 So, hello everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. 200 universities with 1.7 million students. 54 universities with 900,000 students. What do those numbers have in common? What do those numbers mean to you? The first one, over 200 German universities are using Moodle as central LMS. Adding Switzerland and Austria, there are 265 universities using Moodle as central LMS. The second one, 54 member universities of the association Moodle an Hochschule in English Moodle at universities. Those are big numbers. Today, I'm going to give you insights into the association and at the end, I hope you will be motivated to share your knowledge. My name is Klaus Steitz. I'm team lead for the eLearning Systems at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where I introduced Moodle 15 years ago. For 10 years, I've been renovating Moodle University, conferences and meetings. I'm co-founder of Moodle an Hochschulen and member of the executive board. Community, you're all a part of the wonderful Moodle community. Community is pretty much about sharing knowledge, helping and inspiring each other. For instance, this session's title is inspired by the shirt. Martin gave some years to go to me, Empowering Educators. Empowering educators providing a good learning experience for the students is important. As learning institutions, as support institutions, and service providers, there is a big and broadly shared knowledge, but no one can be expert at any aspect. So it's important to share knowledge and connecting people. Also, there have been a lot of parallel developments on same or similar issues, and no one to coordinate them. That was the starting point for the foundation of the association. In 2019, we started working on that idea in 2020. There was the big pandemic. Everybody overwhelmed with work. 2021, finally, we achieved the registration of the association with 29 founding universities. Today, we have 54 university members. What are our purpose and aims? The obvious one, networking. We gather and share knowledge. We want to build a knowledge base of best practices. We want to reach synergies, to recognize and minimize parallel developments, to share in-house developments with the community, and to apply individual members' strengths to the community. So we also want to identify the collective demands and to apply and address them. And of course, there are plugins. We share and maintain 26 plugins. For instance, there's Boost Union, some of you may know, or even listened to the session yesterday. And local static page is the most used one. It's nearly 5,000 sites using it. We want to be contact for the German community and exchange with organizations at state, national, and international level. We also have exchange with other learning management system communities like Ilias and Stutt IP. Together, we formed Open Source LMS and sharing a declaration to strengthen the use of Open Source software. How we do it? We have a big moodle course, including a lot of forums. We have working groups, such as Didactical, Development, Server Administration, H5P, or Accessibility. We use matrix channels. We also have one for that conference here. We organize yearly in person conferences. That is a great opportunity to get in touch and to share experiences. We organize workshops and expert panels, what we are blogging about. We are co-organizer of the Moodle Mood Dach Conference. And we have a decision-making aid for potential members, summing up what it's all about and why it's a good idea to join the association. What are challenges? Time. All the community work happens on top of the daily business. Many community members aren't able to contribute as much as they want to. So there has to be awareness that community activity is part of your daily business. Sharing work in progress projects, often it isn't known what is worked on. And so it's a continuing task to remember people, share what you are working on or what you've already published. All the good ideas and money are of little use if there are no development resources or to less development resources. So it's important to reach synergies and to bundle deaf resources. All of the content the association has is in that Moodle course, also the forms. That is a closed one. Also the password isn't that, it's just Moodle Mood. But it's not that good. We share some of our content at our website. We want to build a knowledge base, but it's very time-consuming and we want to do more in that way. What are the visions for the future? We want to continue to foster open source and the use of open source software. Living openness and open education promote also the creation and the supply of open education researches content. Much can be done there. And we want to do more joint projects based on the demands of the community. A brief look at other countries in Austria. There is the Academic Moodle Corporation. They also provide some pretty nice plugins. Switzerland has the Swiss Academic Moodle Community in Japan. The Moodle Association of Japan. Italy, the AUM, organizing the Italy Mood. United States, the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project. And in Germany, there's also a broad school teachers community and Moodle Schule as association. And they are communicating using social media Moodle Bande. Also, Frau Speckner is there. Some of her courses we showed yesterday. And of course, we have the Moodle Users Association that is in transition to the product advisory group. You might take home messages, share your knowledge and ideas, use the Moodle forums, engage in the community, help each other to get in touch and let communities flourish. Some guiding questions for our discussion. What are your experiences with local communities? Do you know other communities? And what are best ways to transfer knowledge to the global community? I'm happy that you are part of the community in that session. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions for our lovely presenter before we head out to lunch? We've got plenty of time. Yeah, no rush. No? Well, anything else you want to talk? Tim, yeah, of course. Actually, it's not a question, but I just want to give a shout-out to Moodle Dach, which I know you help organise. I went earlier this year, and that's the second time I've been. It's a really good Moodle Mood, and you don't actually need to speak German. They have a really good... They have an even better German than here, because it takes... It lasts for two days, not just one. And you can code that pretty much all in English. And the main conference is about half English, half German. So if you're looking for another cool Moodle Mood to go to, I would recommend Mood Dach. Thank you very much, Tim. More questions or remarks? So maybe I have a question to you. Who of you has already used the Moodle Forms and asked a question? Please raise your hand. And who of you got an answer? So that shows how good the community works. Looks like everyone got an answer. I'll raise my hand a little bit. So... Ah, there's one more. I guess what were some of the main challenges that you experienced when creating this new Moodle community and how did you overcome them? Yeah, as we are from Germany, there was some administrative stuff to do. It's called a Verein in Germany, Eingedragender Verein. And yeah, that's some work to do till we reached that we are registered at... Yeah, how do we say in English? Gemeinnützig, yeah, I don't know. English word. Non-profit, thank you, yeah, that's it. And... Yeah. And we had a good starting point with our existing Moodle course of the community and it was... Yeah, every time we got new members, the next members are Unhold Technical University of Munich, will be a member soon. And of course, yeah, time. As I said, all of you as always on top of your daily business and that's why it lasted some time till we finished. Yeah. And I think that's one of the biggest issues that it's... Herding the community is part of our private time, even if we're working full-time with these projects. And that shouldn't be the case. It's just like we developers are coding every day and documenting is moved to the evening, nearly lying in bed. And this is a critical issue. Community actions should be part of the job and not of your private fun evening. Alex also has a question or remark. It's more a remark or an answer than a question. If you ask about the challenges, I think one of the challenges was to convince the bosses in the university that the university should become a member of the association. So it wasn't a question of money, the membership fee is quite low. It was a question of time and what will be the return of investment. And that's why the association has built up a white paper for the deciders so that they hopefully can be convinced to become a member. That was the one challenge for my memory. I'm also a co-founder of the association. And the other challenge was, if I remember correctly, to get an agreement within the founding members what the main targets of this association will be. Because we saw so many things which should be tackled within Moodle and running Moodle systems within German based or German speaking higher educations institutions. And the question was what to focus first? Should we do development? Should we fund developing plugins? Should we find these synergies to avoiding or inventing the real? Should we spend money on pushing forward open educational resources? You name it and you can extend this list even further and you can't do everything at once. And these were for my memory two of the main challenges. Yeah, that's all. Thank you very much. I have... Yeah.