 Hi everyone, my name is Mia Mussolino and I'm with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. I want to start with a little bit of an overview on the Smithsonian for those of you who are not familiar with us. I think a lot of people are, but you never know. The Smithsonian is a vast complex of 19 museums, the National Zoo, and nine research centers. We are based in Washington, DC, but we have locations across the U.S. and in Panama. Our collection, this is where I have to read. Our collections include an insect zoo, an ocean hall, an elephant house, a portrait gallery, NASA's Discovery Space Shuttle, Dorothy's Ruby Slippers, Abraham Lincoln's Top Hat, Parliament Funkadelic's Mothership, and just about everything in between. In all, the Smithsonian has collected and is preserving over 154 million artifacts. So the Smithsonian and Moodle make a really good match, I think, that we found out, and I hope to show you some of that today. So first, a little Smithsonian history. I have worked at the Smithsonian for almost 14 years, and before I worked here there, I didn't even know much about the history of the Smithsonian, even though I lived in the Washington, DC area all my life and was going to museums from a very young age there. But the Smithsonian was formed in 1835 after wealthy British scientist James Smithson left his fortune to the United States of America to found at Washington under the name of the Smithsonian Institution an established for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. And you would not believe how many times I hear that increase and diffusion of knowledge. It's all about us. So back to Moodle. Oh, the James Smithson had a lot of scientific interests, coffee making, the chemistry of human tears, and a lot of mineralogy, so he had a very eclectic kind of interest in things. And also he had never visited the United States before he gave his bequest. Okay, so back to Smithsonian and Moodle. We implemented Moodle in 2012 under Moodle version 2.1 as its internal learning management system. We started with one course to train accountable property officers, pretty boring. Sorry to you, accountable property officers out there. And today our internal Moodle has about 265 courses and we train about 6,000 employees. We also use a customized version of the face to face plugin for about 17,000 annual classroom registrations. And I feel like this is a pretty big accomplishment because we've only been using it 2012-2013, so we've done a lot. Then 2015 came, so we had this internal Moodle. It was going pretty good and I started getting lots of people interested in training people who were affiliated with the Smithsonian or did work for us like volunteers but who didn't have Smithsonian network accounts. And I was turning them away, turning them away, turning them away. No, can't help you, besides I was too busy anyway. But finally we pretty much took the plunge because we were about to open the National Museum of African American History and Culture in September 2016. And they had a burning need to train over 200 volunteers and they had no building. They had a small presence, they had some office space, but until they had their building they really had nothing. But they really had a need to create a community of learners and they really didn't have anything as far as learning material, artifacts for their volunteers to get used to and study, and their workers really. But over time we implemented an external Moodle, which is outside the Smithsonian Firewall, for them. And then other museums asked us if they could train their volunteers, so we've kind of grown. We're now used, in addition to the internal Moodle, we have the external site, which is used by 10 Smithsonian museums slash units, 25 educators, and we have 50 courses around. There's about 6,800 learners. Okay, this is what the external, we call it the Smithsonian External Learning, so original. But anyway, this is what the site looks like. Not many people who are learners see this because they go right to their category, their museum site category, or they go right to a course with a course key. We make it pretty bland, pretty generic on purpose kind of because it's used by all the Smithsonian museums. We use email self-registration for volunteers who don't have a Smithsonian network account, and we use Active Directory authentication for employees and internal staff who build the courses. So next I'm going to show you how four Smithsonian organizations, units, museums, I don't really know what to call them, use the external Moodle to train their volunteers. And I really had a good time finding pictures of all our people doing things, especially our educators. So that's one thing that I really wanted to bring into this is all the educators that actually do the educating on the Moodle, the external Moodle. So the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, and their educators came to me and they said we really need this, and we don't have much time. So we, like I said, we implemented the Moodle, the external Moodle for them, and they basically trained over 200 volunteers in subjects ranging from African American History and Culture to visitor accessibility, safety topics, protection of minors, diversity training, pretty much just tons of different topics. They had a vision of building a virtual community of learners, and they needed to educate that community, as I said, rather quickly. So here are two courses, just the front pages of their courses. I know you started to kind of see the detail, but they do all their own stuff. They pick out the activities to use, and they use discussion forums a lot. In fact, just going along with the community of learners theme, before the museum even opened, we did a little count and we found that there were over 4,000 forum posts in their course discussion forums before the museum even opened. They use, like I said, discussion forums, quizzes, and SCORM lessons. Here is a SCORM lesson that incorporates live video of some educators outside the Smithsonian and curators who talk about the collection. These were very, very important because they did not get to hold these things. They did not get to see them in person before the museum opened. So it was very important to have these SCORM lessons to learn from before the building opened. Another way they learned before the building opened was pictures in the courses of interior of the building, exhibits being built, all kinds of things. Just things, sorry, that the visitor services volunteers and staff would need to know, like, what's the cafeteria going to look like? Where are we going to meet people when they come in the door? I mean, there's a million things that they didn't even know. So this was a very big resource for them. Here's an example of a quiz question that I actually helped them build, or got them going with this idea of taking the map of the mall, the national mall with all the museums, and kind of doing quiz questions that made them match up where each building was. So that was important to them to have quiz questions that were engaging and allowed detailed knowledge. Okay, the next organization is the Friends of the National Zoo. We also call them FONs, for obvious reasons. FONs handles all of the visitor services, volunteer management, that kind of thing for the National Zoo. And let's see, they started using Moodle in large part for safety training. That was their immediate need, but then they quickly went into animal care training online, like I said, facilitation and of course animal facts, that sort of thing, like what's in the exhibits, what does a Mongoose do or whatever. So here are two examples, and I always like to say with the FONs courses, I didn't pick the cutest pictures. I really didn't because I feel really jealous of them that they get all these cute animals to put in their courses. So anyway, I picked what is that thing, iguana or something. But here are two examples of FONs courses. They did have one course in 2016 that won an Innovation, Smithsonian Wide Innovation and Education Award. It's not either one of these, but it was really, it was difficult to represent it on one page, so I did not include that. Here are some examples of quiz questions. They really like to use a lot of graphics. You can see on the left side, there's some bird feet that are being matched. The learner has to match it to the species of bird. At the top, very hard to tell, but it is a beaver lodge, and learners would need to answer the question by matching up the parts of the beaver lodge to what they're called. Now this one on the bottom seems run-of-the-mill, except it's about something called Code Green. This was actually in their very first Moodle course, and their course was called Code Green for volunteers. It took me a while, but I finally said, what the heck is Code Green? Code Green means loose animal, so really important. The next museum, the National Museum of American History, they had the special challenge of having frequent exhibit changes. Exhibits that changed a lot, they have very interactive exhibits for kids and adults. And they needed to get out detailed facilitation instructions to their volunteers, who managed a lot of the, didn't manage, but they facilitated and worked with the visitors a lot. They also use a lot of forums for announcements, volunteer announcements. In fact, they have a course called Volunteer Announcements, where basically that's how they communicate with their volunteers. And here's a course, they have two inquiry-based learning spaces. One is called the Object Project, and one is called the Spark Lab. And here's a course on the Introduction to Object Project, and it consists mostly of lessons. So if I could put a plug for lessons in, they use a lot of lessons, we use a lot of lessons. And they basically take people, here's the next page, there's a lesson, take their volunteers as a walk-through through the different areas of an exhibit. They do their lessons with, they start with a PowerPoint, they save the PowerPoint as a series of like Ping or JPEG files. So that's how they build their lesson, because it's very key to them to get it up and running quickly. As I said, their exhibits might change every few months, so they can't really spend a lot of time on getting it up and running. And they also use videos, and they interspersed quiz questions in the lessons. The latest museum is the National Museum of Natural History. They almost didn't make it in here because they're so new to this, but they've been moving so fast that I said, why not? So I put them in. Their needs really are a lot of scientific facts. Their education specialists are really, really specialists in very specific areas, and so they wanted to build lessons that were very detailed. So they also use lessons and they use quizzes. They also use videos, photos, audio. And here are two lessons. They've done an introduction to the Sant Ocean Hall, which is their permanent ocean exhibit. And then they have a temporary exhibit up on narwhals, so that is their narwhal course. And here is a narwhal lesson, and you can see that they put in an audio of what a narwhal sounds like underwater. And when they make their lessons, they just use the HTML editor in the lesson activity. So in preparing for this presentation, I took a look at the external Moodle, and I just sat there with a pad of paper writing down all the topics that I could find. I didn't really get very far, didn't get through all the courses, but while you're taking a look at this slide, I just wanted to tell you how my work starts with one of the educators in the museums. I'll be sitting at my desk one day, and somebody will just call me out of the blue or email me and say, hey, I heard about this external Moodle for educating volunteers, and I really need that. And usually it's somebody I don't know, because there's 6,000 people there, 6,000 employees. And I say, okay, you know, and I tell them a little bit about it. I enroll them in my online, I've built an online self-paced course for new Moodle users. So I enroll them in that to get them started, and they pretty much just take off on their own. They are amazing. I just, part of the best thing about my job, I think, is just seeing what they come up with in their first course. So our educators really are just the real stars of this whole story. They are successful with Moodle, with minimal training. They develop creative, engaging, and effective content tailored to diverse audiences. And most of all, they are open to the risk of trying new things. I can't stress this enough. And after yesterday's talk about innovation, that's what I should have said, that really I think that's a meaning of innovation in a lot of ways. And they are not afraid of pretty much anything. So I thought, I really want to take these people with me to the conference, and I wrote to all of them, and I said, do you have anything you want to say about Moodle? You know, I want to put it in my presentation. So a couple of them read that as, not what I meant, they sent me audio clips. And I said, well, I didn't mean audio, but I'm thinking to myself, you know, they're so in the Moodle mode, you know, that's what they did. So I was like, but let's just do that. So I recorded four of their statements. Four out of, I probably got six or seven responses, so I just didn't have time to use them all. And so I'm going to play each one of them now. And they're just short 30 seconds or so, and then I'll wrap it up. Moodle has been the core of our volunteer training program. It has allowed us to change the way that we structure all of our volunteer trainings and helped us embrace the idea of flip classrooms, but for volunteer training. We've put all of our content on Moodle, including lectures, readings, videos, and everything else. Now we use our in-person time to focus on skill-building and applying content. It has, as we think, made our trainings more engaging and useful for volunteers because we can spend more time tackling real-life scenarios rather than spending time talking at them. As we were preparing to train over 200 volunteers, Moodle offered a number of solutions to help keep our students connected. One of my favorite features was the group discussion. It was a great way for the students to get to know each other and stay engaged in the weeks between in-person sessions. Moodle also provided our students with a good record of all the course announcements, the content covered in each session, and made it easy for students to catch up if they missed a session. Here at the National Museum of Natural History, we just used Moodle to pilot giving content training to over 70 new Narwhal and Ocean Hall volunteers. In not needing to cover this content in person, although we do review it just to check their knowledge, but it has saved us a lot of time so we could focus on other aspects of training that we could use in-person time for, such as facilitation. I trained volunteers to run inquiry-based programs in a hands-on learning space. Often in training, I found myself cramming as much material as possible into each and every two short in-person training session. By rushing to cover everything I wanted them to learn, I became an example for what not to do. I wasn't modeling inquiry-based learning. Moodle allows us to move the introductory material online in a participatory way, freeing up our in-person sessions for practice and discussion. Both training components become richer as a result. Right about now is where I tell you that when people find out I work at the Smithsonian, I always say something that goes something like this. I say, I don't do anything exciting. I just work with a lot of people who do. It's so true because you can just tell these people just get out there every day and work with the public and it's just amazing. They do amazing stuff. To wrap it up, I've been thinking about whether any learning management system could match what we've accomplished with Moodle, and I really don't think that it could. I think it's uniquely capable, I don't know, qualified to do what we've done. The fact that we were able to take an internal LMS installation of Moodle and without really skipping a beat, without really even thinking about it, and implement it for a whole different audience, for just endless numbers of subject areas, really speak to how adaptable and flexible Moodle is. Moodle allows our educators creativity, promotes collaboration, and most valuable of all, it facilitates communities of learners, which is really what they needed in the volunteer arena. Okay, I can get to my note here. Okay. So thinking about James Smithson and what his goal was in making his bequest for the increase in diffusion of knowledge, it really has struck me in putting together this presentation that that's really what Moodle is all about, too. So thanks for listening. Does anyone have any questions? We do use badges. I encourage people to use badges. It's usually, I mean, I'll just be honest, it's usually something that they think of at the end, and also they think about their audience. Some volunteer communities might think it's great, and I don't know whether it's like an age thing, or I'm not really sure what, but I would say they're used maybe in 20 or 30% of the courses. Yeah. So usually based on a whole course. But we do have a new user of the external Moodle. The Smithsonian Associates is giving badges actually for people who, in Moodle, who attend X number of programs in a certain area. They might get the archaeology badge, or the brain science badge, or something like that. So that's one way that they're using them. Okay, well, thanks.