 Hello everyone, and welcome in today's webinar, which is the second webinar about Moodlenet. And today we are going to see how Moodlenet has evolved and how we can use right now Moodlenet. I am Anna Kassa, and I am educator at Varsho. And Paul Holson is with me today. He's the project manager of Moodlenet. And he's going to tell us all the news about the Moodlenet project. So Paul, the floor is yours. Thank you, Anna. So before I share my screen, just wanted to say the real purpose of today was to let Anna show you how to use Moodlenet with Moodle LMS, and we'll come back to that after I've given a few updates on the system and what we've been working on. And after that, I'm going to tell you essentially what's going to happen this year with Moodlenet as well. So I'm just going to share my screen so you can see it in action. Go. Firstly, if you attended the first webinar, you'll already know what Moodlenet is, but it is our ecosystem for sharing educational resources. It was created because of UNESCO Sustainable Development goal for, which is about quality education for everybody. And it's there right now, Moodlenet. You can go there. You can use it without an account to find resources and to use them. If you'd like to do a bit more and you'd like to give back to the education community, which is a big part of Moodlenet, you would need to create your own account and validate that. It's a very simple two-step process. What you can see on my screen there is the landing page that you would see if you visited right now. I'm not logged in. I'm an anonymous user. And I just wanted to show you a few things that have changed. The last webinar, we went through the presentation of resources. Now, the core of the resources themselves haven't changed. So you can still find via keywords, via metadata and things like that. And you can order by recency or popularity. But we have been doing a bit of work on making this a bit more presentable and also a bit more usable to reward the authors and the content resources in the system that people are really liking. So you'll notice on the front page here, it's a bit more graphical. We've been working on a better user experience with graphics because there were a lot of people that we felt didn't add graphics to their resources. So we've tried to automate this a little bit now. So the first thing that's changed here is you'll notice on the front page, we have featured resources, we have featured collections and we have featured authors now. And these are curated by us, generally by Anna and I, who go through the resources and we pick the best ones out. So I'm often asked, how do we get featured? How do we get our resources featured? Our collections featured. Well, have good educational resources for one, but also create all of the data around this, all of the metadata to allow it to be searched easily and have some good images to make it visually appealing as well. You'll notice if you go and look at any of these resources, they are generally nice resources and they have everything we need to find them easily. And that's why they've been featured on the site. So that was the first thing that's changed. I did want to show a little bit about the things that have changed. There are very small details here. So if I was to take a resource here, you can see there's a resource for Moodle Guide in German there. And you can see now that before, we used to have a very complicated file type comment on this resource and it wasn't very clear what that file was for. And you'll see now they're much clearer. So top left-hand resource, you'll see this is a Moodle file, which essentially means that if you were to use this resource and you couldn't use send it to Moodle, I'm not going to do that because this is what Anna's going to show you shortly. You will see how this integrates straight into Moodle LFS this resource. So that's much clearer to people. You can see that's a PDF, that's an XML file, that's a Moodle file, that's a webpage and so on. And that's all done automatically now in the system. When you upload a resource, it will try and judge what that is and will label it appropriately as well. The second thing we've done is, we have some great authors that do lots and lots of resources, but when you're doing lots of resources, you don't necessarily have time to concentrate on creating lots of graphics. So we were finding that people's resources were good, great education resources, but when you looked at them, they didn't have any graphics attached to them. So we wanted to make that an easier process. So I'm going to show you something now that we did. I'm just going to have to log into the system, do this on one of my own resources. So if I just log in and then I have a look at the resources that I have on MoodleNet for sharing, just going to take an example there of data modeling and optimization exercise that I shared back when I was a teacher back many years ago. It's a PDF file and you may upload something with some metadata and descriptions, but actually you don't have a graphic for here. And often that's what attracts people to a resource and say that's the most graphics visually appealing. So in the system, what we've done now is we've gone to the open repository of Unsplash and you can upload a graphic if you wish. If you're happy to do that, that's great and it's what we want. And if you don't, you can now say, well, I want to see what data images are available on Unsplash and you can put them straight into your resource. And you can do that from step one so that it's immediately visually appealing and you don't have to concentrate on that. Then you can get things uploaded more quickly. So that was quite a nice feature. Something else that's happened since the last time was that as we get more and more resources we're obviously getting inevitably inappropriate content, commercial content, people try to sell things on the system. So we were asked to create a way of stopping this almost completely. Now we didn't want an amazing manual process with lots of moderators sitting there moderating content. So how could we do this with the community and how can we do it with the software? Well, you will notice if you have joined MoodleNet, your resources that you add don't actually become visible until you are approved for publication. And there are some things around that you have to do. Firstly, you have to add at least five good educational resources to your profile. You'll notice here I've got more than five. When you add at least five, a little button appears on your profile here which says request approval. You request approval and that comes to us to then have a look from a moderation point of view. Are these good educational resources or are they spam or are they inappropriate? If they're just a little bit awful when you need some advice you probably get a message from us saying, oh, please add some metadata to make this better and then reapply for approval. If it's all good, we will approve you immediately. And as soon as we approve you, your resources are then visible to the world on MoodleNet. And of course, after that, we have a reporting mechanism. So anyone at any point on these resources can actually report this on the screen as well. And then that allows us to go and have a look. We do look at things like licensing as well just so you know that we might find a fantastic educational resource. However, we do have to be very careful that these licenses are filled in accurately. So if you're posting an article, for example, that has a copyright symbol on from another author, yet you've listed it as open, we may have a problem with that moderation because we want to try and ensure quality here and academic quality. Apart from that, there's the resource. You can download it, which allows you to use it with any system, any LMS or on its own. MoodleNet isn't just about using Moodle LMS, although it obviously feeds Moodle LMS directly. But we do want to make it clear that, you know, this is a standalone system. So that's the resources. You'll also find here on the homepage, featured collections. These are the curated collections. What we want to see is people who are experts in their field, in subject matter experts, creating a collection and then curating really good resources for themselves or from other people. And essentially, if you were to go into a collection, you will find that somebody has done either their own resource or I'm just going to search one because I know that I do one. For example, there's one there on NASA and these are all curated from other sources. And essentially that allows somebody to follow my collection on NASA and find resources from me and from others all in one place. So that's the curation side of MoodleNet. Finally, look at the profile for people. Well, we have a profile here who talks about NASA as well. I'm not going to look at that, but I'm actually going to go to one of our featured on North as I say, well, okay, we have Eduardo here who's on the call sometimes. So Eduardo has done collections and courses. Now, if I follow Eduardo, obviously I get then to see his profile and the things I follow. So we end up creating a network of educators, special interests, collections and resources within your profile. And you can see them all from your profile and you can see what you're following here. So you can see the things I'm following and there's Anna, if you want to take a look at Anna's resources as well, they're right there. The collections I'm following, but also we can follow subjects. So we use, I said, classifications, they aren't perfectly the same as I sort of list because we tried to humanize them a little bit to remove duplication, making it clearer for people to understand. However, if I am a follower of music and following arts, I can follow that as a subject and that then goes across resources, across profiles and across everything just on that subject. So you can follow your subject area. Now, the beauty with all of this, of course, is that you can download mode and let yourself it's available free of source. You can install it yourself, you can use it for yourself, your institution at any level and you can develop it, you can adapt it, you can give back, you can also contribute back to us so that we may include your development in any future developments as well. I'm not going to really touch on you, because I think Anna's demo will really show you how this works properly. So Anna, I'll hand over to you, please do your demo and I'll come back and I'll talk a little bit about the future and where it's going this year. Thank you, Paul. I'm saying again my screen. And now we're going to see how MoodNet works from the teacher's perspective. So here I am in my bright new MoodForce site and all I'm gonna do is to login. And I'll pretend that I'm a primary school teacher and I've been entitled to create quickly a course about Olympic Games and about the history because we're gonna have some guests in our schools. So I have to do something quickly and prepare learners to participate in such a discussion. So what I have to do is first of all, set up a course as usual going to manage course. And in fact, there is already Sports History and Mythology category and I'm gonna create a course in this category. So my course will be about the Olympic Games and the Olympians. So I want to quickly set up something like that because tomorrow we have this meeting with a guest and we need to prepare our learners. And I'm not making any change because before I start thinking about the resources that I need to create, I'm going to quickly check what already exists and if there is something that I can use for Moodlet. So I'm turning on the edit mode and I'm coming to the other resource and activity or resource here instead of selecting any of these resources, we'll click down this link and we'll browse for content on Moodlet. And here I am, my site is already connected with Moodlet Central and by default, all Moodlet version four is Moodlet is enabled. So I'm looking for only pick something. So I have found three resources and like me, all three resources are modified. So let's take a look. What's this of Gods of Olibus? So it's a gamified unit of the 12 Gods of Olibus, Greek mythology, that's interesting. And this is a Moodlet backup file using only Moodlet core modules. This is also very convenient. I can see the license here. So this one is creative commons attribution, which means that I can use it and I can also adapt it as long as I mentioned the original source. It is a game, that's very interesting for my case and it is for primary education. And the language is in English which fits perfectly to my needs. But let's take a look, what were the other resources? The Olympic game resources is about the summer and winter Olympic games. Well, it doesn't seem very relevant to what I want but it might give me some introductory stuff. So I think I will take a look at it. It's also creative commons attribution and non-commercial which is fine by me because I'm not intent to sell the course. And it's for lower secondary education. This also good and languages is in English. And I think I like this, the first two resources. What about the last one? It says God of Olives again with stars. So it's again the 12 Gods of Olives and Greek mythology. But it says that this backup file uses model community plugin stars. I don't have stars in my own network, in my own site right now. So I don't think I'm gonna use this one going back. And I think I'm gonna start with Gods of Olives. Let's see, I will just click send to model and it automatically takes my model URL and I will send it. So you are about to import the content Gods of Olives file into the course Olympics and the Olympians. Are you sure you want to continue? And yes, I want to. So we are coming back to the typical model course restore process. All I'm gonna do is to continue. And I want this course to be restored into the current course I have already set up. Clicking next, next. And perform restore. So from moodlet, I cannot at the moment see the exact content of the course, but I can easily upload it. And here is the course. There is some introduction for the teachers. And here is meet the Olympians click image to start. And if I click, I can see the whole content and introduction and some challenges. And I can see, I can go through the resource in detail. I need to do this actually and understand how it works. And if it needs, if it meets my needs, I won't go into detail right now, but it seems to be okay for me. This is a game and it contains three stealth activities. I think I can use it and because it's a bit gamified, I think my learners will appreciate it. But I want to take another look into the other resource about the Olympic Games. And I'm going to upload that course as well. Have to find it again. It was this one. And I'm going to repeat the process, sending to moodle and confirm that I want to restore it because I want to see what is inside. This one, I don't want to merge the two backup files. I want to see the two courses, the two resources found in moodle.net as a standalone activities. And then I will see what I'm going to use from each one of them. So I'm going to restore it as a new course in the same category and continuing. There is nothing that I need to change because all I want to do at the moment is that see what really exists in this file. And here I have a very interesting course. So I have some instruction again. I have basic information, introduction, resources about the ceremonies and symbols of the Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee, how athletes take part, the Ascent Olympic Games. This is a very interesting resource for my case. I don't care much about the modern summer and winter games or politics or the Olympic Games today. So word lists can be, it's a glossary, it can be useful. And also there are some videos inside about the history of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Games history and symbols. These are interesting and several quizzes. Now, I think from this course, for my needs, I can use the first gamified course and make a selection of some pages from here and merge these together so I can create the course that I need. And this is so, so simple because I will directly go to the first course. I will, the course in my case is blended so I don't need the announcements. I don't need the activity context and all I need is to import some resources from the other course. So from the Olympic Games, I'll come to select some of the resources. I don't want them, all of them. I don't want these instructions. I need the introduction, the sermons and symbols, the Ascent Olympic Games of course and nothing else I think from the resources here. Of the word list, the glossary is also interesting and the videos. So clicking next, perform import, continue. And after the original content I had, I have the videos and also at the bottom of the section, I have the imported pages and pages and glossary. Now all I need to do is a little bit of organizing. Things, for example, I will take the introduction up to the general section. I will add a second topic, the Olympics and I will add the information about the Olympics here and the Ascent Games and the word list and also the videos are the same. So quickly, just drag and drop and I think I have the course I need. So I will just remove whatever is not needed, the empty topics here and I can turn editing mode off so we can have a clear view of the course. I have an introduction which is about the Olympic Games and it's also a reference to the Ascent Olympic Games. And then I have a word list that with entries that I need to restore from the other course. And I have information about the Ascent Olympic Games and the ceremonies, the history of the Olympic Games, which is a video and another video also for the Games. And then people, my students, can take this lesson which has the gamification which is a gamification around Olympians. And so I think I'm ready for two more meetings and the event in my school. This is the idea, obviously this scenario is ideal and is prescribed indeed. But this is the idea of how movement is going to be used by educators all over the world. We are still not there because we need very good resources but we can only have very good resources if we start selling very good resources. So we have to cultivate this and we are going to slowly cultivate this idea that I have something good and I can share it with the others as long as copyright is not copyright restricted. And yeah, get used to use MoodleNet. That's my point here. So Paul, would you like to do the wrap up? What's the future for MoodleNet? Absolutely, thank you Anna for that demo. It's very useful. Nice to see it working so nicely and easily between the systems, which is obviously our aim. I'll talk about what's coming this year in MoodleNet. There are three things that we're working on and they are aiming to get to stage one of their development this year. First one is federated content. Now, we get a lot of feedback to say, I have a project I would like to install MoodleNet for my institution, my government, my myself. How do I share that content without then uploading it all to MoodleNet as well? Well, that's the next thing we're working on is an ability for you to install MoodleNet yourself, put your content on it and that's obviously then locked to whoever you say is going to be able to use it. But you're able to click a little thing that says federate this content. That will allow all of the metadata, not the content itself, but all of the metadata to exchange with Moodle.Net. So if anyone goes to Moodle.Net searches for content, they will find not only the things on MoodleNet, but the things on your MoodleNet as well. And then can be used in exactly the same way sent to Moodle.download at collection, just like any other resource can. And also vice versa. So if someone comes to your MoodleNet and looks for something and you don't have that content, it will try and find it from MoodleNet. Now imagine that happening with hundreds of thousands of different MoodleNet installations and how that can share those resources across a huge array of Moodles. And I should say again, there are around 40 million registered Moodle courses and all of that content would be within two or three clicks, as you've just seen from Anna, into a Moodle course somewhere. And that's one of the big things we're going to be working on this year. Nextly, that's the two words, I apologize. Next, we want to make things easier to find. MoodleNet at the moment is quite easy to find things. It's a keyword search and you can look through resources and collections, subjects and people who've matched those keywords. And you can then sort those via relevance, recency or popularity. Now, relevance is basically keywords, recency, date, popularity, the number of kudos, number of likes that that resource has acquired on the system so you can like resources and collections and they will then rise to the top of the search results and they are liked. However, we do want to filter these on any metadata. Now, the reason that isn't there already is that a lot of people have wanted different set of metadata. So the metadata that we've added to resources might not be the metadata that your project requires. So we're making finding easy includes us giving you a way of developing those standards yourself and being able to add them to the system. So that's something else we're going to add hopefully this year in terms of doing that along with a gamification system which allows much more than just liking. So we will find that if you are adding a lot of very good resources and they're getting likes, well, actually you should be rewarded on the system to make your resources rise to the top of search engine by achievements, badges, lots of different ways, lots of different mechanisms. So we're looking at that this year as well. And finally, MoodleLMS itself is obviously important. We are saying you can use MoodleNet standalone and of course you can but we are going to improve that integration much, much better than it is now. So at the moment it's MoodleNet to MoodleLMS. We would like to give you the opportunity to say we want to share our MoodleLMS to MoodleNet. So you could share an activity, you could share a course, you could share anything that a file can come out of Moodle, you could share it immediately back to MoodleNet. And also when you're into Moodle, at the moment you have to go to MoodleNet outside, find your resource and then send it back. Well, we feel that should all happen within MoodleLMS as well. So we're going to try and embed MoodleNet into LMS even though it's not a part of it, we're going to write integration so that it's much more seamless. So you can search within your Moodle course and MoodleNet will be there and it will find it, put it on your page from there as well. Those are the big three, there are lots more. If you go and look at our track, loads of feature requests and we will be announcing soon that we have an extensibility platform as well so that external people can write their own edits. For example, we use our own authentication method in MoodleNet. At the moment you have to register on MoodleNet. We realize that projects that often need their own way of authentication because they use Google sign-on or LDAP or external databases for sign-on and we want people to be able to write their own. We will try and write them as well so we're a limited small team. We can't write everything. So we're going to give a platform where people can do that and then contribute that back to the community as a package to MoodleNet that we can then send out with anyone else who installs MoodleNet, that's the idea. So that's where we're going. So thanks Anna, that was really useful. If you've got any questions, we're here. Join us in the communities. This is what we're looking for. We want you to use MoodleNet as a free service. Contribute, put on your educational resources for others. Use the licensing to, you can lock it down so it's not commercial if that's something that bothers you but we're finding that if it's completely open it's getting used more and remember it's always linked back to your profile. So there's everything there for you to grow your reputation as an educator. Coming to the discussions, the links are at the bottom of the page. I'm going to let the tracker the discussion so you can talk to us directly. We need to know what you think of it and how we can improve it again. If you do have a very large project that you're working on, we will happily help you go forward with MoodleNet on that project. We can only take a limited number of what we're very happy to say. Well, if you've got a hundred thousand resources that you need to get in somehow to MoodleNet, then please contact us and we'll see if we can help you do that on your own server. And any funding or development that you can do externally is great. As I said, it's free and open source just like MoodleLMS and will remain so. And give back to the education community. So thank you from us, Anna. I don't know if you want to say anything else but any questions, please ask. Beth says that for now do you need to connect with others so they can see your content or once I publish some resources anyone with a MoodleNet account can see them. Okay, thanks, good question. If you're on Moodle.net and you are approved for publication so you pass that check, it's totally open. So anyone in the world can see your resources. Thank you, Agriu. Vasili is asking, are you planning to implement the transfer for H5P files? Yes, we are. We're looking at every MIME type and HP5 is obviously very important standard right now. So yes, we're going to improve that. Probably when we improve the MoodleLMS integration we'll look at that at the same time. Thank you. Let me see another comment. Chris says that looking fantastic, very slick, great work everyone. Thank you, Chris, for your kind words. I hope you will get involved. Mary is asking, when you have more languages will you be able to filter resources by language? Absolutely, because it is a piece of metadata so it will be a simple language filter on the side. However, I did have this issue with someone I was demoing with too recently where they said you have no resources in my language and I said have you tried searching in your language and immediately found all of the resources. So it does work already, it's just not there as a filter. Exactly, I'm often typing in Greek alphabet and I can get the Greek resources. So it's straightforward at the moment. But yes, we will improve the searching filters as well. Okay, I don't see any other comments. Alex says, would it be possible to have one account for both Moodle and MoodleNet? So I'm assuming this means a single sign-off. So you have one account signed onto both systems. That's a contribution we need somebody to do. Yes, it's something that we talked about quite recently. So yes, absolutely. But a single sign-off, there are so many options that we are really waiting to see which one is the most useful to everybody. Yes. Beth is asking, is there a way to network among the MoodleNet users? So right now, the only feature we have which allows you to get involved with those messaging function within MoodleNet is a very private. So there's no personal information released, nothing against GDPR. In the, I talked about gamification, we're looking at, can we discuss the resources? Can we allow people to post on each other's lines, create the communities around collections, things like that. And that's when we will look at that. How about right now? Oh, Emil says that we are at Microsoft 365 Stop and the Microsoft login works great as we have SSO with our Moodle Instances on campus. So thanks, easy for me to recommend my colleagues. Thank you, Emily, for your comment. Can I just add that there is something that says quite important that, if you're using Moodle LMS and you are using single sign-on, you don't have to log into Moodle.net to use the resources. You can just search it anyway. The only reason for you to have a Moodle.net account is if you want to post anything, like anything, bookmark anything. Apart from that, the resources are open, you don't have to look at. I think we are good to move on and drop up this event. If you have enjoyed this session and Moodle Academy, you may consider contribute and get involved into its development. So being in the Academy, you can be an active member. You can suggest topics, what would you like us to see covering in the future. And you can also join the Get Involved course and make your own suggestions and ask the subjects of your interest. You can vote for subjects that have been already suggested by others. And you can also contribute to webinars if you have particular skills. And if you are an expert on a subject and you have something interesting to say, please do let us know. Note that the webinar presenters will gain a presenters' badge from the Academy. And you can also contribute to courses by setting your expertise and contributing to the development of the courses. And this way you may gain a course builder badge. Note that you can also contribute in the Academy by offering translations by translating the existing material. And of course you're gonna get a translator's badge. Of course it will be highly appreciated if you can help us spread the word about Moodle Academy and the MEC. You can tell your friends and your colleagues about the courses offered and lead to badges. Don't forget to take the algorithm for the MEC. MEC is the Moodle Educator Certification. And if you are ready, you can contact the Certified Service Providers to support you through the certification process. Thank you so much for being here today.