 Sorry, short person, just the microphone. If you're not familiar with this format, the slides will automatically move forward, so hopefully I keep up with them and not ramble on too much. My name's Margaret, but please call me Meg, everybody else does. And I'd just like to share some of our experiences with the recent round of upgrades we've been running at Navitas. And what we've gone through with that process and some tips going forward to help make the process smoother next time. I'm a learning technologist for Navitas. Navitas is a global private education company. We have somewhere over 80,000 students in about 31 countries. As a learning technologist my job is to be the bridge between IT and the colleges themselves helping roll out all this new technology, making sure it goes smoothly, works the way they want it. We know that upgrades are absolutely vital, otherwise you're going to fall behind both technologically and pedagogically. Yet they do strike fear into the hearts of people because it's something new, it's a time-consuming process and often you don't know what's going to be around the corner. At Navitas we're in the middle of upgrading about 40 separate sites, some of them were quite old and we're trying to bring them onto a standardised version of Moodle across the company. It's a bit like herding cats. Everybody wants to be in their own direction a little bit. So we've had some real experience in actually dealing with colleges on a very personal level about how this goes. You're going to face resistance when you upgrade. People don't like change. You're going to hear things like, I don't want to redo my content, or do I have to relearn how to do something? I already know how to do it, why are we doing this? You need to have strategies that are going to help you with that process. You have to be aware that as part of that resistance people are going to put up barriers to it. They're going to say, I don't have time for this or this is too complicated or just not want to deal with you at all as part of that upgrade process. Being aware that those barriers are going up is going to help you with it. You can't just send out the email because you're guilty of deleting the email from the CEO. I did last week. They're going to say, I didn't get it, went to junk mail, don't know anything about it. You skim over it. That's how it works unfortunately with that. So you need to do something a bit more in depth with your staff for it. Case in point recently Moodle renamed news forums announcements. You're probably going to get more teachers say, where's my news forum gone? It's disappeared. Then you're going to get them asking, how do I use competencies? I'd really like to use competencies now. That's what they're going to notice. That's going to be your annoying support call at the end of the day. We need to avoid all those hidden traps. From an IT side we're probably thinking of avoiding them on the technical end. Is the server going to work properly? Is everyone going to have access? Are the roles going to change? But there are support calls that you can avoid at the start by having a good plan in place with your staff. So I'd just like to quickly run through seven ideas that have come out of that experience of upgrading sites to help make that process easier. They might take a bit of planning and time on your part, but for your staff, for your teachers, they're going to make it easier in the long run. So the first of these is time and there's two aspects to this. Firstly, when you're timing your upgrade we had a lot of pushback because we can't do it orientation week. That's the worst week of the year. You can't do it orientation week, which we thought would be good because it's the week before classes start. So it didn't work. So you need to talk to your staff and make sure it's time to suit them. While we're talking about time, think about time on the long scale as well. What is your long term plan? Are you going to do an upgrade every November, every year? Are you going to upgrade every time there's a new Moodle release? Are you going to stick with the long term support releases? Just let them know when they can expect upgrades to be happening in the future. Also, make sure you know what's new in each release as well, so that you can have a list that I've done. Here's all the wonderful new features you're going to be able to play with. Drag and drop questions were a great example for us. They went down really, really well. Having been able to tell teachers, hey, here's this new feature you can use in your quizzes helped make people a little more excited about the process. While you're at it, check out all the wonderful new plugins that are out there or perhaps look at some new LTI technologies. See, there's something else you can put into your Moodle site using Moodle as your starting point so that it can make it a better educational tool. An example, if you haven't checked out H5P, go there now. It is awesome. You've also got to think about your comms plan. Not just what you're saying and when, but who you're saying it to. You're going to have to make sure that you're giving plenty of advance notice, but a lot of your stuff aren't technical people, so don't make your notifications too technical. And coming back to the point about the long term plan, you need to be transparent about your plans. Let them know that you're working on this or that you're we've had a bit of a glitch, but we're working on it or that we're on testing phase or we're actually going to get something nice and brand new for you. The clearer you are the less scared people are going to be about this new technology. You're going to have people in your organisation who jump on technology the moment it's released. First person to get the fit bit. Take advantage of these people. Get them involved in your testing process. If you have a test site, perhaps get them into a Sandpick course early so they can play with all the wonderful new features that you're giving them. They'll help you sell it. And on the idea of selling demonstrate what's new. Show it off. We have a course called Instamoodle, where we just show what's available now. And all any teacher can log in and have a look at it. Let them see. If you don't have a separate environment, you can play with for that. Look at the Moodle cloud. And while you're at it, don't forget about your students. They need to know as well. You don't let your students know. They're going to annoy your teachers and your teachers are going to get annoyed at you. So make sure your students know what's coming up and if there's any key differences in the interface that they might need to know about as well. So ultimately upgrades are a vital part of what we're doing. We have to keep up with it. We have to keep moving forward with technology. They don't have to be scary. Take the time, put in some thought and you can make sure that it goes smoothly not just for you but for your staff as well. And they'll be able to use Moodle much more in depth. So I hope these ideas can be of use to you. As I said, these are things that, not all of them, we got right the first time round. We're working on getting them right the second time round. So I hope that you can use some of these ideas with your upgrades. Thank you very much. Questions? Taking questions? Yep. I'm not against emails but don't rely on it. As the only thing, we had some posters that we had developed that the colleges could put up around their staff rooms. We also suggested that if they do perhaps there might be some weekly notices that go out or something like that. So make it a part of that as well. The key with emails is not to bombard people. Don't have 20 million emails about this because that'll get ignored as well. So just make sure that they're carefully considered as to is it too much or could we put this as part of something else? Thank you Meg.