-side through the external functions; browser-side responses don’t decide the grade.
  • Plugin maturity. The current release of mod_coursekit is marked as alpha. We expect bug reports and the upgrade path may involve breaking changes during this stage.

What’s next