Moodle courses in vocational education are rarely the result of a single design. They grow in layers: new activities get added, old ones are too dear to delete, and a couple of years later nobody remembers why section seven has three versions of the same assignment.
I knew my own course had some of this. I just didn't know how much.
What the audit does
I built an audit agent that reads a Moodle backup (an .mbz file) and goes through the course from three directions:
- Structure: section sizes, duplicates, broken links and empty sections.
- Bloom's taxonomy: what levels of thinking the course tasks operate on — from recall and application to analysis and evaluation.
- Alignment: does the course cover the competence requirements of the national curriculum, and do goals, teaching and assessment tell the same story.
The output is a PDF report. The most important choice was that the report doesn't describe — it proposes: every finding comes with an action and a time estimate. I didn't want an essay about the state of my course. I wanted a work list.
What it found in my course
I ran the audit on my 45-credit web programming course. The report told me, among other things:
- 289 activities, of which 142 theory pages and 126 assignments. The backbone was fine.
- 43 percent of tasks were at the application level, about one percent at the analysis level. The course taught doing, but hardly justifying.
- One section had grown to 137 activities. No student can find anything in that.
- 83 activities were duplicates across sections.
- Plus five empty sections named after students, and a few broken links.
None of this had been visible to me in Moodle.
Your own course's flaws are hard to see for the same reason as your own text's errors: the eye slides over the familiar.
The agent doesn't know the course or its history, so it counts and reports without flattery. A day of manual work became a run of a few minutes, and the result was more honest than my own estimate would have been.
The report's action list came pre-ordered with time estimates: restructuring by competence requirement (4–6 hours), resolving duplicates (3–4 hours) and adding analysis-level tasks (8–12 hours). I could start the fixes where the impact on students is greatest.
The line is the same as everywhere else
The agent analyzes; I decide.
The report can say that analysis-level tasks amount to one percent. It can't know that some of them happen in classroom teaching with no Moodle trace. It counts duplicates, but I know which ones are parallel on purpose. That's why the report is a proposal, not a verdict, and every action passes through the teacher's judgment.
The agent also never touches the course itself. It reads a backup and changes nothing. No student data enters the analysis — the backup is taken without it.
What I've learned
The questions that matter most for course quality — does the course cover the requirements, does the assessment measure the right things, can students find their way — are exactly the ones there's never time to stop for. The audit made stopping cheap. When a check costs minutes instead of a day, you have time to do it every term.
The technical implementation and an example report are described in more detail on the case page (in Finnish). The same audit works for others too — from a single course to an institution-level summary.
Want a training on this for your team?
I run hands-on workshops on this topic for teachers and organizations — exercises with your own tools, content tailored to your audience. See the training packages or let's network on LinkedIn.