 So, at the Moodle Moot, who knows what the most valuable thing about the Moodle Moot is? I think that presentations are a really great way to share knowledge, but at the end of the day what's really important is networking and communicating with each other. So if you ever want to come up and speak to me about any of the things I've talked about, please feel free, I'll be at the VR booth. Also, if you're into Twitter, take some photos, hashtag MootAU17, and we can all follow each other because we're all interested in LTI, or saving the world, one of the two, or maybe both. So I've chosen an ambitious title, I'm sure, how LTI can solve the world's toughest problems. But I think that the potential in this tool is really great, and maybe you've heard of it before, maybe you haven't, I'm not sure if you've used it before, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to show you the amazing potential that it has. And as we build up the community surrounding LTI and LTI and Moodle, I think that there will be some great benefits. So in the world right now, there's a lot of problems. There's things like fires, natural disasters, poverty, overpopulation. These are huge problems that we need to be thinking about and solving. Now, we're all teachers, or we're all admins at institutions. Maybe we can't directly be helping with these. But I'd like to say that we already are. So because we're contributing to education, we are the people preparing the people who are going to be solving these problems. And as the saying goes, you can either give a man a fish or teach him how to fish, and I think that it's more important that we are here doing the things that we're doing to the best of our ability so that we can prepare the next generation. So how does LTI fit into this? Well, a lot of you came to my virtual reality presentation and it was kind of, it had an anticlimactic ending in that I revealed that it was not available on the Plugins DB and it was quite difficult to install and start using. Now, I'll take responsibility for that. That was my fault, but it was showing a very real potential of how education might be reshaped in the future and the new tools that are coming up. You may have also seen a lot of presentations around gamification. Personally, that's one of my favorite subjects. I studied games and I've moved into education now and I just love the potential that gamification can show. And you may have seen things like advanced analytics. Maybe you came to the Q&A about analytics last yesterday afternoon. But at the end of the day, we're looking at all these presentations and it's great. But there's this question that I get asked almost at every moot. It's definitely the question I get asked the most. If I can't install Plugins, how can I do these things? Because there may be requirements. Either you're working on a cloud-based system that doesn't allow individual Plugins to be added to instances or maybe you don't quite have the support staff needed to be able to work on it or your administrator has some very valid concerns about the effect it's going to have on the instance of your Moodle site. So how do we do it? We're here at the moot. We're learning about all these amazing new ways that we can teach. And a lot of them come back to tools that we need to be using. Is there a better way that we can shape this? So the answer, in my view, or one of the potential answers is LTI, which, if you don't know, stands for Learning Tool Interoperability. So it's basically a standard. And as soon as I start talking about standards, it's very boring. So I'll try and make it more interesting. It's a way that we can say this tool is not only compatible with Moodle, but it's also compatible with any other LMS. It can just be dropped in. It doesn't need to be installed. All the interactions that it needs to make putting grades back into the grade book, enrolling students, managing them all, it's all done automatically. So with LTI, I honestly believe that the best tools in the world are at your fingertips. You, maybe you might see, you might go, oh, I want to get this virtual reality thing. I want this gamification. I want this plugin that's going to be tracking attendance, all these things that you've been seeing. And you might want to start using it straight away without having to go through all that process. LTI really puts it right in front of you. So what is the effect that this has? Maybe if you're an admin in the room. I'm sorry, I might be scaring you. You're thinking, oh, no, now all the teachers are going to be installing all this random stuff. Well, the great thing is the LTI has a really strict set of standards that makes it easier to guarantee exactly what it's going to be doing. So you can control permissions directly around what user information will be passed to the tool and what it will be doing with that information, et cetera, et cetera. So let me tell you a story. I love photography. I am no good at it whatsoever, but it's a good hobby of mine. So when preparing for this presentation, I was like, why don't I take a bunch of really nice photos and put them through? Well, as it turns out, I'm quite busy as we all are and I didn't get time to do it at all. So I found this great website called unsplash.com and it had basically amazing photos just ready I could search for anything that I would need. And so instead of making everything myself, I basically used a tool that's already out there to make this presentation of what I'm trying to teach and the ideas I'm trying to get across to you more effective and more memorable that I didn't have to do it myself. So LTI is that basic idea of saying there might be a part of your process that you can get from somewhere else that will help you to teach and communicate a lot more effectively in tools that can do amazing things. So what is LTI in Moodle? Well, we call it the external tool module because that's what it is. It's a tool that you're getting externally. So you may have seen it. It's the green puzzle piece. I don't know if you always just scroll past and go, I wonder what that is. But it's there and it's been in Moodle for a long time and we're just seeing the potential of it come into fruition. So I think the main benefit that I've discussed is it reduces the work for the course writers and content creators, whether you're a teacher or you're creating content for your teachers. And it gives control back to the administrators. Like I was saying, you can control individual capabilities that the tool will be given. You can say, I don't even want any information about my students to go to it, but I still want them to be able to use it. So then they're given an artificial name. Or you can say, I do want their name, but not the email or I want the email, but not their name. And the other side of LTI is what in technical terms, we call it an LTI provider. But on the website, on a Moodle instance, all that's really called is share as an LTI tool. So you just, once it's enabled on your site, all you have to do is basically go to the course or module that you want and you can share the tool. So this enables you to not just use tools that are already out there, but also to share your content with the rest of the world. So there's great potential in that whether you're altruistic and just want information to flow everywhere or that you might want to charge it so that you can have more resources to create more content in the future, the options are already out there for you. It also helps you to connect systems together I've heard that LTI, one of the more common uses for LTI is actually to be able to connect user accounts between two different systems because a lot of times when we're working at institutions we have an old version of some old LMS that's already out there and we're trying to move everything to Moodle but the reality is maybe the time isn't there or the technical expertise isn't there to get everything across. Well, LTI can help there. It can basically connect any system back into Moodle. But both of these tools together, whether it's your sharing things by LTI or whether it's your getting content into your Moodle by LTI it opens up just a world of possibilities that ordinarily wouldn't be there because here at Moodle we're all about empowering educators and so we really want to empower you to not just be able to use content but also share it as well. So here's some screenshots. I was lucky enough to be asked to work on the new interface for LTI to make it a little bit more user-friendly because as I've said, there's a lot of potential out there but maybe people might think it's scary. I know all three letter acronyms are always scary just as a general rule. But we tried to put a lot of effort into the usability of LTI to make it easier to use. So if you haven't used it, all you have to do is find a link to an LTI module and then paste it in there, click Add and it will run you through the whole wizard. And then after you add a tool, you have the option to make it appear in the list just like any other module. And I think this is really important because it enables teachers to just see these tools just as another tool instead of having to go all the way into the external tool module and try and find it there. It makes it a lot more clear upfront and they know that they can use it and it's a lot more easy to use as well. So if you're an administrator in here and you've never used LTI before, in order to let teachers share the content via LTI, it's disabled by default. So no one starts sharing privileged information by accident. But all you have to do is enable the LTI authentication plugin and enrollment plugin. And then once you've shared the tool, it's as simple as going to this interface and you can copy that link, paste it into whatever LMS, whether it's another Moodle or another LMS that you have, and it should just work. So I hope I've inspired you with LTI and you've seen maybe a few of the things that it can do. And I think that when it comes to LTI, the community is going to be the most important thing. As we develop more and more content and make it available via LTI, that's where the potential of LTI will really increase. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. It's great to have tools to make using Moodle that much easier. Do we have questions for John? Upgrade tools. How do you mean by upgrade tools? LTI tools to upgrade. Well, if an LTI tool is upgraded, it will upgrade automatically and you won't have to do anything about it. No manual process, man. There's no manual process, no. Thank you. As a Moodle administrator, I'm wondering if you have any ideas for how to help us with managing LTI because it is a great tool. It makes it very easy for our instructors to add new tools into their courses. But from an administrative perspective, I find it difficult to be able to know what people are actually using. So do you think that you'll be creating any reporting to help us with that? In addition, it's great. You can add LTIs individually into courses. Any thought about creating tools to actually batch LTI into courses so that you can do them en masse? Well, so in regards to the first question, I think reporting would be great. So we've been working on the interface recently and we want to make it as usable as possible. So those use cases are really handy for us. I suppose being able to know what tools are used where, we have a little bit of that. You can now see which tools are used the most, but not down to the individual course level. I think that would be something good to add later. And the second question, what was the second? Oh, batching. Yes, not yet, but it's coming very soon where you'll be able to go through the process and it will add a whole bunch. So basically, you will, instead of adding a tool individually, you'll be able to go through a wizard that's defined by the tool and they'll say, I'll set up everything for you and it will just add as a batch. That's coming very soon. Maybe not 3.4, but 3.5. And if you say already had pre-configured linda.com as an example as LTI and you wanted them in all courses inside a category, do you think that you'd be able, is that something on the roadmap? So sharing back the other way. Not on the roadmap yet, but if you create and track a issue and get some votes, hopefully we'll get it in soon. So one of the struggles I've had with LTI is that as far as I can tell, the only way to add an LTI 2.0 tool is to be an administrator and add it at the, like in the site level to register it as a tool. But because if you just go and add the LTI and then paste in a link, then it automatically does an LTI 1.0 launch. It doesn't do a tool proxy registration request. I'm getting quite nerdy here. Yeah, yeah. So is there a way to do that? Is it maybe already there in 3.3 and I don't know about it? Yeah, so LTI 2.0 is the easier way of conferring a tool. Basically what it is is you just paste in a URL and it will configure the tool for you. So we've supported that for quite a while, but it was, I think it was just recently, or maybe we've always had it, but there is a capability which is LTI managed and you can just give that to anyone and they'll be able to add via proxy as well. There is talk of how we can make it so teachers can have better separation between the admin and that, like they'd have their own selection of LTI tools, but that's not available just yet. So as a solution for now, give them the LTI managed capability. So being someone who knows basically nothing about LTIs, are there any things that we should be aware of or avoid? And also do you have any recommendations about where to find out more and source good LTIs? I'd say the main thing to be aware of is if your institution is using a local instance of Moodle in that it's not available publicly, a lot of LTI will have trouble because it's all about allowing the tool to communicate back to your site. So just make sure if it's on an intranet, make sure it's accessible publicly as well. That would be the main thing. And the second question was? How to source good LTIs and find out more? I'd say there are some really good websites out there for finding LTI. If I know for Moodle itself, we're going to be pushing that a bit on the new Moodle net and things like that so that we can have our own repository of these LTIs. But yeah, if you search the internet, you'll be able to come up with good results about LTI and you'll be able to experiment and get involved and see what's out there. Great. Any other questions? Sorry, I'm not sure if this was obvious or not. Is this just between Moodle sites? I mean, if someone's got a proprietary LMS, can they still share content? Yeah, so it's not just Moodle. It's all of the big LMSs that are out there. In terms of a proprietary one, it depends on the implementation of that one. But I know all the major ones do support LTI and it should all work with them and tools to those and then back to Moodle. It should all work. My experience has been contacting them. Half of them don't seem to know much about it at all. So they just tell me you've got reports you can access as an admin into our systems and also download them and use them, which isn't really very useful for tracking content that's being done on another site because I hate sending people off to other sites where they have to create their own user ID and password and things. Yeah, I think... So that's exactly why LTI was created in the first place so that you wouldn't have to have them log in again, et cetera, and worry about all that. It's even beyond SSO at this point where it just tries to make the process seamless. Obviously, that's in an ideal world. I think with the same with Moodle, we call it external tool. Other LMSs may call it something else. And I think that the reason I wanted to give this presentation is because I want to raise awareness about LTI as well. So I would even be not surprised if the people you contacted in support just didn't quite know what the feature that was already in there because, yeah, I know that the major LMSs all support LTI. So keep asking questions. Yeah. Any other questions for John? No? Okay. Thank you, John. Thank you very much.