 Well good afternoon. I hope everyone can hear me well and I hope this goes well. It's very hard without any feedback so bear with me. So my name is Emma Richardson and I'm coming to you from Colorado in the United States where it is approximately 5 a.m. in the morning and I believe it's about 5 30 in the afternoon there. So hopefully you've all had a great day. I think maybe this was your first day of the moot but I may be wrong on that but I hope it's been going well for you and so I'm here to talk to you about the Moodle Users Association and normally I would ask how many people are from the Moodle Users Association but I can't see or hear you so I'm just going to talk and then at the end what we'll do is if anyone has questions if you can just send them up to one of the people in the room and we'll use the chat to get them to me and I'll answer them all at the end. So right now I'm kind of stuck in my powerpoint and that's all I can see so I'm just going to keep going until I get through it so here we go. So what is the Users Association? The Moodle Users Association was created about three years ago and it's basically an association of just Moodle Users so you have to be a user of Moodle to join the association. It is not Moodle it's a separate entity and it's we've got our own governing board it's run by a committee of volunteers there's 10 of us we get elected in every year currently I'm the chair of the committee but we have a great committee of people this year we have 10 very very active members and we just got voted in a couple of months ago and I've kind of put the committee to task this year and they're really coming through so I'm really excited about what's happening with the association and we have our own rules and procedures and these can all be found on our website our website is at MoodleAssociation.org and I really encourage everyone to go look at the website and look around we are in the middle of revamping it so within about a month I hope to have kind of a whole new look to it but all the basic information is there. So when we talk about what we do it basically comes to that we have some power to influence Moodle development and so there's three tracks where you can help change things in Moodle. The first thing is if you find a problem or you have a feature request you can go to the Moodle tracker and the Moodle tracker is great they're actually very responsive I know Martin has a whole new team there now and they're really trying to go through all the tracker issues which is excellent and so that is one way just through the general Moodle progress of making changes in Moodle and you can propose code there if you're a code writer you can actually implement solutions right in the tracker right there and get them incorporated. The other track is if you're a Moodle partner and so that way you get to help Moodle by it's kind of a two-way relationship you get to use Moodle's name you help support Moodle financially and through that there's also some features and stuff that you can influence over bringing into Moodle that way and then the third way which is this new way is the Moodle users association and what we do is we develop projects and our Moodle users or our members are able to submit projects which are just like ideas that they want to go into Moodle and so it can be anything from something really little to something really huge and so we have two cycles a year each cycle run six months and so during the beginning of that cycle our members come in and they propose their projects and they say this is what we want to see change in Moodle we would love this feature or this needs fixing and so they come in and they propose projects and then our members vote on them and we say which is the best of these projects and the first time we vote we just kind of cut it down to the top 10 and then those top 10 we kind of try and develop as much as we can so we're really ready for Moodle HQ to take a look at them and go yes this is a you know this is a good project we can do it and here's a rough estimate of how much it's going to cost to do that and then once Moodle HQ's come back with their feedback and their estimates we vote again and that top project if we have enough money then gets pushed over to Moodle and gets implemented into Moodle core and so it's a it's an exciting process because it's a way that an individual member can make a huge change or a you know a larger university or something can also have quite a bit of influence so the way our membership works is we have different levels of membership we have an individual member which is it's actually very cheap to join it's a hundred US or sorry Australian dollars annually and then we have different levels for institutions to join going up to our gold level which is 10 000 Australian dollars a year and each dollar represents a vote so while you can have a great effect as an individual member with your hundred votes probably the biggest effect you're going to have is maybe getting a project proposed and voted on by other people because obviously your hundred votes won't have as much as an institution's votes but you still have the equal right to put in a project which is wonderful so through this whole process it's really just a group of people coming together so we support the growth of Moodle by taking all those membership fees and putting them into new ideas and new projects and we become a united voice for the community out there so not only are we driving that direction for development but we're actually providing the resources to turn those ideas into actual Moodle features and reality so it's kind of an exciting it's almost like crowdfunding um but then you get to decide which project we crowdfund so it's a really neat way to support Moodle and a lot of people just come in because they want to give a little bit back to Moodle and they understand that this money is all going directly back to HQ for core features so a few projects that we've already released the very first project that the Moodle users association came up with was the recycle bin and this is oh invaluable I use this all the time because I'm one of those people that deletes things so we now have the recycle bin and that came from the users association just recently in 3.3 we rewrote the whole dashboard and that was hopefully you guys are on 3.3 and you're really enjoying that new look of the dashboard so it's got a nice completion editor you can look at your dashboard and kind of see your progress in each course what is wonderful about this project was it was suggested by just an individual user member so for her you know little hundred dollars um 100 Australian dollars that she paid for her membership she was able to have a huge effect on Moodle overall because dashboard is one of those major pages um in there and in 3.4 um I don't know how many are on 3.4 I know I'm in the process of upgrading my sites um the calendar um went through um a big rewrite and so what's great about that is we now have drag and drop in the calendar so your events you can drag them from one date to another and it will actually update the date in the corresponding activity too and I think the majority of the core activities are now compatible with the new calendar drag and drop maybe not quite all but I know that um we've got choice assignment I'm not sure if quiz got um bought up but if not it's I believe it's on the list to get done soon and maybe we'll ask the Moodle team about that um so that's really been um a great project too and um just a new look too for the calendar so um that's coming in currently we're working on improved tagging for the question bank um and our next project um we believe will um allow us to create quizzes um by tag um pull random questions from a category and then further filter it down to a tag so this is going to give us a lot greater control over selection of quiz questions um and we think that's going to be a great improvement on the quiz bank and we're currently in the process of voting on the next project um and so we've always got a couple of things in the works and in January we start a whole new round and we'll start um looking for suggestions and project proposals again so if you haven't joined already now is a great time to join um because you can actually get in on that next round in January and then if you have a great idea for Moodle you can get in there and get that submitted right away um we have a lot of current goals with our new team so we've really been working on improving communications with members um our last chair came up with a great um idea to have monthly town hall meetings and we do that um so twice a month we meet and um we started off just kind of with open discussion discussing what people wanted to see change with the association um and that's where the improved communications came from um now our members have asked that we kind of have some topics to talk about so we're now picking a topic for each town hall meeting um this last month we discussed the grade book and we had some really great discussion about the grade book and we had some great book people there that joined us um and so we do this on the um first and second Tuesday of every month and um the meetings are on the calendar on the website they're also open to everyone now so we open them up they're not just for members so we invite anyone to come join us so if you even just want to come find out a little bit more about us the town hall meetings so a great great place to do that um we continue to collaborate with HQ that's our primary focus um and HQ are a great bunch to collaborate with so um as I mentioned we're revising our website um I believe we're going to switch to a different to bring it up to date and switch over to the boost theme here shortly and so we have some work going on in the background just to make sure everything um is ready to do that so um so that'll be exciting we're trying to make it a little bit user-friendly so um some of our committee members are working on um a frequently asked questions glossary um so we can get some you know questions answered quickly for those people that come in um we also have done a lot with our times and we have some countdown timers to help people not miss the end of the vote and stuff like that so we've been working on that a lot and then of course our main goal is to fund more projects and um obviously we can't do that without people like you joining so we really hope that um you will come and join us in this great um this great overall project of helping to fund Moodle and helping to bring some great changes to Moodle as well so I went through that kind of fast because it's really hard to see when I can't see anyone um but I would really kind of like to throw it out um to questions and see um what questions are out there and hopefully Francis will type those in and I'm going to stop sharing just so that I can um see the chat here uh well thank you Emma um does anyone have any questions for Emma no okay um that's all right if you have any questions you can always get in contact with them um through the MUA website and they'll be able to be in contact with you then I'll pass on to Tom now well if there's no questions I will say thank you and please visit the website um please feel free to um Francis maybe give out the my email if anyone has questions afterwards um I'm more than happy to answer emails and stuff so and I hope everyone enjoys their evening