 Thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. For those of you who are here waiting for Marie's presentation, I have to say I'm thrilled to be her opening act. So we'll get through this, and then we can get to Marie's presentation shortly after. I'm really delighted to be here to talk to you today. My role at Moodle is the head of customer success for the US Services Division. In that role, I work with the learning design team and the support team. So a fantastic group of people who are really smart and really good at what they do. In that team, we work with clients to help them launch their Moodle sites and then support them over the long term. And that support comes in a number of different shapes. What I'm here to talk to you about today is kind of driven by that experience. And I'm interested in your thoughts and your feedback as we go through this. I will note before I leave this slide, because I think some of you, we've known each other a long time. And you may be as eager for me to have finished my doctorate as I was. I did, I am happy to announce, complete my doctorate in December. So if you wish to call me, I think it only took 32 years if you ask my husband. Or it felt like that. Yes, yes, all right. OK, anyway, I will say that with the letters after the name now, I am obliged to make at least one reference during the presentation to my dissertation research. So kudos to you if you can find that as I sneak that in. Obligated, part of the contract. So I really want to talk today about my evolution and kind of where I sit in terms of thinking about how we help people build better Moodle courses. I've been doing Moodle a long time. It started with my first Moodle site in 2003. Started training people on how to use Moodle a couple of years after that. Traveled around the US and occasionally beyond. Meeting with groups of teachers and trainers at different companies. I'd go in and do, I'm sure you've done the same approach. You go in, you hit them with as much information as you can give them in two days. You walk out and say, good luck, have fun. And then you never see them again. And then, again, that's how it goes. That's where we started. Over time, I started to shift a little bit. Things became a little more personalized, a little more consultative. Then we moved courses online. Again, very much a focus on the tools. Let me tell you how to build an assignment. Let me tell you how you should format your course. Let me tell you about a classroom. We did the online courses. And then as the technology evolved, we started doing virtual training before the pandemic. During the pandemic, things ramped up and we did a lot of virtual training. Today at Moodle US, we take more of a consultative approach. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that and how that works. But where we sit today, and our growth as a company, has really inspired me to think a little bit more about how we help people build quality online courses. And so what I'm sharing with you today, I will tell you straight out, is theory in my head. We have not yet implemented this. So you're getting a sneak peek. Everything I know and I have to say about this is based on experience and research. So I have a lot of hope that what I'm thinking is the right way to go. And it has a lot of promise, but I am so eager to get your feedback and hear what you think about it. So when I go back home, I'll either throw it all out or hopefully improve upon it. Before we get into that, let's talk a little bit about today's landscape in online learning and the work we do. First, tell me what you think about what makes a good online course. Think about the ideal learning experience. What components do you have to consider as you're building an online course? This is the part where I'm making sure you're still awake. Yes, Ryan? Clear expectations. Clear expectations, good one. Accessibility, accessible course content, yes? Inclusive education. Inclusive education. Yep? Measurable outcomes. Measurable outcomes, good. Yep? Interaction. Interaction, agree. I would say a lot of the principles apply in both face-to-face online and blended, but I do think there are some elements that are unique to the online environment. So in this case, I'm gonna say yeah. On demand, interesting. I'm sorry, one more time. Engagement and motivation, good. What about what you see on the page when the learner comes into the course? Design, yeah. You guys have ticked all the boxes that we hit in the Learning Design Jam yesterday. So the awesome part is you did talk a lot about the learning experience, the interaction, the engagement, the clear expectations. All of that stuff, I would say, goes into good instructional design. But in that group yesterday and here today, we heard about accessibility. Yes, accessibility has a relationship with online learning design, but it is its own beast. How many of you feel like you know everything there is about accessibility? Yeah, me neither. There's so much to know. There is a feel all of its own. And then design. Design really gets into web design more than learning design. And again, there are people with specialties in that area who know all there is to know about that. So there's a lot that goes into online learning. Now, how do we normally train people to develop online learning? And there's a full spectrum here on this, right? How did you learn to develop online courses? Trial and error, yes, yes. And I still do that. It's a very effective method. Model course, good, yeah. I like those. Where do you get your models? You build your own. Yes. I watch somebody. There you go. That click through the options thing, I see a lot, right? That's how I started training. And I think a lot of people still do that, right? In your organization, if you deliver training on Moodle to other people, how much of that, how many of you see that done where we pull up the screen with all the settings on it and then you walk through it? How many of you are doing that, seeing it done? Yeah, that's my experience as well. And that's a little bit what I'm trying to counter when I talk about the options that I'm talking about today. So yeah, in a lot of cases, my own experience and that of others is that you start with the Moodle settings. Here's how you build a Moodle course. You get that all figured out. People build their first courses and then they pull you back in for another training on accessibility and then you're expected to figure out how to incorporate all of the accessibility stuff into the stuff you've already built, right? And then there's another training all about, say the grade book. And there's another training about the course design. And then somehow you're supposed to figure out how to integrate all of this without completely rebuilding your course six times over. So how effective is this? How much is this working? I've talked to a lot of people already here at the conference. I talked to a lot of colleagues. And words like this resonate. These are the ones that come up. The fact that we have terms for these kinds of courses tells me and I think should tell you that we don't quite have this right yet. Because if you have a term like scroll of death that is well known in the Moodle community, it's because it happens a lot, right? We can add a couple of others to your repertoire, pile of files. I think I saw last year, there was a guy talked about, oh my gosh, a dumpster. What did he call it? It was a document dumpster. Yes, document dumpster. And then we came up with one in the learning design team the other day. They talked about courses that are unintentional escape rooms. Have you ever been in one of those where you just can't find your way out and you don't know where you're supposed to go? Every step is like a puzzle. Or clicky, clicky, bling, bling. So imagine the last form course you saw. Click, click, ooh, look, a movie. Click, click, ooh, an interaction. Click, click. So we've got a ways to go I think before we're building really ideal online courses. And I would say that the documentation or the research reinforces these anecdotal experiences. This research is from 2009, 2010, but it still applies. The last time I saw Martin speak about all of the different kinds of activities used in Moodle, it echoed the sentiment in that most of the time we are putting in document, content, information for broadcast-oriented purposes. So we're just putting stuff out there for people to read. And then if we are doing anything that requires interaction, it's an assignment. The only interaction that happens within an assignment in most cases is between the learner and the teacher. You're missing a whole element of the course and it's, yeah, not at all what it could be, right? And this is where the dissertation stuff comes in. To be completely fair, this is not a problem of subject matter experts. This is not your problem. This is everyone's problem. For my dissertation research, I talked to a range of instructional designers working in a variety of learning management systems. And what we found there is that, as with our own team, actually, instructional designers have a variety of skill sets. I do not know a single instructional designer that knows everything there is to know about building online courses. Thinking about my own experience, actually, I've been using Moodle for 20 years. I have a degree in education. I have a master's degree in instructional design and technology. And now I have a doctorate in learning technology as a doctorate in something. And I still think about the team that I work with as a hive mind, right? Like, I could not build a complete online learning experience without all of the skills and knowledge of other people that I work with. And I think most of us probably fall into that same boat, right? How many of you are the only person working in your organization to design online courses? Oh, just a couple. Okay, that's good. Things are improving. That's cool. So my question is, how can we enable better online learning? At Moodle US, what we do is that consultative approach that I talked about. And I really do like and value the consultative approach. I think it is very effective. Like, if you were to think about the ideal instructional situation, it would be to sit down with an expert and one-on-one, have them provide information, assess, ask you to apply, give you feedback instantaneously. That one-on-one interaction is unlike anything else. So we're approaching that a little bit with our implementation experiences. When we do the consultative approach in an implementation, we are launch focused. That means at no point is our instructional designer or learning designer sitting down with an agenda and saying, okay, today I'm gonna cover all the course settings. Today I'm gonna cover how to set up a glossary. It really is focused on what it is the client needs to accomplish to get to launch. Because we know if we don't get to launch, if they don't get started, they aren't going to finish. They're not gonna be there in a year. And they're not going to achieve the objectives they set forth. In addition to being launch focused, it's also agile and iterative. So we don't expect or go in with a plan knowing exactly what things are going to look like at the end. We try to be flexible, collaborative. And then through that, we create a sense of shared responsibility. So we work with the client to say, what do you know and what are you capable of and what do you have time for? And what can I contribute to the situation? And we work together to build the site. Through this, there are tons of authentic learning experiences. It is as common for in those situations for the client to be sharing their screen and us guiding them as it is to work the other way around. And then we are all learning along the way. And then last but not least, the training is fully embedded. So we talk about, I built you a template for this kind of SCORM activity. If you need to change that, then you would change it here. Here's how you upload your next bit of content. So it's not about learning every activity. It's about focusing on those that the learner or the client really needs. So those are what I see as the strengths. The downsides, the cons. It is highly resource intensive. It is resource intensive for the client. It is resource intensive for us because of all of the time it takes to get through all of that. It is overkill for some. There are some clients who come in and say, I've got 27 SCORM packages. We've got SSO set up so we can add users via standard authentication methods. And we could have a site up and running within a couple of hours with that. They don't need a full on consulting package. We don't need to spend a lot of time exploring other options because it's a standard stock and barrel implementation. And then it's difficult to scale. I have been so fortunate to work with a really amazing team of learning designers. I can't believe every time we add one that there are still more amazing people out there at that scale. But it is hard to bring in a learning designer, train them up, get them to know everything and there is to know about workplace and Moodle and get them started and make them fully productive. So it's difficult to scale. So that's what has us thinking about alternative approaches. So here's my theory. My theory is that we focus on the questions first. Instead of talking about settings instead of building prototypes one on one with the clients, we think about trying to make the focus on the questions. So what is it that you wanna deliver? How are you building your content? What sort of experience do you want? And then we use that, the answers to those questions and we provide a ready-made package. So you want a course that is just a single-scorm activity. Ah, I know in my head that's a single-activity course format. I know how the SCORM settings are going to work. You don't need to worry about all that. I say, here's the course template package. You install it and you have a course ready to go. The level of conversation around that is minimal but it is highly focused on what's important. How do you want the learner experience to be? What are the goals and the outcomes? And then we use what we know behind the scenes to make that happen. There are some oddballs. There are exceptions, right? There are people who need to know how to do the settings. If you are training others, you need to know all the settings. This option, me giving you a bunch of templates, may be helpful but it is not the end, you know the end all. You need to know all of the details. If you're in a situation where you are building courses and going to be continuing to build courses and you don't know what those are gonna look like, you need to know what options exist. But this template model I think still has some advantages and it can help move things along for, even for those folks and for our learning designers. So let's take a look at an example. And as I go into that, I have to say, I think this is valid for how we work with others as well. I can give you a list of what it looks like to build a perfect online course but until you see an example, that list isn't very useful. So let's take a standard training example. If I were to train you in a very traditional way on the assignment activity, I would pull up the assignment settings page and say, we'll start with the name. The name is the thing that appears on the course page that the learners will click on to get inside of the activity. I've done that a few times, right? Fill in the description. You wanna provide a complete set of instructions on what they should put in there. And then everyone's at their computers working to fill in the information, hoping that they're getting something that I'm saying. And then after we're done, I say go have fun, build it, let me know if you have trouble. Now let's think about the alternative model. I say instead, backward design kind of inspired here. How will you know that the learners develop the skills that you want them to achieve at the end of this activity, at the end of this course? How will you know? So you might say, well, I want them to build a project or I want them to answer a quiz. I want them to answer some questions. So I ask, will they create some product or they answer some questions? Will the learners provide feedback to each other? So notice here that instead of me standing up here and going, it's a really good idea if you have learners provide feedback to each other because they learn a lot by seeing the work of others, they learn a lot by editing each other's work. Instead of giving the advice, the question is embedded in. So I'm subtly suggesting, this is the right way to do things, right? I start to normalize the kind of positive course design good instruction that we want. Will the learners perform self-assessment? Again, suggesting good instructional design instead of giving an hour-long presentation on how you engage learners in courses. And then how will you stretch your feedback? So it's not about how are you going to grade the students. It's what about a rubric? Have you thought about that? And then when they say, well, I'd like the students to submit an assignment. I'd like to grade them anonymously and I'd like to use a rubric to do so. I go, here's the package. So in my head, the way this will work ultimately is that we will have a collection. And on brand, I'm gonna say that collection could live in a glossary because I suggest a glossary for everything. Or I could live in a database or we could create some other sort of experience or interface for giving this information. I don't know if you can see this from the back, but in my head, I do have a sample. I have the file that they can download. I have suggestions. Instead of an assignment, have you thought about peer feedback? If so, go check out the template for the workshop. And then I have a link to the sample. So instead of saying, make sure you provide clear instructions. Tell the learners what it is they are to achieve. They can see exactly how to do it. So you're not giving them a big blank box. And the template does the same. And all throughout, in my head, what'll happen here is we'll have tips along the way. So again, instead of me saying, when you build assignments, it's really better to use ListView. And I provide that in some other context about how to design courses. I provide those tips along the way. So it's really embedded in context and giving them the information at the moment it's most likely to stick. So good instructional design, good learning design, good support. Now, I realized that templates are not novel. I didn't make them up. They've existed before, right? I've done presentations before. We've talked about templates. I've gone to conferences where people talk about templates. The thing is, is a lot of those templates are very focused on course format and standardization. They are designed with the intention of making the learning experience easier for learners so they know where things are and how to do things, but it's a very limited view. And it's not really designed with the intention of making instruction better and helping people design better learning experiences. So that's where this shift is, is really thinking about how to improve learning experiences. The benefits, if I were to summarize them. And I have to say, as I was thinking about, well, how do we do this? How can we scale what we do in consultation? How can I expand these offerings? The number of benefits, as I thought about it, just continue to expand. One, it expands the learning designer toolkit. So every example, every template that we build becomes something else that the learning designers have in their back pocket to use when they do an implementation. So even for your teams, when you're sitting down with individuals and helping develop courses, how many of you are going, ah, chemistry professor, you want a sample of a quiz. You build the quiz and you go show it to them. And then you go talk to the other professor. And they say, I want a quiz. And usually build another one from scratch. We do this too. So it expands the toolkit, helps improve standardization, saves time and effort and energy. Reduces the learning curve for those who are building courses. So instead of having to learn all about accessibility, all about online course design, all about learning theory, it's all integrated together. And they have to know less about all of it because it's just there. We're not training them. We'll give them the tool set. The other thing I really like about this and I'm so hopeful about is that we can start to normalize good design. Right now, when I go look at a Moodle site, I can pretty much predict what I'm gonna see. And it's not awesome. I would like people to see better, more awesome courses all around them. When people are building their first courses, if they have these templates, that's what they're going to see in their head. And that's what they're going to know. And they're going to think that's normal. I'd love to have that happen. It maximizes the time and effort. So instead of trying to make our educators and subject matter experts into Moodle experts, accessibility experts, web design experts, we let them focus on good instruction and what they know. So we try to make it as easy as possible. It also means that the learning design skills and knowledge are all integrated and in context. Again, so nobody has to take all these pieces and try to figure out how to integrate them into a good course design. And then last but not least, with the collection of resources and tools in the glossary or the database or whatever I'm gonna put it in, I'm creating opportunities for people to discover other options. So again, I'm putting the assignment out there and going, what about a workshop? Or I put in a glossary and say, what about a database? So create opportunities for growth but at the moment of need. So in my description for the session, I did suggest that I might have some data. I can make some up for you if you want, but we don't have it yet. So we're still in early stages of development on this and hopefully next year at this time, I can say, look at what we've done. This is amazing. But at this point, we're just gonna have to imagine that that's the case. So where do we go from this? What I like to see as your outcome? What do I hope you take away from this? My goal is not to say, ah, look, Moodlely-Rest is doing amazing stuff. We are and it's cool. And I'd love for you to know that. But I also want you to take away, like I want you to think about what you're doing and think about how you can revise it to make it more powerful. We as instructional designers, we as educators, we know good stuff. We have a lot of power. We don't know everything. So I think think about both sides of those points. How do you get out what you know to help people build better learning experiences? And then how can you also support your own team and your own resources to help improve what you do? So if I were to summarize it into a few key points, a few key takeaways, it would be, ask questions first, do the settings next. Not the other way around, okay? And it's so weird when I say it, because I feel like, ah, that's obvious. But if I think about all the training I've done and what I see done elsewhere, it is the other way around. Remember that no element of learning design exists in isolation. I can't talk about accessibility without thinking about the impact on web design and learning design and activities. So when I teach them in isolation, I've got to figure out how to get those into the mix. Similarly, best practices apply everywhere. So when you're building a course, if you're going to teach best practice, you do it up front, figure out how to get them there from the start. For us as designers who are building multiple courses, build once, then adapt. I build a quiz. It's a simple straightforward linear quiz. Tomorrow I talk to somebody else and they say, oh, I'd love to have an adaptive quiz. Don't build a quiz from scratch again. Build with the standard settings. We all have recommendations on what the standard setting should be. Use those and duplicate. If Lauren builds an amazing database, it's silly for me to build another one from scratch. Beg, borrow, steal, get what you can to actually adapt and improve. Remember for you and for the subject matter experts who are building courses that that is not their specialty. It is easier with them and with us to do it right the first time. Think about incorporating the good web design, the good accessibility, the good learning theory, all of that the first time rather than change it later. So please don't do the settings and then the accessibility and then the online learning design. And there's a reason there's an easy button. You know, it's a good thing. It doesn't have to be difficult. We don't have to make the process of building an online course hard just for it to be good. It's cool and easy and fine to find shortcuts. People appreciate that and it makes us smarter. So with that, I realize I'm nearly at the end of my time. But I'm interested in your thoughts. I'm interested in your questions. I'm interested to know if people are doing these kinds of things and how you're managing it. And if we don't have time here, then I'm happy to chat with you afterwards. Questions? Hey, Michelle. I'm wondering whether your research or experience, how that responded to different cultural contexts and is it different working with somebody who's perhaps an educated academic, maybe grumpy, in the United States or a high-income country versus someone from a different culture who might be low digital literacy and the way this approach has played out in that context? I do think definitely, and I don't think I mentioned this explicitly. I don't think this lives in isolation, right? I do think there are cases where I give a collection of templates and people run with it because it suits their needs, it suits their budget, what have you. I think there will be cases where we still do the consultation and then tell people how to use these things I also think and I realize this as I was building out the templates and again, I'm early in the development of these ideas but the potential for what we could create in terms of this collection is huge. So I do think, yeah, we might have a template or a sample where I'm pitching to that academic and trying to make this set and let me tell you how to save time, let me tell you how to make this super fast easy and get good data and good course reviews. And then in another case, the emphasis will be on offline accessibility and things like that. But I do think a lot of the same stuff needs to apply, right? Like I know that you work with a lot of under-served populations with limited online access so offline access is important to you but I think that should be embedded in everything we do. And when I build the samples, that would be a tag or a key word, built for offline design. But yeah, it's a semi-easy button, maybe, yeah.