AI Course Creator — Moodle Local Plugin

This plugin is part of the LearningOps suite by Highskills and more. https://www.highskills.co.il/

Overview

AI Course Creator lets teachers generate a fully structured Moodle course from source material — lecture notes, a syllabus, uploaded documents, or any plain text. The plugin streams the request back from Highskills FastAPI backend, displays real-time agent progress, and delivers a .mbz backup file that can be restored as a new Moodle course in one click. Teachers can choose to include AI generated images to each section. Currently this plugin creates courses with the following modules: page, lesson, quiz, forum, feedback, choice.

Activation

To get your activation endpoint and API key, please complete the setup process here.

Requirements

Moodle 4.2 or later
PHP 8.0 or later with the following extensions: curl, zip, mbstring
Access to the AI Course Creator FastAPI service (provided by Highskills and more)

Installation

Copy or clone the ai_coursecreator folder into your Moodle installation (rename ai_coursecreator):
```
<moodle_root>/local/ai_coursecreator/
```
<clipboard-copy aria-label="Copy code to clipboard" class="ClipboardButton btn btn-invisible js-clipboard-copy m-2 p-0 d-flex flex-justify-center flex-items-center" data-copy-feedback="Copied!" data-tooltip-direction="w" value="<moodle_root>/local/ai_coursecreator/" tabindex="0" role="button"> </clipboard-copy>
Log in as a site administrator and navigate to:

Site Administration → Notifications

Confirm the plugin upgrade. No database tables are created.

Note: The vendor/ directory (Smalot PDF Parser for PDF text extraction) is bundled in the repository. Composer does not need to be run.

Configuration

Navigate to Site Administration → Local Plugins → AI Course Creator → Settings.

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Setting	Description
Stream endpoint URL	Full URL of the FastAPI streaming endpoint provided by Highskills and more
API Key	64-character hex Bearer token provided by Highskills and more
Stream timeout (seconds)	Maximum time to wait for a generation to complete. Default: 600 s (10 min). Increase for very large documents.
System prompt (optional)	Text prepended to every teacher submission — use this for standing instructions such as language, tone, or curriculum standards.

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After saving, use Test API Connection in the Diagnostics section at the bottom of the settings page to verify that the plugin can reach the FastAPI service.

Accessing the plugin

Authorised users find the plugin at:

Site Administration → Courses → AI Course Creator

Roles

The plugin ships a pre-defined role AI Course creator created automatically on install/upgrade:

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Property	Value
Archetype	manager (all default manager capabilities are inherited)
Assignable context	System, Category
Who can assign	Site administrators only

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Capabilities

The capability local/ai_coursecreator:generate is granted by default to:

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Role	Access
AI Course creator	Allow

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To restrict or extend access go to Site Administration → Users → Permissions → Define roles.

Supported file formats for upload

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Format	Notes
`.txt`	Plain text
`.csv`	Treated as plain text
`.html` / `.htm`	HTML tags stripped; plain text extracted
`.docx`	Word document — text extracted from `word/document.xml`
`.pdf`	Text extracted via Smalot PDF Parser (pure PHP). Image-only / scanned PDFs produce no text.

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Plain-text limit: 512 KB of extracted text per generation. Files are accepted regardless of file size as long as the extracted text does not exceed this limit.

Features

Paste course source text directly and/or upload one or more files
Optional Include image generation checkbox
Real-time SSE progress panel showing five pipeline stages: Analyst → Architect → Writer → Image Generator → MBZ Builder
Restore as new course — one-click restore via Moodle's restore API
View in backup area — the generated .mbz is stored in the user's private backup area and persists after restore for later download or re-use
Hebrew (RTL) language pack included

Troubleshooting

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Symptom	Likely cause & fix
"Not fully configured" warning on the course creator page	Stream endpoint URL or API key is missing in settings
`cURL error 7` — could not connect	FastAPI service is unreachable — check the stream URL and network/firewall
`cURL error 28` — operation timed out	Increase the Stream timeout setting; large documents need more processing time
`HTTP 401 / 403` from the API	API key is wrong or expired — regenerate it in the Highskills admin UI
PDF uploads produce no extracted text	The PDF is image-only (scanned). Convert it to a text-based PDF first
Progress panel only updates at the end	Apache/IIS response buffering. Add `SetEnv no-gzip 1` to your Apache virtual host, or disable response buffering in IIS
`unable_to_find_conversion_path` on restore	Moodle temp directory issue — check `$CFG->tempdir` is writable

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License

GNU General Public License v3 or later — see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.