 Hello everyone, I'm Abby Frey, Head of Marketing and Communications at Moodle and it's day two of the Moodle and I've just been to an incredibly interesting presentation by Albina Badi about utilising Moodle in vocational education settings in Albania and I'd love you to tell us a little bit about the project. Why? Why do, why are you using Moodle in a vocational context in Albania? Well I want to start with how excited I am for being here, delightful to do this interview with you. How we started using Moodle in Albania it was because of the need they had for learning materials, for professional courses in vocational educational schools. We thought then, well why not make them digital then if there are learning materials to be developed how about we just put them online and we make them accessible for all teachers to reach and all students on VAT system to reach and the best solution it was Moodle because it was open source, it was easy to customize, it's scalability, it was an option as well. So we started off with Moodle by customizing it and then teachers from different vocational educational schools started developing their own courses and then upload them to the platform and then started using the platform with their students. Then everything advanced when the company I work, Practica Dotal, took the whole thing in a whole new level because we thought to make possible for each school to have its own platform but that would be too costly so Moodle Workplace was the best solution for this. Moodle Workplace is designed for organization and departments but we used it for vocational training schools because each department let's say in Moodle Workplace is actually a school and each program is actually a school direction so we kind of adapted the thing to have a vocational focus let's say. Of course we needed to build the capacity for teachers to use it, students to use it, we developed lots of video tutorials, we have actually developed like more than 50 video tutorials yes for Moodle and guidelines as well and then we tried with this new role in each school we picked a person which was a teacher but it had this technical expertise so he or she was able to help the teachers and also to administer this site of their school for the school and then yeah everything else was it's going actually great the users were growing the number of courses as well there are more than 500 courses more than 15 000 users in the platform that they use it regularly also we have the branded Moodle app yes Mussovet app because since it enables offline learning yeah students can access it can access the learning materials while they are offline which is also great and it helped us a lot and it's going really really well yeah you've obviously taken a very humanist perspective so not only have you implemented the technology you've provided the people who are utilizing the technology your trainers the ability to upskill and learn how to use the technology effectively yes and that was actually the biggest factor because we could just do the upgrade and just leave it like like it was but it's easy for teachers if they didn't use it actually because they thought oh it's a new thing oh i had to prepare stuff and then put it there why can't i just you know share some papers and stuff and if we weren't there to constantly train them and make them see all the benefits that they would have by using the platform they the platform will just simply stay there and it wouldn't be used but now we see that the students were the ones who actually wanted to use it because they they were like oh i can just open the book in my phone why can't i do that i have a video here so i can understand better the lesson and this is why we used we used students as well to promote the platform and they were the ones who actually asked for the teachers to use the platform for their learning that is so nicely explained that makes complete sense to me particularly in a vocational context so i really like the way at the beginning of your presentation you talked about lack of employment opportunities so is this targeted to youth to a younger market yes yes yes because we see well there are lots of factors in albania that are let's say factors of the unemployment or underemployment but in some industries it's actually harder to find employees like because this happens for lots of reasons even for the change of preferences that students have they are mostly focused on industry that use technology and creativity but there are many industries that have like hard labor sometimes or this is how they percept it let's say the youngsters they see many things now they have access on lots of information they all want to do different jobs that are that they want to do they have fun doing it and some industries that are i know less attractive let's say it makes it hard for them to have employees and promoting vocational schools is it's a great way to to actually boost a bit the the employment on these industries because this is how students can get that oh i want to to to be i don't know i want to work on the construction field or i want to work as a i don't know bar bartender or something we have to awaken the passions for for these professions as well and we have to make the vocational educational attractive to them so then they pick it and then they just develop skills so they can use and then we'll they will have it will be easier for them to find to find a job which it's not like the wages are low on these industries it's they're actually really high but yeah they have to to learn about this too so the platform is actually a really good way to promote vocational education because we say that with a platform we're also training teachers on blended learning on new ways of learning so the the quality of the learning is is better that's why parents should also be educated to know how to orientate their their children's on these directions yes there's so it really connects to our whole conference for a thing doesn't it that there's this notion of lifelong learning and unearthing the potential in people it's a really awesome project i know you've worked with wider services which is a middle premium partner they've helped you along the way with development and installation yes it was actually something new for them as well especially for the vt sector they helped us with the implementation and everything and then i had to explain how i thought of doing the things how to manage the users what hierarchy we should build the organization structure because vet schools are a bit complicated actually they have lots of roles and positions which uh it was a positive thing because model workplace offers all the the tools to actually uh you know assign different teachers to different positions and then we are actually experimenting on this thing now to use muscle vet for administrative tasks inside the school as well it's a new thing we are working on so not just a repository of digital learn digital learning materials not just for teachers to teach our students to learn there but also uh let's let it be a repository for all the documents that school has and uh kind of uh i don't know events uh thing information that comes in the platform to be part of everyday school life of of students and teachers uh as well to of course makes to only to make easy things for them not to complicate things but of course it's a bit hard at the beginning of course empowering learners empowering workforce for the future right yeah absolutely empowering teachers and trainers so thank you very much appreciate it your time thank you