 Our last day of the MOOCs kicks off with a fascinating panel discussion, led by Shalimar Anderson and a number of panelists from around the Moodle ecosystem, where the team will be debating the future of learning management systems. So without further ado, I'd like to invite Shalimar and the rest of the team to the stage. Thanks so much for waking up early, got a mercifully later start today for reasons we all understand deeply. Just want to take a minute to introduce the panelists who are here. Starting at the far right is Michelle Moore, who is head of customer success at Moodle US. Thank you for joining us, Michelle, followed by Lauren Goodman, who is a learning designer with us at Moodle US, and Paul Hodgson, who is our MoodleNet project manager. So we've got a lot of great Moodle HQ brains with us this morning, and we're going to be exploring some themes of the future and what it might hold for Moodle. So you're not going to have to listen to me talk the whole time. We're just going to get right into some questions, and about halfway through we're going to take a little break to shake it out, right? Because we have been, yeah, just waking up, right? So here we go. Okay, so there's been a lot of discussion through the whole MOOT about what the future holds and where to the technology might be going. And one question that I personally have not been privy to or kind of an elephant in the room, if you will, is whether or not the LMS is going to even be the same beast we've come to know, right? So I guess my first question for our esteemed panelists is what do you see as the role of the LMS in five years time? We're just going to get that microphone on stage. So what will the LMS be in five years? I think it's really interesting to think about because obviously technology changes really quickly. At the same time, teaching and education doesn't. So I think there may be more opportunities for automation and things like that under the hood, but from the front end perspective, I'm afraid and a little sad to think about the fact that it may not be meaningfully different. It's still going to be a place, a destination where there's content, a lot of content, and then maybe we see progress and that we have things integrated and so on and so forth. But yeah, on the path we're on, I don't see it changing dramatically. I definitely have thoughts about where I'd like it to go, but imagine we'll get into that. So my background is in community colleges in America, so open access higher education in America. And what we saw and what I know we saw around the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic when we moved to emergency remote teaching is all of these people that had maybe never used the LMS before suddenly using the LMS. And I think that's really exciting, and there's a lot of innovation. I like to think of baby innovations, little innovations and innovations that happen for an individual who is now using the LMS, and we're seeing organizations that have never thought about delivering their programming online, coming to us and wanting to deliver online with just an idea. And I think that's really exciting. And so I think that what I like about this question that we're thinking about five years, that's not 20 years, that's not 40 years in the future. And I think that the way that teaching and learning is changing and has already changed, and the LMS needs to be there for this change, is that we just have learners in so many different environments. So we have folks who are online in Big Blue Button, who are in a physical classroom, who need to take the course asynchronously, and they're all participating in that same learning experience, right? And so I think that the LMS needs to be this central hub for that. And especially, I would like to see the LMS become a place where it can be that touchstone when you have learners who are synchronous virtual, but also in a physical classroom. And I think it can connect all of those learners. But I do think we need to work on some new tools to make those connections a little more seamless. Yeah, I sort of agree and disagree as an integrator of other systems into LMS. In 2016, in my university, we ran the entire Moodle infrastructure for five campuses across the world. And we were already talking back then about how it was actually the hub, as you said. We saw the LMS as the hub, but we were generally pushing learners out to other systems which were more experiential. So we would do our high-stakes testing, we would do our assessments and our plagiarism checking on Moodle, but we were generally pushing people out to other content systems. So I actually see, yeah, these things, we talked about AR and VR back in 2016 and how it will be here in two years. And here we are. We're still waiting for it. So I do agree that I don't think much is going to change in five years, but if it changes, it's going to change fast. We have to be ready for that. So obviously I represent MoodleNet and we talked to a lot of people about content. And I think there's a lot of discussion about how can you get better content, more targeted content in the learner and to their preferences. So I think analytics as well is going to come in and play a big role in adapting what the learner needs to see to help them learn. That can happen in five years. I don't think it's a very two-year project, but five definitely. A follow-up question. Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how we have some old stalwarts in at least the American education system, for example law schools and other more solid institutions that have yet to make the break into the online learning space. Do you see tools emerging within the LMS to draw more people to the table, especially those old holdouts? I mean, I would say I think we have the tools. I think tools are tools. I just think they're tools, right? And I think that we don't necessarily need more tools. We need to use the tools we have better and we need to have really good examples of ways to use those tools. So I think that what I've seen with the stalwarts is that they're now like, oh, I can put a file online and not email it. And I just do that once instead of sending 30 emails. And I know, again, that that sound, but we all know what that's like. And I think that's important. So I think that we need to really celebrate the changes that people are making in their teaching practices that are sometimes small. But, you know, they're seeing examples. And I think that, you know, this is the way this is that diffusion of innovations theory, like, right? This is like, someone has an idea, we have those who are the forefront doing all the things. But now all those on the outside are catching up and we all need to set really good examples and share. I think that's what's really important. We need to share those examples, share ways to use the tools. So people have examples. But I don't know that we need more tools, because I think that everybody's trying to sell a tool. I think we need to work this from all angles, right? From one angle, there is talking to the leadership at those institutions and saying, like, look, here's what this can do for you. Here's what this can do for your students. Here's the opportunity to reach learners in a new way and broaden your reach and make more impact. But we also need to reach people who are developing the courses and doing the teaching. I remember when I first started working with Moodle and I was working with other teachers, I didn't try to have a group training session and say, hey, everyone, we're going to do Moodle and it's going to be amazing and you should all come on board. It was a lot of little conversations where I was going like, so what's your hard thing that you're doing? And I talked to teachers who were building like six spelling tests to differentiate instruction and they would list the same spelling test six times in the classroom. You all be quiet a little bit over here and I'm going to give a spelling test. And so we identified like, look, you can do that in Moodle with, you know, a fraction of the time and here's the opportunity. So it's about finding those opportunities for making things easier and finding ways to solve their problems. And then I think along with that is providing, again, more of the tools and examples and supports so that when that teacher or that trainer is ready to adopt, they don't have to think about every element of the framework. They can plug in the pieces that they need and then we provide the features to support them along the way to help them continue to improve. Yeah, yeah, great. Just to add to that, I think it's a question of learner demand as well as these stalwart institutions bring forward new professionals. I think also that they too demand some form of other access to their materials. We were talking last week in a product development meeting about maybe there'll be a shift away from online, totally online learning because of the pandemic, because people were forced into it. So maybe people would actually like to go back to traditional methods for a while. But with the connected generations, this is going to come back into having to provide this even in our old fashioned traditional institutions. Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so one problem that we have at Moodle.io us is we serve clients with broad reaching use cases. And it's not a struggle but always a lot of work for us to help our clientele scale what they're doing. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how we move past teacher driven learning, content centric learning into something else, something perhaps more driven by learners. Yeah, I could talk about this all day. So this kind of gets back to some of those tools that I was thinking about. And things that we've been suggesting for years, and I've heard many of you suggest as well, is again, you've got to put the tools in place to make it easier for people to go the direction you want them to go, rather than relying on them to figure out where to start. And it comes down to, I'm going to give a lot of examples here. Let's say I had an ah-ha a few years ago, where I thought about how I'd been training people when I when I used to go out and I train people on how to use Moodle. And the first tool I would tend to teach people was the resource. So that means the very first thing I've planted in their head is how to upload a file. And then what do I lament? I am like, oh, everybody is just uploading files. And I had to think about that. Yes, I need people to know that they can upload files. But if I frame the training as here's the first most important thing I'm going to teach you, then I've just kind of led them down that path. So part of it is thinking about how you present things, frame things in terms of training and then in terms of doing things at scale again, try to make things easy. So we talk a lot about with our clients and others about developing templates. So as an organization, decide on some standards around how your courses are going to be set up, make it easier for people to build good courses. I'm not saying that we need to lock things down. I think we still need to give people autonomy and choice because not every class is the same, but give them a framework that is solid, reduce the cognitive load, don't make them think about, well, am I going to make the heading blue or green? Let them think about the content, what goals I'm trying to achieve and what activities go in there. And then as an organization, you can have several templates and let people choose depending on the kind of situation they're teaching in. And then if I go one level higher outside of an organization, conversations we've been having, I've had a lot this week and then last week at our global meetings was talking about building tools into the system, starting to use some of that AI that people are really excited about to support and coach teachers and those training others along the way. Because what we know is that it takes a really long time for people to change their pedagogical approach. It doesn't happen with a template and it doesn't happen with one training or one conversation. It's a series of conversations and processes. So if we had, say, an AI system that in Moodle could say, you know, hey, I see you were just using a whole bunch of assignments. Have you thought about sharing that information with learners or involving peer review? And so those tools are another way to scale. Because otherwise, it's me having a conversation again and again and again with somebody trying to change their pedagogical approach and move away from that content-centric model. That should be good. I had this discussion with the Moodle User Association of Japan yesterday with MoodleNet. We studied before in my past about Putanedra's SAMA approach to substitution, augmentation, redefinition and modification and how we can use AI to do that with content. So how clever can it be to say, well, you normally give out a PDF file, how about something they can annotate? Just raising it small steps to the next level and then use. It's still content-centric, but it is improving that process. Well, from a learning design perspective, I mean, like for the instructional designers out there, like shout out to learning outcomes, you know, I think like, I don't think I could answer this question without giving a shout out to learning outcomes, making sure that folks have really good learning outcomes, know how to write learning outcomes. Because when we have that goal, then learners have multiple opportunities to show their learning in different ways and to reach that goal. And I hope that, you know, we help our teachers have that openness to that. Conceptually, I will tell you the way that I talk about this with teachers. So, you know, I think that, so there's access, right? Access to education. That's baseline, right? That is just baseline access. Community colleges in the U.S. are open access. There's supposed to be two-year institutions and our graduation rate in three years is 22%. So, 78% of the time, we're failing those students as institutions, as systems, right? So, access, but what is access without success? It's nothing in my opinion, right? It's just access. It's just the door. So, here's how I talk about this with teachers, right? We talk about being welcoming, right? And to me, that's access. Like, you have your house. You've maybe even tidied up your house and you put out a welcome mat and you unlock the door, right? You've provided access. So, somebody could walk by, they can like come to your house. You got the welcome mat out there. But that's really different than making someone feel wanted in that space. It's really different than sending an invitation to the dinner party where you're like opening the door and saying, like, welcome and introducing that person to other people at the party and having a conversation. And I think that is sort of success and engagement in education, which is where I think we need to go to. And so, when I talk about this with teachers, we talk about like the dinner party metaphor because you want your learners to feel wanted and engaged in that environment. And so, you can't just be like, here's my house because that's not engaging. That's not fun, right? So, I think that, I think that things like that, like metaphors can really help. And I think that we need to do whatever we can to make students feel wanted in any kind of learning space that we design. Thank you for that. Thank you. Okay, so here's the thing. I want to take just a quick break and allow everybody to stand up, ask you to join me in standing up. Because here's the thing. It's morning and I know we've had our coffee and I know we're starting to get our brains on. But we've got bodies that we need to respect. Stretch it out. Maybe do some trunk twists, right? Say hi to the person next to you. It's our last day of this moot. Downward-facing doogie imus. Just check in with yourselves. Good call. Okay. Yeah. Wiggle it out. You know? Yeah. Okay. That's better. Now I can hear the energy in the room. Hey, welcome. Hey, we're starting the keynote. Awesome. Okay. Let's get back to these brilliant minds. Michelle and I talk a lot. I recently kind of adopted a nephew and he is nine and he is learning to read. You know, the last few years have been really hard on his education. And as like a first-time parent figure, I have been struggling to help this nephew learn to read. And there's so much. I'm such a lifelong learner like we all are. There's so much that I can't wait to show him. But until he learns to read, it's going to be next to impossible. And so Michelle said something to me the other day that it's just been stuck with me. You have to learn to read before you read to learn. And so we have been, I've just been kicking that over in my brain, just thinking about, oh my gosh, day in and day out, we are teaching people how to use the LMS, which feels very much like teaching people how to read. And so with this next question, how do we enable transformative learning experiences at scale? I'm really wondering how we can get from learn to read to read to learn. How do we do it, Michelle? How do we enable transformative learning experiences at scale? So when I think about that, in terms of the LMS, what I think is that in a lot of cases, we are training people how to use the tool rather than training people how to use the tool to do transformative things. If you look at a lot of the videos that are out there and the documentation that's out there, it is all very much focused on those things. And those things are very important, but those things are not going to lead to transformation in teaching and learning. And we've actually been having this conversation related to our own services. The idea that if the documentation, if those videos alone were all that were needed, then we'd have amazing Moodle courses everywhere. And I've seen enough Moodle courses to tell you that it's not exactly the case, that all the courses are amazing. So we've got to figure out how to build a framework and build tools to support that transition. If I think about the environment itself, then I think it kind of goes back to some of those placeholders and those templates. But imagine if you came into a Moodle course for the first time, and the question at the top of the page was, what do you want people to learn? What do you want them to know by the time they're done in this space? And I'm not talking learning objectives because people like get too wrapped up in like the student will. Yes, the goal is a learning objective, but I want you to just tell me in plain English, what is it you're trying to achieve here? Start people out by thinking about that. And then we use a model quite often called backward design. And the next step from there is, okay, if this is what you want them to learn, then how are you going to let them demonstrate that skill? How are you going to assess that they have learned this information? And so then you say, okay, so what tools, how are you going to assess and confirm that they've learned this? So maybe the next step is a prompt. Imagine, for instance, the interface for selecting activities in a course. Right now, it's just a big list of activities and you have to pick and choose and figure out what works. What if it said, you know, here are the activities we might suggest if you're a first time user for doing assessment. And these things can be used to help you figure out if you've achieved your goals. And then the next prompt is, okay, what activities are going to feed into that? And then finally, what content do you need to support that? Just, you know, the user tours, the prompts, the interface, things that we can do to move beyond the what button do I click. And then the other thing is when it does come to that training and that support, people, when it comes down to it, a lot of people don't really need help knowing what button to click because that information is there and the help buttons are pretty cool. They need to figure out what question they need to ask. They need to figure out which tool do I need to look at, not how do I set it up, that the hardest question is what tool do I need to pick. And so as we're designing training experiences, we're really saying, well, okay, you're looking at a course for the first time and your course probably falls into one of these four or five buckets. So if you're in this bucket, you might look at a course format that looks like this. And if you're in this bucket, you might look at this and so on and so forth. And in that conversation, we help people decide which course format is good for which setting and then we let them choose which of those formats is the best and then provide the documentation or the training on how to actually make that happen. Just a little different approach because I'm obviously concerned with products and how we build products. And it's a really big shout out to Zoe and her product experience team really because for the first time, certainly MoodleNet as a new product has had the opportunity to design where the learners are, to study other systems that they already use and to use that to make sure they don't have to learn how to use a system. Because they already use Twitter, it looks like Twitter. Because they already use LinkedIn, it has LinkedIn features and so on. So I think systematically we can program that into our systems. It's something that the LMS has generally haven't been very good at and haven't adapted to over the years. But I think 4.0 and Moodle certainly is going down that road and we'll get better. But MoodleNet, I think if you look at it, is entirely built on those assumptions. Yeah. Yeah. Just another one for the course designers. So the taxonomy of significant learning, Dale Fink's taxonomy of significant learning, shout out to the poster session that my colleague Heather and I did. I really love this taxonomy of learning. You can use in conjunction with Blooms because the central question is what change do you want to see in your learners? And then it looks at six categories of learning, like human connection and caring. There's so much that goes into learning. I would add to that question, what changes do you want your learners to make in the world? I think that education must be focused on social justice and changing this world so that we have a more equitable environment for all. So to me, when we think about transformation and transformation at scale, it's asking our learners to do really big tasks and to think big about how they can make changes in the world and in their communities and incorporating that. So I think that we've got to just think about those changes, plan for those changes, and then create experiences for students where they have the opportunity to enact change, to make change. And content is there. The internet has a lot of content. Things like MoodleNet and OER and being able to curate content, it's going to be there. So I think that in our learning experiences, we need our learners to have experience with learning. We have to incorporate fundamental digital literacy skills, media literacy skills, critical thinking skills. This is what learners need to be practicing. I think the subject we need our learners to master is learning. I think we need to develop expert learners because that's what they will need as they go on. And I think that's how we scale. If we have expert learners out there, we can scale because they will continue to learn and they will continue to create and they will continue to change. Thank you, Lauren. That's great. Everybody, welcome Don Hinkelman. Don is Vice President, I believe, of the Moodle User Association in Japan. Yes. And I just got this letter from India. Just got this letter from India and they sent me a paper balloon. Now if you were at the transformative experience last night, I was trying to get people to use this paper balloon. I'm still drunk. This is a 200-year-old toy from Japan and it's self-inflating and it never goes down. And the reason why I brought this today and why I brought it last night is because this is ed tech. If our theme for the Moodle 5.0 and 6.0 is changing to ed tech, here's an example of ed tech. Why is this an example? This is transformative for the ages, particularly in zero to three years old. So I've been making Moodle courses for zero to three years old children because we have a problem in Japan where the, and I'll just pass this down, we have a problem because young children are addicted to screens. We have a problem of child suicide and this is the solution. Ed tech, tech that is tactile, tech that is kinesthetic, tech that is touching all the senses. So why, what does this have to do with Moodle? Well, the brain, the neurons in your brain change most dramatically zero to 36 months. The growth in synopsis is huge and the way to connect that is connecting all your senses. And when we dedicate ourselves to total screen learning, we lose those senses. And when I work with university students, we try to create year-long projects where you travel to another country, do a project, collaborate with other students in another world, and do some volunteer work. We try to make, inside Japan, we try to make internships where students learn how to use their knowledge in actual workplaces. So the key to transformative learning is breaking the school boundaries and breaking the Moodle boundaries to include all of these physical, tactical, experiential kinds of actions. And our brains will grow and our heart will grow. I love, Don, thank you so much for joining us because that was amazing. I love the balloon. I love it. I'm wondering if we can just kind of play with this idea a bit more. How can we blast Moodle open for all of our senses? Are you sending in the male balls to children to help? I'm sending them to you, to educators. Give me your address. How about anybody else? I think it comes a little bit with that shift to learner-centric environments, right? If someone else is creating the content for you and you're just consuming it, then it is all about that screen experience. But if you're engaging the learner and actually creating the content and the activities and engaging in authentic experiences, then there are more opportunities there to engage all of those senses. Yeah, we'll work on smell-o-vision. I mean, that's something we can do. Yeah, definitely. Okie dokie. Moodle is essential for the caregivers, for the young children. It's creating the journaling systems, the community that meets on Moodle to share what they've learned about raising their baby, or where the interns and volunteers share what they've learned about going to another culture and doing transformative work together. Ok, so we all know Moodle's mission, or at least the short from, right? Do you want to say it together? Empowering educators to improve the world, right? I heard you all out there quietly. I heard you. That is transformative by nature. It's radical, right? It's not a sit still kind of mission. It's not a hope and pray kind of mission. It demands us to be forces of change in the world. So what does that look like? How do we create a global community of change makers? How do we really get people off the back sides out there and making this world better? Oh look, the mic is in my hand. Can I just say MoodleNet? I'm talking about this in the next presentation. I won't say too much. However, this is sort of the entire aim of MoodleNet is to bring the community of educators together, to provide those resources, whatever you need be experiential, be it anything at all, into the hands of those who aren't able to do their own things. And that's the open ed take global mission, I believe, as well. So I would say that that's one of the ways we can scale very quickly because communities of educators can work together on that platform. And then those things are open, totally open education is the way forward. Yeah, I mean, I'm not so much, I mean, I think I've talked about creating in the sense of I think what we can do in our classrooms and in our learning experiences with learners, I think we have a community of global change makers. And so what I'm concerned with is making sure they have the resources, the tools, the access that they need to connect with one another. And I think Moodle is a tool. I think it's an awesome tool. I love Moodle. I don't think that Moodle should ever dictate the way someone teaches, right? I think what we've been talking about with experiential learning, that's teaching, that's really, really good teaching, that's teaching and learning. It's outside of the tool. The tool facilitates that. So I think we have this amazing tool to make connections, to bring people together. But it's a tool. And I think that we need tools. And what I'm most concerned with is that our tools continue to evolve in such a way that we just keep bringing in folks who are maybe not currently here. I think that's what's most important. I think that's how we really make changes. We need to be as different and diverse as possible. 63% of the world, I think, still doesn't have access to broadband, doesn't have access to the internet. And I think that the Moodle mobile app is amazing, that we can bring online learning experiences offline. That's where I think that we really, really need to keep expanding. Because I don't want to see, those of us who already are doing okay, we're going to do okay no matter what. And I don't want to see the digital divide, that divide of access, but then also knowing how to use tools, how to use tools for learning, how to use tools for change. We can't see that gap continue to grow. So I think that's where we really, really need to put our resources, our time into marginalized communities and those places that just haven't had a chance yet to participate. Let's get them all in here. I want to have everybody here and I don't want to leave anybody behind. I think that's what's most important. I'm not sure I have a lot to add to both of those comments, but I will say, I agree about giving the access and what Paul is saying about expanding MoodleNet and using that as an avenue to empower people is really interesting too. I had an interesting chat with the keynote speaker after her session yesterday and I was talking about this balance between when I look at a lot of OAR communities, the content that is there is content and I look at it and I go, oh, but what could it be? And how do we make it better? And how do we provide content and give people access to resources that help create the kinds of transformative learning experience we're looking for? And what she reminded me is the first step is getting people into those spaces and creating the space where people feel comfortable and giving them a starting point. I do think with that and through all of that we need to continue asking the right questions. So that question of what is the goal of the learning experience? What is the goal of the content? And continuing to perpetuate those in all of these spaces so that it just, even if it causes people to pause and think for a moment about how they might use the content differently, I think that's a win. Okay. All right. This has been excellent so far, but the beauty of any panel discussion are all the wild questions that the audience is going to ask us. Are you all ready to be in the hot seat? Fantastic. We're going to start passing a microphone around. We've got a microphone, one microphone. And if you are going to ask a question, here's the thing. I want to know who you are. You've got to tell me your name and you have to tell me your favorite moment from the moot. It could be last night. It could be during one of the sessions, but the price for admission, the price to ask a question of these panelists is you've got to give some goods. I want to hear all about those great moments. So questions from the audience? Your name, your favorite thing, and then your question. Yeah. Hi. My name is Dominic. I'm going to make it easy. I mean, I can't even speak properly after yesterday. So my favorite moment was yesterday evening. So I take the easy, easy response to that. I would like to invite the panel to go back to the very first question, which was what does an LMS look like in five years? If we've got 800 people here in the room, we've probably got 800 different logins to different LMSs. And so if we take a learner centric perspective and we're thinking of seamless learning, one of the biggest challenges seems to be exactly this configuration of our LMSs and the fact that we're always thinking of individual platforms. I wonder what we can do as a community of Moodle users to actually overcome this to make it easier for learners to create their own learning pathways. Thank you. Great question. First of all, he had a great time last night. We've all got so many different various systems to log into, and everybody's kind of doing their own thing. So how can we move past that to build something that is more cohesive and perhaps just easier on our learners so they're not just having to go to all these different sites all the time? Oh yes, that's terrible. I have so many classes where I have to use three LMSs. It's horrible and the students hate it and the teachers hate it. And we're pushed to this, this, and this. Partially it's pushed from the publishers and pushed from the school and pushed from the individual teacher who has their own favorite thing. Perusal is a great little add-on and this other add-on and this add-on. And it needs to be like a classroom, use one place which we will possibly never achieve because of the complexity of the market and the specialists in the market. So my answer to that question is to partner, just partner like crazy, and make integration simple because a lot of you will avoid integration because integration is painful. So I think this is something we need to work on better in terms of around our systems. Where are we, who's the specialist in that area and how do we integrate seamlessly with them? So at least from a learner perspective, they don't know or the teacher doesn't know. It's just all embedded in one place. Perhaps a little bit of embracing complexity for ourselves to enable simplicity for those who we serve. Yeah. You know, for me it comes back to those digital literacy skills. I think that no matter what, we are navigating thousands of platforms a day and they all look really different and the buttons are in different places and so I don't think uniformity is the answer. I think, again, like I think difference is important but I do think that equipping learners with the skills, the basic skills of how to navigate a system, what you're looking for when you're inside a system and being really meta about that in our teaching and learning and talking about that with learners or those who support learners, I think that's really important. So maybe I'm sure there's a lot of things we could do on the technical side or I would love to have some universal standards that we could follow but I also think that we will not be serving learners well if we just try to make everything look the same and feel the same because it never will be and we need to equip people to be in a really different environment and know how to function. They have to have that fluency with technological environments so I think that's part of what we need to do. On that note, Lauren, I was telling you all about my nephew who's trying to learn but I have the same kind of thing going on on the other end of the life cycle. My grandmother routinely calls me up in a panic over some new website she's been to on her phone and so it's the same thing. I've got a teacher how to read, right? Teacher how to take that information in, yeah. I'll reinforce here the idea of standards. It really becomes apparent as I'm working with various organizations and I can see well this stuff is easy because these companies and organizations you're working with adhere to the same standards so we can do what you want to do and then unfortunately sometimes I have to say well I'm sorry this platform that you've chosen to work with doesn't play well with others and so we can't work together. To the point about digital literacy I think that's completely valid too. I think there is a balance there and I'm really interested in the potential of technology to help mediate that issue because one of the things that I see as a barrier to open educational resources is that lack of consistency in those user experiences. Like if I'm an organization and I'm trying to deliver a professional looking course I can't get away with content from here, here, and here and having you know six different look and feels and I also am mindful of the cognitive load, right? It's okay to ask learners to think harder when it helps serve the goal but that sort of difference the visual differences it's not serving the goal so I would love to see the technology evolve to the point where it can go I'm taking the content from MoodleNet and I'm going to skin them all the same and I'm going to embed it in that frame and it is that seamless experience that you're talking about. That's great we have another question up front okay all right back here remember your name your favorite part and then your question. Hey I'm Andrew Hancox my highlight so far has been Tressie Punt talking about LTI which made me really excited about the opportunities for integration but there's a lot of adverse incentives universities want to own their relationship with students, lecturers want to own their intellectual properties, universities believe that they own the lecturers intellectual property even at a school level there's those issues LinkedIn learning are actively making it harder to integrate their content into your platform how do we find those adverse incentives? Great question think about it think about it. I had an interesting conversation the other night that was kind of along these lines and unfortunately my answer is going to mean it's out of our hands a bit but it has been interesting to me to see to see students and it feels weird to say this but younger generations who are really increasingly protesting and speaking up about the injustices and those adverse conditions you know in a lot of institutions educational institutions I see learners treated as a captive audience and they often are which means they're meant to just tolerate whatever environment they're presented and I as a student myself I was setting something some new feature up the other day and I was like this is crazy annoying and ridiculous like why you know why does it work this way? And I think people are starting to realize there are other options and I kind of expect in the coming years that we will see more pushback from students about these sorts of adverse conditions and the ridiculousness of everything that we're being asked we're asking them to do. Yeah I mean I think with any kind of change it needs to be systemic it has to be at the institutional level and so I think that you know in all of the different spaces where we all might have power we need to advocate for that so at a university you know I think that advocating for incorporating OER into your course materials that should be part of the tenure process that should be celebrated right and but that has to be institutional change and you know I think that advocating for openness in these institutions of education is so important but we all have to educate folks about that I think we need to educate folks about Creative Commons licenses right you can still own something sort of or you can have attribution right you can have this distributed but have attribution and you know reputation that's a big deal right building your reputation having your name out there and so there is there is incentive but I don't think people always know about it and I think we have to advocate advocate for that at the institutional level. It gives a new meaning to publish or perish right publish your courses. On MoodleNet the I don't believe in the word property that word doesn't fit we need new words because everything in education is collaborative it's you're pulling things you know if we study what what Vygotsky has talked about learning is a cultural group it's collaborative and I just don't know where that word property comes from I guess I should take a class to be a lawyer or something and but I do understand that that Moderna you know if they invest a billion dollars to make a vaccine they need to get that money back somehow but to lock that in and to add on another three billion in profit you know by using the tricks of property that's wrong so as educators how do we break through that word property and collaborate and share and so that's why I'm putting my whole effort into MoodleNet because that's you're going to go you're going to create a course at the top of the page to say what do you want to learn and you're going to create it you're going to take in the minds of a thousand people create your course including your own background and the own things you've made and that can be shared again and shared again and shared again I have nothing to add fantastic hello my name is Cyril I'm with a French Moodle partner favorite part of favorite part of the conference favorite aspect of the conference I did not forget that I did love the Moodle bar I did love having the Moodle team technical team available the whole team with all the the technical portfolio available that was uh once in a lifetime as far as I'm concerned and one out of many moods I went to I would very much appreciate you know in the next upcoming Moodle Moodle to have um maybe more perspective and I would very much love to see invited a great absent of this crowd which is the actual learners and I think it would be great to have learners group to give us feedbacks and this is actually my question to the four of you or five of you can you please tell us a couple of you know success successful stories of learners engagement um so first thing that came to my mind one of my favorite things that I did um at the the college where I was previously is a Moodle makeovers with students so students um you know taken a look a look at Moodle course they did a little bit of training with us like we didn't just put students out there in the wild looking at faculty Moodle courses but we would have students who could give feedback to faculty on their Moodle courses and we made it kind of fun we made it like a Moodle makeover you know like what would you do in this course differently how would you build this course and the students gave feedback directly to faculty um you know about that you know we would also do things like surveying students and and we would do focus groups um we had a student advisory board for online education so in addition to all the faculty governance stuff we had a student group and I think it's really important to empower students to be involved in that process um but yeah I think make it fun like have a student on your team and just make sure you pay them like this should not be they're already doing a lot of unpaid labor so just make sure you got a student make sure you're paying them you know work study get them in there get them on your team and and and let them say whatever they want so give them a space safe space to say it and maybe make it fun Moodle makeover done preach girl yes love that love that I'm gonna go back a number of years to one of the experiences that stands out in my mind um I used to teach a course for a university in their in their master's level instructional design and technology program and the course was ostensibly about how to use Moodle but it was really about instructional design and Moodle just happened to be the tool and in this course I used this as my playground to really experiment with what I could do with Moodle um I had a captive audience so they you know um they were subject to whatever you know I'd come up with and in this course we tasked the learners with helping convert courses from Blackboard to Moodle for faculty who are really interested in exploring that that change and we made a little competition so several groups of students were looking at the exact same course and making that that transition and um in the process you know we didn't do training up front about here's how the glossary works and here's how the assignment works the students were tasked with you figure out a tool you become the expert you share that with the group and then you share that with your your team so they had that interdependency long story short the students were working on their courses they invested more time and effort in that project than I ever anticipated I ever expected I I remember I was at a Moodle conference I think in Canada when the students were getting ready to do their final presentations and I walked out of my my room after these presentations and someone looked at me and they were like you're just like giddy and I was like that was one of those teaching and learning experiences where I found a lot of joy and I got great feedback and you could just see the students were engaged and it really all started with me asking the right question presenting the right problem and I think if we can think about doing that in a lot of cases we can make a lot of progress um jot that down about having learners here right and write that one down for next thing something we did at university a few years ago was to allow the students to choose their assessment method so it still fell with faculty to set the criteria but the students could actually then brainstorm whether they submitted a paper did a presentation did a video do whatever that was capable for us to have in a high stakes assessment and obviously to give them the opportunity to if they really fell on this choice so they went the easy route and did a presentation and got a poor mark they could drop that one three out of four something like that and that worked really well and actually taught us a lot about student engagement and that papers really for us at that time in higher education weren't the way to go it wasn't the way we engage the students in the learning process and we achieved higher grades as a result of doing that yeah okay uh we are very near time maybe squeeze one more in is there another question out there oh over here it's going to be the briefest of answers though sir your name your favorite part so far hello my name is torsten from germany my favorite part so far in a very close second would be the party yesterday and the absolute favorite was running into the sea with my colleague luka busch at monday morning so my question is during covid we learned that while many aspects of teaching could be emulated with uh online learning and could be done better with online learning one key aspect that was lacking in many scenarios was students engaging with each other the main focus and learning technology often is the student teacher interaction or the teacher student interaction and moodle core lacks many features that enable students to engage with each other there are great tools but i think moodle core could use some more what are the plans for that maybe we can have one person answer this question what was the question i'm going to pass this on it well you know i i would say i think moodle has i think moodle already has really great tools for student to student interaction synchronously right big blue button you know other video conferencing tools and then asynchronously discussion forums you know glossary like there's so many ways wikis where students can collaborate and can interact but i'm going to go back to my dinner party metaphor when you bring people to your house you don't just sit them down around a table and then leave right like you you say like hey this is so and so and they like this and you give people prompts and you help with it and i think that's where it comes to the teaching like how are we asking students to engage with each other and giving them really clear instructions and reasons why they're doing that what is the goal of that engagement and then what are we expecting of it i think that's what we do as teachers right is to help set that up for them and just a super quick answer here i'll say that there there is an awareness at moodle hq of this gap in functionality not to downplay what you've said because i think you're exactly right there but um there is a need to meet the learners where they are and there have been conversations there are ongoing conversations about how to improve the functionality to make that user to user connection even more seamless uh just stay for the next session please okay thurston now i understand your question what are what are the interactive tools well my point today was really is very important we've got to get involved in really and integrate that into moodle because moodle is not about lms it's about education the future of education so and it really is transcends all levels from infant to to ages so this is why i brought this here today uh the other thing is uh i forget thurston could you stand up i just want to introduce thurston because he's one of the founders of the moodle in universities in germany association and this this is our future because he's connecting all of the universities to combine their collaboration and development and you know the staff people hundreds of staff people who are working on moodle and get them working together so that things are not duplicated we've got to do that in all of our nations and all of our networks these kind of associations so thank you for and i brought and i brought some beer from japan for you thank you so so so much to the panelists for shellomar for hosting don for making it paul lauren and michelle your insights were fascinating and it was a great way to start our last day of the mood