Frequently Asked Questions

Solin Early Warning is a Moodle™-native early-warning system. The free block shows teachers which students may need attention inside a Moodle course. It uses explainable signals: inactivity, missed assessments, negative grade trend, stalled completion, and forum silence. The commercial Dashboard adds institution-wide reporting and governance features.

Yes. The Solin Early Warning Block is free GPL software and is available on GitHub. It will appear on the Moodle Plugin Directory after review. Install from GitHub →

No. The free block is designed to be useful on its own. It does not require the paid Dashboard. The Dashboard adds institution-wide visibility and paid services. It does not unlock basic teacher-facing functionality in the free block.

No. The free block makes no outbound calls.

The Dashboard requires a license heartbeat. Optionally, institutions can opt in to contribute institution-level aggregate benchmark data to Solin. This contains no student-level records. Student names, student IDs, and student-level risk lists are never sent to Solin services through the plugin. If you enable Slack or Teams notifications, those notifications are sent directly from your Moodle to the webhook URL your administrator configures. Solin services are not in the notification path.

It means the operational student lists, flags, course activity, and risk details remain inside the customer’s Moodle™ site. The free block sends no data to Solin. The Dashboard can optionally participate in institution-level aggregate benchmarking. That feed does not require student names, student IDs, or student-level records. If you enable Slack or Teams notifications that include student names, those notifications are sent directly from your Moodle to the channel webhook your administrator configures. They do not pass through Solin services.

No. Solin Early Warning does not train a machine-learning model. It does not produce opaque predictive scores. It uses configurable, explainable signals over Moodle™ data.

Moodle core analytics can use machine-learning models and requires institutions to operationalize that analytics setup. Solin Early Warning takes a smaller route: explainable signals, shown inside the course, without a separate machine-learning backend. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but they are aimed at different operational realities.

Broad analytics suites usually provide wider reporting across many aspects of learning activity. Solin Early Warning is narrower. It focuses on one problem: helping teachers and Moodle™ administrators see which students may be disengaging early enough to act. It is Moodle-native and keeps the teacher-facing view inside the course.

Solin Early Warning is built and tested for standard Moodle™. Supported versions: 4.5 LTS, 5.1, 5.2. Moodle Workplace introduces multi-tenancy and program-based enrollment structures that may affect cohort floors, visibility, and reporting assumptions. Workplace is not officially supported in v1.

Not in v1. The free block could in principle be ported because Totara™ is Moodle-derived, but Totara support is not currently part of the public roadmap. We would consider funded Totara development for an Institutional customer.

Yes. The Dashboard plugin is GPL software. Source code is provided to license-holders on request. What the license pays for is the right to use the Solin services that the plugin connects to: license validation, cohort intelligence, support, and audit-related services.

The Institutional tier is the model for this. One license per Partner, sub-keys per client. Talk to us about Institutional →

The free Solin Early Warning Block keeps working. It is GPL software with no service dependency. The Dashboard plugin remains installed, but its scheduled aggregations and Solin-connected services stop refreshing once the license expires or the service endpoint becomes unavailable. Your Moodle data remains in your Moodle.

The higher Dashboard tiers include service components: license validation, cohort intelligence, support, and audit-related services. A perpetual license would either remove those features or push their cost into a much higher upfront price. The free block remains available for institutions that want a fully self-contained Moodle™ plugin without recurring commercial services.

Not in v1. Cohort intelligence depends on aggregate data across opted-in customers. Self-hosting would remove that value. Institutional customers can ask about custom arrangements.

Cohort intelligence compares aggregate patterns from opted-in customers. It can help identify whether an institution’s flag rates, dismissal patterns, or threshold choices differ strongly from the broader comparison group. It does not require student-level data. Where sample sizes matter, the product shows sample-size information. We avoid sector-specific claims in v1 because early sample sizes would not be credible.

Sector labels such as higher education, vocational, corporate, or compliance training are often too broad to be reliable, especially early in the product’s life. Course shape is more useful. A self-paced evergreen course behaves differently from a cohort-paced semester course, regardless of sector. So in v1, comparisons focus on detected course shape rather than self-reported sector.

The cohort intelligence layer becomes more useful as more institutions participate. Early customers accept more sampling noise while the comparison group is still growing. The first-year discount recognizes that. The discount applies only to the first year. Renewal returns to the standard tier price.

Yes. Current paying customers can receive $500 credit on their next renewal for each referred institution that becomes a paying customer and completes its first year. Disclosure is encouraged: tell your colleague that you may receive a renewal credit. Read the referral terms →

The free block is available on GitHub: github.com/solin-repo/moodle-block_atrisk. Dashboard plugin source code is available to license-holders on request.

For the free block, use GitHub issues: github.com/solin-repo/moodle-block_atrisk/issues. For Dashboard or service-side issues, email support@solin.co.

For product, procurement, or technical questions: hello@solin.co.