- Moodle
Pulse
Use automation to improve student engagement & compliance.
- Basic free
- Pro from €229 / year
Key feature 01 / 04
Notifications
Send notifications directly from a Pulse activity whenever learners reach key progress points, personalized with placeholders. Pro adds reminders, flexible senders and recipients, scheduling and branded emails.
Key feature 02 / 04
Flexible learning paths and completion workflows
Trigger actions based on learner progress for adaptive learning paths. Activities complete on availability, after a confirmation or with approval by a designated role. With Pro, users react directly via email.
Key feature 03 / 04
Credits
With Pro, motivate learners with visible credits that can be earned through activities or automated rewards. Together with Credit enrolment, credits also provide course access.
Key feature 04 / 04
Automation engine
With Pro, scalable cross-course automations powered by flexible, condition-driven logic: reusable templates, instances that perform real actions, combined conditions, and actions like sending notifications or allocating credits.
Pulse at a glance
Focus on what matters
Pulse keeps teachers, parents or line managers informed about learner progress and automates repetitive tasks.
Everything about Pulse
Overview
Automation engine and Pulse activity
Pulse gives teachers a tool to create personalized, adaptive learning experiences. Notifications, reminders and credits (re)engage students, reward progress and nudge them to complete their courses — whether you need to monitor and improve completion rates for compliance reasons or want to keep engagement high.
Pulse consists of two components: the automation engine runs rules across courses, triggered by conditions such as activity completion, inactivity, course dates or Moodle events. The Pulse activity works inside a single course, sending notifications, awarding credits and handling confirmation and approval steps.
Management summary
Value, cost and rollout on a single page. Export as PDF for your committee.
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Engagement
Re-engage and reward
Notifications, reminders and credits nudge learners to complete their courses.
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Compliance
Everyone stays informed
Teachers, parents or line managers learn about progress and can act when needed.
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Time
Focus on what matters
Repetitive tasks run automatically, so teachers focus on teaching.
Features & pricing
Reusable templates, activated as instances in individual courses.
Templates define an automation once for all courses. Instances apply it in a course, inherit its settings and can override them where needed.
Combine triggers, from simple to complex scenarios.
New in 2.5: user inactivity, course group and course date conditions; detailed completion states and an improved events condition.
Trigger on user inactivity, course group membership, course start or end, detailed completion states such as pass/fail, or Moodle events. For events, a frequency setting limits how often the automation fires, e.g. credits for the first submission only.
Email or web notifications as soon as the conditions are met.
Once the conditions are met, the engine sends a notification by email or web notification, in every course that uses the template. It can also allocate credits — see Credits.
Any sender; recipients, CC and BCC by role or group, also outside the course.
New in 2.5: user-level roles, course group context and predefined external email addresses as recipients.
Send as course or group teacher, tenant role or a custom address. Reach recipients, CC and BCC by course role, course group or user-level role, including mentors, parents or predefined addresses such as HR.
Intervals, delays and limits; no mails once irrelevant.
Send once or daily, weekly or monthly, with a delay before or after the trigger and an optional limit. Notifications stop automatically once selected activities or the course are completed.
Activity descriptions, pages or book chapters pulled into the email.
Insert the description of any activity, the content of a page or a single book chapter, as a teaser with a read-more link or in full.
Emails from a Pulse activity, triggered by what learners do in the course.
The Pulse activity sends an email when learners finish an activity, submit work or reach a checkpoint — reacting to completion events and approval steps, without setting up automation rules. Placeholders personalise every message.
First, second and recurring reminders after the invitation.
Reminders go out on a fixed date or a set time after the activity becomes available, and can repeat at an interval. They use the same placeholders as the invitation.
Text, images or logos for consistent branding.
Add text, images or logos above and below every notification, from the Pulse activity and the automation engine alike.
Complete on availability, on confirmation or by a role's approval.
Activities complete when they become available, when learners confirm information or consent, or when a teacher, parent or manager approves them in the course. Combined with Moodle's access restrictions, this builds branching, multilingual or section-based learning paths.
Confirm, rate or approve via email, without course enrollment.
Users confirm completion, give thumbs up/down feedback or approve according to their role directly from the email — without opening the course or being enrolled. Every reaction is tracked in Moodle.
Standard or boxed layout, box types, icons and custom CSS.
Choose a standard or boxed layout and box types such as primary, warning or success, optionally in your brand colors and with Font Awesome icons. Custom CSS adjusts spacing, colors and typography.
Save complete Pulse activity setups and reuse them in one click.
Administrators save complete Pulse activity configurations as presets and release them centrally. Teachers preview a preset, apply it to a new Pulse activity and adapt it to their course.
Credits visible in the profile and top navigation.
Via Pulse activities or the automation engine; manual adjustments possible.
Award credits for completed activities and milestones, either through a Pulse activity or through engine rules across courses, with control over timing and roles. Balances can be adjusted manually.
Reactions, reminders, completions and approvals, to monitor progress and engagement.
What is scheduled, what was sent, when credits are allocated.
See scheduled and sent notifications from Pulse activities and the automation engine in one place, and when credits will be allocated to which learners.
Course access in exchange for Pulse credits.
Provide course access based on credits. Requires the free Credit enrolment plugin.
No feature matches your search.
All · every feature of the group 2 of 6 · some features — Not included
Use cases & screenshots
Onboarding
Course welcome messages
Welcome learners automatically when they enroll or the course starts, personalized with placeholders.
Compliance
Reminders for overdue activities
Remind inactive learners or those with open activities and keep teachers, parents or line managers informed — notifications stop automatically once the work is complete.
Workflows
Approval workflows
Let designated roles approve activity completion, or let users confirm, rate or approve directly via email — without being enrolled in the course.
Tech & compliance
Running it
Requirements
Moodle 4.5 to 5.2 (Pulse 2.6). For Pulse Pro on Moodle Workplace or Totara, please contact us.
Installation & updates
Basic and Pro are installed as described in the installation guide.
Reviewing it
Data protection & hosting
Your data stays in your Moodle. Pulse runs entirely inside your Moodle site and stores its data in your Moodle database and file storage, on your own server. bdecent does not run a cloud service for it, and the plugin never contacts bdecent: no licence checks, no telemetry, no usage tracking. Access is controlled by Moodle roles and capabilities, so only the people you authorise can see or change it. Pulse implements Moodle's Privacy API, so its data is included when you export or delete a user's data for GDPR requests. Pulse carries Moodle's Privacy friendly award. Notifications and reminders are sent through Moodle's own messaging and email.
Accessibility & license
Pulse is built with Moodle's own template system and the Bootstrap components of Moodle's standard theme Boost, so it follows your theme's colours and fonts. We have not published a formal WCAG audit yet — if something gets in your way, tell us and we will fix it. Released under GPLv3, like Moodle itself.
Part of three bdecent solutions
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Solution · Automation
Moodle that runs on schedule
Reminders, approvals and enrolments that happen on time without anyone clicking.
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Solution · Compliance
Mandatory training you can prove
Watched, tracked and provable.
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Solution · Engagement
Courses learners come back to
Video, nudges and dashboards that keep momentum instead of chasing it.
Awards
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Auto TestMoodle award
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Privacy FriendlyMoodle award