 Hello, my name is Martin de Guilamas from Moodle. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening to everybody I've got a little bit of time here to tell you what's going on in in my head in my world and Be happy to talk to you afterwards Wherever that's possible on the conference site. Thanks very much to next cloud for inviting me to speak Real pleasure to do so and I'll share the screen now and show you a few things while I'm talking So, look, I really want to talk about Moodle cloud Moodle, sorry our next cloud together and particularly The things we share and the values about why openness is in education is essential Talk a bit about Moodle first Bit of a catch-up some overview of what we're doing Then I want to talk about the Moodle and next cloud integration work That's been happening and continues to happen and then I want to really dive into the big issues of the future So the last year of course this year has been An incredible one in the education field with at the peak. We had nearly 92% of all learners in the world Having to study online suddenly or being at least taken out of school and As a result has been all kinds of upheaval and education and a lot of decisions being made and a lot of changes being done and It's been a crazy crazy year if you're in the field We are in education technology Current stats of Moodle LMS in the world are installed. We have a hundred and sixty thousand Registered sites. These are ones who just press the registration button. Of course being open source We don't really know all the installations and it's a good deal higher than that But still if you look at the statistics, there's 30 million courses on those sites and you know, it's a significant Proportion of the world those numbers jumped from In February there was a hundred thousand sites registered and it went up to a hundred and sixty thousand sites since then So you can get an idea of the kind of growth. There's been in 2020 with people wanting to go online And the Moodle world though, it's not just our LMS. We also have another LMS for workplace It's based on that one and it has extras. I'll cover that briefly. We have apps to access these platforms And these are the tools that we make we also have things resources that we provide or organize so the Moodle partners are our Network of service providers around the world. We have Moodle cloud, which is a SaaS platform Mostly for smaller sites. We have Moodle net, which is a new social network. I'll talk a little bit about that And we have development partners of all kinds that that we work with including next cloud In the skills side of things we have a educator certification And I'll cover a little bit of that and we have Moodle moots their conferences that run in different places all around the world they've all gone online and We're actually Restructuring them because we probably will always stay online from now on Like many other things even after the virus is sold Globally Moodle's got a very high penetration I mentioned some raw numbers but in the higher education space this is what it looks like for learning management systems and you could see in some continents each one of these is a continent that Can go up to 80 odd percent The place where Moodle is faces most competition really is in the US in North America Where there are large proprietary LMS's that we that we Compete with although we don't really look at it like that because we're the only open source one and we We're doing our thing and we're doing it for however many people are in our community So we operate on a different level from a proprietary company. I will talk about that as later as well But overall it's about two-thirds of the world's universities and higher education use Moodle in some way So the big thing that we are focused on here in the Moodle community is a big focus on UX user experience Moodle has been around for 20 years or so. It's an old code base it comes from before social media existed that gives you an idea and there's a lot of UX that That needs to be updated for the modern world and we've been doing it slowly slowly on our six-monthly releases but we are focused on spending an extra whole year to really do some big changes and There will be a couple of very small six-monthly releases happening in November and next May But by the end of next year we have 4.0. It's a good time to to really express that UX focus So we have a number of really large projects. We're overhauling all the navigation across the system Search and menus We're focusing on the process of creating a course so that teachers have clearer and better support around creating courses and hopefully with higher quality We're focused on the student experience how they know where they are how they know what they've done what they still have to do And we're fitting all these together with a new design system and that includes a component library, but also Just a new philosophy for how we fit those together There's also a whole ton of little small what we call low-hanging fruit Little obvious things in UX that we know we need to fix and we're tackling a lot of those as well The Moodle community is not just the the core LMS though. We have 1730 plugins and climbing these plugins extend Moodle with extra functionality You can see a couple of the most recent updates here from the front page of our plugins database and we have a very Interesting new approach here in that we are keeping although all those are GPL by the way, and they will always remain GPL it's required to be part of our plugins database that you have plugins that are under open source license and particularly GPL but Many of our users can't install those plugins and have the value of them because They need to get their university admin or IT person to install that code and they may be Wary of doing so they might not trust it or they don't want to maintain it and and so Some of the the benefits of this open-source project don't get to the end users So what we're building is a plug-in service and we're turning basically all of those those apps into an app store and we'll be serving them up Through the LTI standard so that they look like they're part of your Moodle site But actually they're running somewhere else on a cloud And so that will be a subscription service and that means even teachers can install plugins From a an app store without needing admin approval Well, you know the admin probably still has to allow them to do that but It won't affect the installation or anything else they're worried about The the other LMS we have Moodle workplace, which is as I said Moodle plus these extra features focused on the workplace Multitenancy and organization hierarchy and so on This is available through our partners only but these features are all coming into the main Moodle core LMS as Well, but over time so the next thing in Moodle 4 will be the report builder that's going to be landing From workplace and that's a really fantastic thing that allows you to build reports using a graphical interface very very common need in the Moodle community And here's a big glimpse of what Moodle workplace looks like it's very popular. It's going very well some huge projects are using workplace Such as network rail or the rail system for the UK Military all sorts of things quite interesting applications for workplace Another one of our projects is Moodle net and it's been going for a while as a kind of a skunkworks project. We've had We're building a social media platform for educators and the primary goal of that is for educators to find Others like themselves who are teaching the same subject and and to share resources and to collaboratively curate the best resources for teaching that subject in that language at that level So this will be released Tomorrow actually the first beta 1.0 beta Moodle net and It's simple at this point is still being still early stages But the most exciting thing about it is it's built as a distributed federated system. So there's not just one site there's many and there will be many and It's a big experiment, but we have some good hopes for it It's really something that's missing in the education world today is a decent system for curating the open education resources that are around And last little project I want to tell you about from Moodle is that we have a Moodle educator certification program This isn't just for certifying how you can use Moodle. This is Moodle's program for certifying that you are an educator And that includes 22 competencies that come from the European Union And it's called Digi comp They include, you know professional engagements and how you manage digital resources and Assessments and teaching and learning these are kind of Moodle things But also, you know how you facilitate your learners digital competence and in the power of them and so on So we have a this detailed certification which anyone can take come to Moodle It doesn't teach you how do you do these things? It just certifies of them So you need to be a pretty good teacher to take this certification It's not a couple of hours. This takes weeks but you do get at the end a very nice certificate and Hopefully it's really worth something to you because it's it's about 200 euros to get the certification and It is as I said a quite high quality and deep certification So let's talk about next cloud and Moodle in the education space I'm a big supporter of next cloud. I'm Huge fan of privacy and open source as you might imagine and I I love that next cloud really tackling the space that it is and I Fully supported doing what I can from my end to help support that and part of that is to get our integrations Better and better So the first round of integrations that we did was from December 2018 Most of this work was done by some community members Moodle community members who were also using next cloud in the University of Munster We have so firstly and these were brought into call for our team and then our standard features that next cloud can be a Repository inside Moodle, which means you can say whenever you want to add a file or use a file You can say yep get it from my next cloud installation Moodle also will use next cloud as an OAuth 2.0 Authentication source so you can log into Moodle using your next cloud account And so in these ways, it's very similar to our Google and our Microsoft Office integrations We wanted to have next cloud in there as an equal An equal member of those, you know, like with the same sort of functionality So there was an open source alternative But we want to take that further and further now and make next cloud the best integration for this sort of functionality So phase two and by the way the colors I'm using here indicate really who's who's been doing the work So these are blue because this has been done mostly by the next cloud team With a bit of support from our team so the Moodle app now can also authenticate from the next cloud site and So when you're logging into our Moodle app if there's a next cloud SSO set up you get sent to the next card site Everything works perfectly The next cloud dashboard widget there's a new one and it shows upcoming Moodle events and Recently access courses from the Moodle site that's connected And lastly, there is a search integration so that when you're in the next cloud search You can find Moodle stuff and here's a bit of a couple of screenshots showing that work that's been done lately Here's the notifications on the dashboard and Here's the search in operation. So there's a couple of really good steps forward That is not nearly enough So we're starting work on phase three and we're deciding on the features I'm going to tell you some of the things that are on the list that are still being discussed and prioritized And this is where if you're interested in this whole thing You can actually start getting involved and helping us decide what it is and also hopefully help us build this stuff So the first thing we can do is we could synchronize Moodle groups with the next cloud circles That will be very handy in the documents for example that are only available to a particular course in Moodle That only those people enrolled in the course can access that document things like that We can also be synchronizing the calendars between Moodle and next cloud pretty obvious one I'm sure there are hacky ways to do it now by iCal and things like that But it would be nice if it was just kind of automatic when you connected them one Moodle with the next cloud There's a task manager in next cloud. It would be great if we could see Moodle tasks appearing in there So perhaps, you know assignments that adieu appear as tasks to be managed in next cloud And and overall just more smoother transparent single sign-on We shouldn't always be having to log on individually to lots of systems that the more we can make it Seen like one system. I think the better Particularly when you're thinking about a school or a university in the education environment The more transparent we can all make it together and seamless the better. So it's something to research a Big one for me is to make it easier for a teacher on in the Moodle side to embed a document from next cloud as content and have a very clear decision to say is This something that's collaborative or not Is this content? I as the teacher and putting into the course for students just to read or is this something that I want everyone to work on together And we want to make the whole UX around that and other things a lot simpler It is kind of possible to do it now, but it's not easy to discover or set up Basically all the UX on the Moodle side there is a lot of little things we can do to make it easier and more Transparent and it might include some next cloud work to get that slickness But if managing documents in Moodle, but keeping them in next cloud Can be done smoothly. I think we have a real winner here for the open-source proposition I think we we could also be showing next cloud in the Moodle dashboard which has its own blocks and Payings So we could show recent files in there and notifications coming from the next cloud end as well There's obviously work to do on what that UX looks like, but I think that's a promising area of development The last one I see is a possibility and this might be mostly on the next cloud side is At the top of next cloud where there are all these the icons the plugins I forget actually what next cloud calls and they're not plugins, but those those features I think there's room for a Moodle icon to appear in there to be very explicitly have a drop-down or access to a dashboard To show what's happening on the Moodle world So it could show at the simplest even just a list of all the courses you're in to make it easy to jump to them But it could also show Moodle's dashboard in there as well. It's a possibility. So some way that could be done there If you're interested in joining in on this phase, there's no timelines on it yet We're committing as much resources as we can but we would love the communities on both sides to who are interested to engage With us help us drive this forward The place to go I've set up a Moodle tracker issue for it This could easily be one on the next cloud side as well But if you go to Moodle.me slash next cloud that will take you to the tracker issue and you can Subscribe to that issue and start putting comments and you know just express your interest I think just to get everybody together and talk about what we need to do So that's it for the next cloud Moodle integrations interesting work there and I I love Next cloud. I really want Moodle to work better with it and you know Committed to with Frank from the XFAD site to for our teams to be working together on that and making it a better and better thing But let's talk about the future And I'm a wider scale that's a global scale and the kind of environment that we're in and why are we building these things? And what should we be building is is an important question the UN Some years ago came up with the 17 sustainable development goals these are basically the most pressing problems that the earth is facing right now and You can see a lot of hot button topics there obviously climate action and Equality of many kinds quality education and reducing poverty, etc, etc So how do we support that and I'm thinking in the education field? How does education support that but how can we all be supporting that and what? What are some of the issues? So here's some Issues that are just to zoom in a bit a little bit more detailed about some of the things that we're facing some of the bigger problems Under that that we we need to be looking at so one of them is that The whole pandemic has really forced a lot of people to evaluate and reevaluate what being remote means What it what it means to not all work together in the room This was a trend happening anyway, and I feel it's time that we have good systems to work together and learn and Do all the things we need to do online Now that comes very core to where do we do that? Where are the spaces for working and and educating and doing all these things and who runs them? It starts getting more and more important when we Putting our private information and our data and our lives effectively Into a system as to what's going to happen with that information That's another big trend of artificial intelligence versus human work Don't know if you've seen some of the I've been following it for decades But in in the last year the advances and AI have been quite exponential There is one particular called GPT 3 which comes from an open AI. It's been trained on billions of documents This AI is a general AI that you can put onto Problems that we previously thought were only that only humans can do and it can do them easily It's not and I it not an intelligence as such But it's just a statistical engine that given a word or a situation Finds the next word to put in and the next word and the next word But for example people are using it for applications like, you know describe an app to it and it will create the app and the code to make that run or Give it a sentence and say write me an article or a book and it will complete the article and the book and Actually, it's a pretty easy read now it may have factual errors because It doesn't know anything about what's true or not true but it will write things like a human would write them and make you know, you could easily make a system to say Create a new Wikipedia from scratch, you know, right millions of articles about everything and this AI will go and do it and A lot of people would find those articles perhaps in a search and think oh, yeah, that's truth That's an article written by somebody. In fact, it's all just being generated by this machine so When we have AI of that level taking away human jobs, what does it mean to be educated? How do we? Operate in this new environment where machines are generating more and more of the information that we have How do we know? How do we separate? And we come down there also like formal education and inform education. I'm a big supporter of formal education I think a society should play in its education and its topics and we should be very intentional about what our next generation needs to know There is a big battle if you like between that and everything else right the internet is full of information that you can learn from and Educate yourself and it's terrific, but there are some issues people Going into You know, there's filter, but the filter bubble problem So you might learn a lot about one thing and then not very much about everything else and That leads to problems like in democracy How how can you vote for somebody or how can you participate in democracy if you know only a lot about one thing? It it's it's an issue There's also the problem of fake news as I said before so much potential for Misleading stuff and we are seeing it more strong more and more strongly all the time how social media is distorting the truth continuously Now lastly, this is a big one that I'm sure is very near and dear to anyone who's at a next cloud conference Which is the big tech versus open the centralization of technology versus Decentralization that is the issue the biggest issue that we as technologists should be fighting for the more And if we wrap all these things up if you have an education system that is built on top of centralized for-profit technology Then our education our news our information can start to be Swayed and distorted by commercial interests if those commercial interests are connected to governments or whatever You have a lot of quite scary possible scenarios. So so what do we do to keep education being the best possible thing? for society well Let's let's look at what the best future is for for tools resources and skills in in education. I Showed you this before which showed the moodle activities under tools resources and skills if we go wider the more generically Tools should be open education technology resources should be open education resources and Skills should be open recognition Now I'll talk about these in in a little bit more detail But the open education technology is pretty clear. I think it's open source It's technology that evolves because the community is driving it It doesn't have commercial interest embedded in it. It doesn't have prices that are gonna cut out huge portions of the world and It has the flexibility to evolve Resources Open education resources the last year UNESCO which is a Collection of almost every government in the world Passed a recommendation to their own members, which is every government in the world except the US To focus on open education resources, which is terrific news That means less on paying publishers to for expensive textbooks more on Building and supporting open education resources You know documents and and data that is open and under creative commons licenses and open licenses like that So that's that's well established this last one is still very new open recognition So there is something called open badges, which is a start towards this, but that's not all of the problem The problem is once you've learned something or once someone has recognized you for something How do you give that to others in a way that is That you can trust So if someone comes to me and says, oh, I know about this thing How can I be sure they do know about this thing, you know without actually testing them? and what I want is a Someone who certifies that they're good at that thing Or someone I trust and I want a trustworthy way of that being stamped so that I know So there's a lot of work happening in this field. It's very important for education, of course because they Once you've learned something you want to keep the knowledge of that and you want to store that somewhere We do not want to all be using LinkedIn First of all, you can lie all you want on LinkedIn and it'll be accepted as truth on my LinkedIn profile It says I invented LinkedIn and I did that just to show that it's very easy to lie there We want something more a better framework an infrastructure that's open that we can all trust And that's what they're building here So I'm going to focus a little bit deeper on the open ed tech because that's more related to what we'll hear about today There is an organization that I'm launching called open ed tech and Open ed tech global is the website. It's kind of new but it's it's not actually doing much itself It's really an association of companies that fit a criteria to be called open ed tech And they will be able to then have an open ed take open ed tech Certification that says that this project is fitting the principles of open education technology and some of the companies that fit under their umbrella they we haven't actually got the Certification as yet But this is to give you an idea of the kind of projects that that do fit things like H5P or Mahara Which is a portfolio system Open edX is a MOOC platform Kohara is a library system Matrix is a really interesting project about messaging So text messaging as well as audio and video I if you don't know about it, I highly advise you go look at matrix.org I would love to see next cloud be integrated with matrix Moodle net the social network I mentioned next cloud of course Edumete is a video conferencing platform Produced by G Ante G Ante is the connection of what a collection of all of the network providers in Europe Big blue button a very well known video conferencing classroom system badger Which is an open system for managing badges open badges and and moodle and so on So these are some of the projects that will be involved in some way our job is to promote the brand of open ed tech as as a brand so that people can understand that you know Yes, this project has the right idea and these ones the other ones don't It it shouldn't be about what is cheaper It shouldn't be only it shouldn't only be about where it comes from it should be About how is this software constructed? What are the principles of it? What's the sustainability of that software? Will it be around for a long time and how does it integrate with everything else? so With the tools resources skills get OET and open source open education resources and here are some other People who've been involved making that happen and then the skills badges and open recognition So let me just tell one little story one little thing that I think That that might be where the future of education is and I I want to Drop this seed in here and see what people think So you may have noticed an informal learning space especially there's a lot more a lot of Collaboration and I I'm I'm quite a big fan of what's happening on YouTube to a certain degree I don't like that it's YouTube, but I do like what I do like is that there are so many teachers there Who are all contributing to each other everyone's learning from each other? There is an easy way through algorithms and tagging and so on to find related stuff And so we have a network of people learning from each other and the same on social media You know with with all the problems of it. There's so much good stuff happening and What we're effectively doing is we are all learning together as a society but You know about politics about current news, you know We're like nodes on the network and together. We're kind of thinking like a big brain And that's happening more and more and more It's across countries. It's across any organizational structures It's just you know, the world on the internet is connecting more and more and learning from each other This is a great thing But as we would as we know you also see people Going off into these filter bubbles and you know learning how to be a great Nazi or something It's it's perfectly possible to learn everything this way. And so there's no inherent Support of the SDGs or you know the global context. It's just people learning from other people which is Just good to point out The second trend I'm seeing is this The emergence of let's say gurus, I'm gonna use the word gurus Now guru is a hingy word that means basically teacher But there's a lot of Baggager that comes with the word guru when I what I want to use it for is because I'm talking about a very high level teacher someone who's really good at what they do is able to actually produce a feed of Interesting content, you know as that teacher evolves and learn Learns they share that and they have followers who are interested in that and are following with them and there's a constant feedback loop of you know, the Followers are saying they love it. They don't love it. They further ideas and then you have You know ongoing growth everyone's growing together But there is a guru in the middle of facilitator and there's so many examples of that on the internet A really good one actually is Martin, I'm not sure of his last name, but he's building a marble machine. You may be my mark I just look up marble machine He's in the band winter garden and look at the process by which he's building the new marble machine And how his whole community are learning together through YouTube and other social media. There's many many other examples now what I think we could be doing is building a platform of Open education technology of OER and this open recognition so that a guru Can just pull off the shelf everything they need for free and I mean really for free like not with all the fine print of what YouTube is which is selling your data and Advertising and monetising on your data But a true open education platform That this a person like this can use and then that person is now empowered to to grow and teach a huge group of people Through the internet now I'm not saying this would happen outside of institutions I think every lecturer in every institution should have the same mindset that they are the guru with all these tools and they're able to create a community around themselves and If you like that teacher kind of docs They might have their own platform that they dock with the institutions platform So yeah, you enroll in some university and you now have access to that teacher who is associated with that university And you join that community. So there's possibilities here to really kind of use what works But in a new way that promotes quality that promotes Research and science and facts and of just a high quality of education to really start producing citizens for the world So in short, I just want to encourage everyone no matter where you are or what you're doing fight to keep Education technology open We need to I think if we don't there's possibilities for the very large companies to start taking over the education space And once they do that They will also take over the future of the planet and I don't think that's what everybody wants Here's some of my contact details if you want to get in touch very happy to talk with you Thank you for listening and thanks for the opportunity. Have a great conference. See ya