 It's great to be here today. Thank you all for coming to the second day of the Global MUT 2022. It's a great privilege for me to be here presenting to you today, talking a little bit about the future of Moodle, LMS. Now, if you've been using or associated with Moodle for a little bit of time, you're probably wondering, Barry Van Hoo now. I'm Barry Fun Oatswarden or Fun Oatshorn, if you want the easier pronunciation. I'm the platform manager at Moodle. I'm still very new to the role. I've been at Moodle for about three months now and I will say that before that I do have an EdTech background, I worked at a K-12 LMS for about 14 years before I joined Moodle. I will also hasten to add that Sander is still very much with Moodle. He's very upset that he's not able to attend the Moodle this year. He is here in spirit though because he and I co-prepared this presentation today. If you do have any particular questions about things that are slightly wrong, that'll be me and not Sander on the presentation. What are we going to cover in this presentation? To begin with, we'll look a little bit at what we've released in Moodle 4.0. Then I'll talk a little bit about what's coming in Moodle 4.1, which is very, very exciting. Also, very exciting. We'll talk a little bit about the changes that are coming to our roadmap in Moodle and then I'll look a little bit more into the slightly fuzzy future. So, Moodle 4.0, relatively recent release. Most of you I hope are familiar with Moodle 4.0, but it was one of our biggest releases that we've had in a very, very long time, as you can tell by the version number. One of the biggest changes that we introduced in 4.0 was the beautiful new default theme. When we went to build this new theme for 4.0, we really wanted to make sure that it was easy to customize and easy to build on. Those are the two core fundamentals for it. We also wanted to significantly improve the navigation experience throughout all of Moodle, for educators and for learners. And we wanted to streamline the course experience for editing and for actually engaging and participating in courses. There's obviously a whole lot more that we also introduced in 4.0. We ported the workplace report builder to Moodle 4.0. We've got out of the box big blue button integration. We've got much improved LTI support, both as a tool and as a consumer. And of course lots of improvements to the quiz and to the question bank management. Now, there are QR codes scattered throughout this presentation. Feel free to try and scan them. I'm not sure how successful it will be, but the presentation is also available on the app afterwards. We're also not quite finished with 4.0. One of the things that we're doing at the moment as part of our 4.1 development is backporting a lot of the accessibility improvements from our 4.1 development into the 4.0 series as a series of patches. We know that accessibility is really, really important. We know that if we can keep Moodle accessible to as many people as possible, then we can actually make a big difference in the world. And we also know that people's accessibility needs change over time and we want to accommodate that. You know, the picture that I chose there is a person with a child. I have two children. I very much know that it's very hard to use a computer or a laptop when you've got a child pulling you over here and another one screaming in the background and you might need to change the way that you interact with it. You might start using a touchscreen more or anything like that. So we know that accessibility is not binary and we want to keep improving on it for all of, for Moodle 4.0. So that's Moodle 4.0. Now you might be thinking great, Moodle's finished, we're done, there's nothing more we need to do. I know no one's thinking that. So 4.1, what are we looking to actually release in 4.1 in the very near future? Let's have a look at the numbers to begin with. So in Moodle 4.1, we've got over 420 issues integrated, over 240 bugs squashed and over 150 improvements. And these are just the numbers from when I updated the slide deck on Monday. They've gone up since then. What is really, really exciting though, is that we have over 130 community patches, so non-HQ patches in 4.1 at this stage. More than 70 bugs that have been squashed by the community and over 50 improvements directly contributed by people who don't work for Moodle HQ. I was at the dev jam earlier this week and I was standing in the back corner with Marie and she nudged me and said, hey, look at all these people. These are all part of the development team for Moodle. And it's true, it's amazing this contribution that we can have from the community. Those are the numbers then. So let's talk a little bit about some of the concrete items that we're bringing across in Moodle 4.1. One of the big ones is that we're going to be introducing a new rich text editor in Moodle 4.1 called TinyMCE. Many of you might already be familiar with TinyMCE. You've probably used it in various other places on the internet, perhaps without even realizing. We have currently in Moodle a text editor called Atto. And Atto is a text editor which is built by Moodle and used exclusively by Moodle. It's a really, really great text editor. There's a huge ecosystem of plugins that have been built around it. But we know that to provide a world class editing experience, we need to put in serious, serious development if we want to continue using Atto. So what we're going to be doing instead is we're going to be transitioning over from Atto to TinyMCE. It's not kind of, we're not turning off Atto as part of 4.1, not at all. TinyMCE is an option and it's not the default in 4.1. And we'll be working with the plugin authors who've been developing plugins for Atto to help them to build plugins against the TinyMCE code base. We've got the report builder that we ported from workplace into Moodle 4.0. We're going to be continuing to build on report builder by providing more reports out of the box. One of the ones that's highlighted there is the completion status report. This is one of the highly requested features inside Moodle and what's great here is that the report builder actually makes it possible to deliver features that otherwise would be custom development. We can actually build those now in the report builder rather than having to go in and write PHP code to develop that particular feature. One of the other things that we're working on for 4.1 and we're really, really hoping that it will get in, but it might not, is an integration with MoodleNet so that you can share your content from your Moodle LMS across to MoodleNet directly. This is incredibly powerful because we know that MoodleNet and the content that it provides and the access to that content is a really important part of the future of Moodle and of education globally. The MUA and I hope that you've all had a chance to go and chat to some of the MUA members have also supported and funded a project in 4.1 to improve the database activity user experience. Now this is about taking what is a very powerful activity in Moodle and really revitalizing it. As part of this work, there will be a whole lot of new presets for the database activity which means that teachers can use it in ways that they might not be familiar with or might not have realized they could more easily. We've also included a preview mode so that it's much easier to actually see what you're going to get. We've improved the student experience by providing a better experience with the existing views in the course activity. The grade book has also seen significant UX improvements. We've got clear navigation. This is continuing the trend that we started in 4.0. There's the new grade summary report. We've improved the UI and the UX on the user report and the single view pages. So this is really about saying how can we take what is a very complex part of Moodle and make it accessible and make it easy and make it intuitive and clear. Now Sonda put a note here saying people will ask questions about the grader report page and I should say we're working on it for 4.2. So we're working on the grader report page for 4.2. The big blue button team who have been working very, very hard on improving the integration between Moodle and big blue button. They're running at pace to get this across the line for 4.1. I'm not quite sure whether it's going to make it or not but we're working very hard with them to do that. They're going to be working to make it possible to broaden the use of big blue button inside Moodle. So this is functionality which makes sense to be out of the box and just you won't notice it once it's there because it's what you expect. So for example the language in big blue button will be pulled across from Moodle dynamically. There will be lots of bug fixes and we'll also be able to invite external participants into those big blue button sessions. These are the sorts of quality of life improvements that will just make it more seamless and more comfortable and more ergonomic and make the integration feel much more polished. Another community driven initiative is around the quiz and the questions in the question bank. So this is about making it possible to improve the management and sharing of questions. So taking again what is a core part of Moodle and building on it and improving it. This is very exciting. There have been a couple of talks actually that I've attended around quizzes and question banks and all the incredible ways that people are using this functionality and it's really exciting to see the community taking the initiative on building out and improving this core part of Moodle. There is a slight possibility again that this will land in 4.2 rather than 4.1 depending on whether we're able to get it across the line for 4.1. And of course accessibility. So we've been working hard as I said before on accessibility in the 4.1 series. One of the key things that we're doing is actually looking at the web content accessibility guidelines which set out some very basic but very concrete ways that a product needs to behave and represent itself to be accessible. We're looking for double A accreditation for both 4.0 and 4.1. We already have it in place for 3.10 and 3.11. So this is really going to make sure that we're getting that baseline level of accessibility for Moodle across the board. So that's kind of what we're looking at for Moodle 4.1. Hopefully that's pretty much in line with what your expectations are but I understand if maybe there are some things that you're a bit surprised about that you didn't know were coming and that's why we actually wanted to talk a little bit about the roadmap process change that we're looking to make across the board at Moodle. What we want to do is introduce a simpler, clearer and more transparent approach to road mapping in Moodle. So we want to look at what we're developing now, what we'll develop next, what's coming later and what's coming later still and we know that predicting the future is very very hard so we know that as we go out into the future into that later and the later still phase things become that little bit fuzzier and as they come closer to now they actually become more concrete and we can be a little bit more confident in making statements around them. What we want to do though is we want to make sure that we have your input and the entire community's input and engagement throughout the process of developing Moodle. So that means that actually having conversations with people, having doing research, actually talking to people, really providing mockups and prototypes early on throughout the entire stage so that we know that what we develop from an HQ perspective and what we develop in conjunction with the community actually aligns with the needs of educators and of learners and of administrators and of operators. I will also give a little shout out. Maria is running a session in the workshop room tomorrow at 2pm and she's actually going to be doing some really really great stuff around the whole way that our product life cycle works and I really encourage you to join that session. It will be great. If you do want to have a look at what that looks like in Tracker, we've actually built a new Kanban board and this will actually look across all of the products in Moodle. So this is about providing transparency across yes Moodle LMS but also the rest of the products in Moodle. It's subject to change. We're still working it out. Things are going to be tweaked and adjusted. We've been making tweaks right up until I think last week we made some more tweaks to it. It's constantly being adjusted but we really want your feedback and your engagement on this. So how can you be directly involved in this whole road mapping process? Well for now we're still getting things sorted so keep getting in touch with us through MDL through the support through your partners through the services. We need to get that feedback still and the product team at Moodle HQ will be pulling things across onto that Kanban board and triaging them into there but we still want your advocacy and we always want your votes and your comments so if there's something that you're saying why is that on the backlog ask and we'll try and answer or if you're saying why isn't that on the backlog let's ask and let's see if there's actually a valid reason or maybe we just haven't seen it. We really want your engagement because Moodle is very much a community project. The other key thing I'll ask you to do is please everyone get out your phone and scan the QR code to join our research group our experience lab. This is a really really important way for us to understand the needs of our customers and to actually know what's happening for people at the at the call face whether they're educators whether they're students whether they're administrators whether they're partners whoever you are we need to know how we can best support you and we'll be using the experience lab to conduct research now and into the future and really make sure that what we build is built with the best possible understanding of your needs and your requirements and the other thing you can do of course is join the Moodle users association that's a very direct way of being involved in the roadmap as we saw earlier the MUA will propose and fund some of the projects that we work on. So we've looked a little bit at what we've done in Moodle 4.0 and what's coming very soon in 4.1 so what's happening in 4.2 and beyond that now I'm going to put the caveat again this is still a little bit fuzzy because we haven't quite released 4.1 yet so there's a little bit of fuzziness happening there but what's likely there well one of the key things that's very likely in fact I'd say if we don't deliver it Martin will be very very unhappy is an integration with Matrix and as part of that a whole instant messaging framework for Moodle so that it's not exclusive to Matrix but setting the scene so that ultimately we can actually connect a lot of other instant messaging or chat type applications. We're also going to be doing some research on the course hierarchy there was a bit of a discussion when we released 4.0 we removed the ability to indent and outdent blocks which was received with a little bit of consternation the reason that we took that out was that it didn't actually it was not accessible so what we need to do is we actually need to now look at there was a need there there's a requirement that people have there how can we meet that need and meet that requirement and still be accessible going forward so we're going to be doing some work on that as well the tiny mce integration which we've released in 4.1 that will see significant improvements as well of course the grade book it's still complex we're going to be keep refining that user experience the quiz as well is going to see significant improvements and the MoodleNet integration is very very exciting Paul and I spent quite a bit of time over the past couple of weeks excitedly talking about the various ways that we could make the MoodleNet integration even better and grow that over time and we'd love your ideas and your feedback on that as well we'll also be looking at the ability to bulk edit course activities and improving that workflow as well so if we now look further still into the into the the deeper darker future in the 4.x series there's going to be ongoing discovery and exploration we don't know what's in the far future yet as I mentioned a lot of the discussion we've been having with lots of people over the past week and before has been around this idea of site and course templates and I think that there's a lot of thinking that's happening in a lot of people's heads around that so that's possibly something that we'll see so really about scaffolding and showing people what it looks like to build a really successful Moodle course and how we can support that we need to do more messaging integrations so this could be an integration with teams or with Slack or with WhatsApp possibly various different options there and ultimately we'll also be switching from Atto to Tiny as our default text editor at some point during the 4.x series so that's hopefully helpful and useful to you I think I've gone a little bit quicker than I expected to but that's okay because that gives us plenty of time for questions and I've very not kindly got a wonderful group of people here to help support me I am only three months in so there will probably be questions I can't answer but please in regards to tiny mce becoming the default editor is there at this moment do we know if there's any plans to make it so Atto will not be an option because I know I have some clients that would prefer to keep Atto we have no concrete plans to remove Atto completely I think if we were in a position where we wanted to simplify we would move Atto across to the plugins directory at the very least rather than having it as part of the out-of-the-box experience but that's in the far future yet and that's part of the conversations we'd need to have to understand the usage of Atto across the board. Hello Neil Snopleton University of Cambridge I've got a question about the the activity to have activity navigation in Moodle 4 which has been quite a bit of discussion I contributed recently to to the forums on this is there any plans to to reintroduce that as an option? Possibly that I think is something that we would need to I can tell you that it's not happening in 4.1 it's certainly something though that we should get onto our onto our backlog and our roadmap so that we can actually start having those conversations with UNC if it is something that we should be looking at for 4.2 or 4.3 or or beyond I can see a few very vigorous headshakings happening around the room so I think what we can definitely do there is make sure that we actually are capturing the need and the problem that you have there and then we can actually start looking at where that might fall in terms of our ability to deliver something to improve that. What will be the next LTS version 4.1 or 4.2? Sorry the the next release of Moodle? The next LTS. Oh you've caught me with my mind has gone blank. 4.1 there we go. Please please try to put as much as you can on 4.1 if that is the LTS version because May is too late for a lot of universities at least in Europe to have that 4.2 version for the cars 23-24 so please as much as you can on this November. Yes we'll certainly try and get as much as we can in 4.1 because 4.1 will be an LTS release we do want to make sure that whatever we land in there is stable so that it can be supported and won't introduce problems for people migrating to that version but yes we absolutely want to make sure that 4.1 is as feature-rich as it can be. I was just wondering when we had this discussion with the long-term support release have we ever discussed of maybe completely skipping a LTS release and moving more towards a rolling release have this ever been part of a discussion I wonder just for interest. Yes yes the the idea of moving to a rolling release is certainly something that there have been discussions around as you can imagine there's a lot of complexity involved in that not only from a technical perspective but also from a governance perspective and from an engagement perspective with the users of Moodle and also the partners. It is something which I think we are keen to keep having conversations and discussions around to see if there is a way that we can streamline and increase the frequency with which we can get new capabilities and bug fixes at the door.