Cloud Poodll Recording Question for Moodle

A native Moodle question type that lets students answer by recording audio, video, or drawing on a whiteboard.

Cloud Poodll adds a question type to the Moodle question bank, so it works in quizzes anywhere a standard question would — students record their response directly in the browser, and the recording is stored in the Poodll cloud rather than on your Moodle server. Like an Essay question, responses are graded manually by a teacher, with the recording (and, optionally, its transcript) shown alongside for grading.

• Plugin: qtype_cloudpoodll (question type)
• Maintainer: Justin Hunt — poodllsupport@gmail.com
• Documentation: https://support.poodll.com
• License: GNU GPL v3 or later

---

Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• Site configuration
• Response formats
• Authoring a question
• Grading
• Privacy
• Support

---

Requirements

Moodle	4.3 or later ($plugin->requires = 2023100900)
PHP	8.1+ (PHP 8.4 supported)
Database	MySQL / MariaDB / PostgreSQL
Cloud Poodll account	Required. An API user and secret from https://poodll.com

Cloud Poodll relies on the Cloud Poodll service for recording, storage, transcoding and speech transcription. Without API credentials the question type will not function. See Cloud Poodll API secret for how to obtain them.

Installation

1. Copy the plugin folder to question/type/cloudpoodll in your Moodle code root (on Moodle 5.1+ this is public/question/type/cloudpoodll).
2. Visit Site administration → Notifications and complete the upgrade.
3. Enter your Cloud Poodll API user and secret at Site administration → Plugins → Question types → Cloud Poodll.

Site configuration

Settings live under Site administration → Plugins → Question types → Cloud Poodll:

• API user / API secret,
• AWS region The AWS region processing and data storage take place in,
• Cloud Poodll server The default is fine. Users with AWS region Ningxia in China should use cloud.poodll.cn
• Expiry days for recordings.

Most of the day-to-day options (recorder type, skin, transcription, transcoding, etc.) are set per question, on the question's own editing form, rather than site-wide.

Response formats

When creating a question, the teacher picks a response format:

• Audio or Video — the student records using a Poodll recorder, with a choice of skins.
• Whiteboard (beta) — the student draws or annotates instead of recording; an optional background image (e.g. a diagram or passage) can be set for the student to draw on top of.

Other per-question options include a time limit, transcoding to mp3/mp4, disabling audio noise filters (useful for music or shadowing exercises, where noise suppression would distort the recording), and Safe Save (disables the next-page/finish button until the recording has finished uploading, so a submission can't be lost).

Authoring a question

Beyond the recording settings, a Cloud Poodll question supports:

• Information for graders — notes visible only to whoever grades the question, e.g. a model answer or marking guidance.
• Transcription — Cloud Poodll can transcribe the student's speaking and display it beneath the recording, both for the student reviewing their attempt and the teacher grading it.

Grading

Cloud Poodll questions are graded manually, the same way Essay questions are — a teacher listens to (or watches) each response and assigns a grade and comment through the normal Moodle question grading interface.

Privacy

This plugin stores personal data: question responses (recordings) and, if enabled, transcripts. Recordings are stored via Cloud Poodll (AWS S3), and identifying information appears in recording URLs. The plugin implements the Moodle Privacy API for export and deletion.

Support

• Documentation and how-tos: https://support.poodll.com
• Account and subscriptions: https://member.poodll.com
• Contact: poodllsupport@gmail.com

License

Copyright Justin Hunt / Poodll. Licensed under the GNU GPL v3 or later.