 Hello everyone and welcome. I'm very pleased today to welcome you to this conversation with a group of new Moodle team members. My name is Abby Fry. I'm the communications manager at Moodle and today I'm going to be having a discussion with new members of the Moodle US team. Moodle's US is a services business that Moodle has launched in the United States to service customers. It has been formed by the acquisition and merger of three US Moodle partners, My Learning Consultants, Munami Learning Solutions and eLearning Experts. So to get started today I want to introduce some really important members of the Moodle US team. First of all we have Jonathan Moore, one of the founders of My Learning Consultants. Jonathan is an education technology strategist and a leader of technical services and he's been in the industry for over 20 years. Jonathan is going to be the CEO of Moodle US. So welcome Jonathan. Thank you Abby. We also have Kathy Robeson who's the former CEO of eLearning Experts. Kathy will be using her extensive eLearning expertise and her management skills to oversee the integration of the three businesses. Hi Kathy. Hi Abby, nice to be here. Thank you. I'd like to welcome Michelle Moore, also a co-owner of My Learning Consultants and Michelle is an internationally renowned as an online learning expert. Michelle's role at Moodle US will be to head up customer success. Welcome Michelle. Thank you Abby. I also want to welcome John Porton, who is the former president of Minami Learning Solutions. John has facilitated a number of very large scale client educational organizational contracts in his stellar career. And John will be overseeing our operations team at Moodle US. So welcome John. Thank you Abby. And finally, last but not least, of course, is Martin Dougie-Armes, who's our CEO and founder. So Martin, I thought I'd direct the first question to you. Why Moodle US? Thanks Abby. Well, look, this is very exciting time for us. This is a new thing for Moodle and what we're doing here is building something that will really serve customers. Moodle uses better in the US and we're bringing together all the best experts that we can and a lot of them are here. This is something customers are asking for. So there's a lot of requirements that customers have. They need help, they need support, even though Moodle's free, the actually making a solution takes expertise. And we've had a partner network already in the last 15 years or so around Moodle and around the world. And all the other people here have been successfully running Moodle partner companies in the US. But it's time for us to come together and be more cohesive, have very stronger services with a much larger team, able to do better support and better coordination of all kinds and particularly work with really large customers. And we already have some quite large customers we're working with and there's a lot of demand there. So it's all about that. And I'm interested, Martin, do you think the timing is important here? Are there things going on in the market that has made that more important at this time? Yeah, there's a lot of reasons for it. Online learning in general is still hitting its stride. We've been involved in a lot of us up to 20 years, but it was really only last year that you saw like an enormous uptake. The pandemic has really forced a lot of things and you see a lot of people using online, doing online learning in not such a good way. So there's a need for expertise and support and we have all this experience. There's also a real time for sustainability in the Moodle world. And like I was saying, we're really trying to build Moodle as a stronger organization that can work more closely together, with these thousands of people around the world to support the Moodle open source projects. And it's a really good step forward for that. And Jonathan, how do you feel about Martin's comments? Would you see, have you seen a change in the US market in recent years and perhaps around the pandemic? Are customers requirements evolving? Do you think? For sure. And it's kind of been a long, long standing issue in the market that structurally, it's difficult, especially for large clients for Moodle to put a successful formal tender forward. You look at the economics, you really have multiple Moodle vendors all doing a fraction of the effort that say Unified Company does. So we tend to spend probably more money as a group trying to be responsive to those requests for proposals, but on average have a little bit lower quality. And then there's been a real ratcheting up of how large is your staff? What are your security protocols? Give us some references of other clients that are in our industry, maybe in our region that are on par with a similar size. And so it's been kind of unfortunate where Moodle is really probably the most adopted LMS on the planet. But you have a tender command that you literally can't meet the requirements for on some technical issue of you can't have a reference with enough users of particular birds of the feather. So I think this really will fix a lot of structural issues where we can be more responsive to the market. I've spoken with lots of prospects that ask, well, why didn't you apply for that? So I think that's going to let us be a lot more responsive with clients and we have seen the pandemic is really kind of fast forwarded. You look, there's been a real kind of a rocket ship line by itself with the adoption of distance learning, but then the pandemic has probably moved the clock forward five or 10 years. At first we weren't sure if that was a temporary thing or a more permanent thing and it seems to be a more permanent shift towards using these tools. Yes, and I can see with that level of adoption that being able to service at scale is really important. And so these mergers of these business will allow you to do that. I'm curious to understand why you are such a Moodle advocate. Why do you think Moodle should be the platform of choice in both sectors, both education and workplace learning. Well, I, you know, I think it comes down to a variety of factors. One, it's a very capable solution. And it's a mature product that's been been around for a long time. The underpinning of that is how did we get here today and that's the open source nature of Moodle, where Martin had this fantastic idea, and invited a bunch of other people along to contribute to that. And then there's a stone soup dynamic where everybody's contributed a little bit to the stew, and it's become a really tasty stew. You look at, you've got a lot of great core functionality in Moodle. But then there are almost 2000 plugins that have been contributed by the community. And not everybody needs all 2000 of those, but you have you have kind of a long tail of functionality where maybe you need one or two of those to really meet a particular need within your organization. So it makes it quite dynamic and functional and then if that doesn't cover your needs with it being open source, we can get under the hood and and make it really like a custom glove really fit to the individual organization. So our philosophy has been to try to to a certain extent adopt the LMS to the organizations needs rather than vice versa. So I think that's a place where Moodle is really different than other offerings on the market. I like your analogy of the large under the hood analogy and sort of this notion that there's a very, very large toolbox there. And, and you connect that to its open source core. I mean, I know that's very important to you, Martin. You know, there is a lot in the public domain about open source versus versus proprietary software. You know, why do why is open source from your perspective, a better choice. Yeah, I've been working open source for about 30 years actually I was looking back at it. It's a, it's a very natural way to develop software actually it's, it's very natural to just give your source code to somebody. In fact, the proprietary method is in fact harder. It's much harder to keep software locked down. So, first of all, it's kind of natural but there's all these benefits that come with that you have these the four freedoms of open source so you can take it, you can run it, you can study it, you can modify it and then you can redistribute it. And those freedoms enable all this wonderful network effects so you get these communities you get, you know, like these people here in the room, who have come to know each other over the years just because we're working through this project. And there are thousands of people around the world, also with involvement in Moodle and we all work together to produce something that we can all use and benefit from. And it's sort of like academia, right? So you share research and everyone we push the needle forward and we all learn together so it's, it's great for that and it means that Moodle is very, very deep in functionality. It has 20 years of educators and developers just solving problems and sharing with each other and I could never have hired thousands of developers and teachers to build that open source was the way to do it. And at the same time, you have benefits on top of other software you get more security because you get people looking at the code and solving security bugs and more reliability. It's very flexible it's very customizable. And yeah, it's, it's open source is really the purpose of everything we do at Moodle. And it's the main reason why anything with the Moodle name on it exists because we are trying to build and sustain this open source project. Yeah, I really like this notion of people coming together. And I can see with Moodle US, there's the benefits of this history of the 20 years or so of development community that has come together and now you all come together. And can you give us a bit of perspective on what the services of Moodle US will be. Yes, that's something really excited about is being able to bring all three companies together. You know we have a lot of overlap that there's also specialty areas within each company. We're really looking at this as a broadening of the individual services of each, each company so Moodle US is going to be able to service really any usage and assistance that an organization would have around around the adoption of Moodle so kind of the bread and butter stuff is around how do we host the application how do we make it available online. And we have a broad set of services whether that's helping someone that has an on-prem installation, all the way to hybrid options and then full SAS type operation where it's turnkey and the organization just hands out all over to us. So we have that kind of technical piece. We have the part to service the open source nature of Moodle which is the development shop so a lot of organizations may say well I like Moodle but here I have to have a developer. And that's not the case and even if you do want a developer that's something we can we can provide and then do that custom glove. And then finally but probably most importantly is really the learning design side. So once, once you have the tool in place the tool is not really that valuable unless you're using it. And so we have a really great team and even broader team bringing everybody together that understands the research behind what's effective education, but also has a lot of practical experience of how do we implement that and then having worked in a in the service market for a long time, we can kind of balance those two factors around what's an organization's budget. Yeah, that's really interesting the whole area of learning design so making the most of Moodle. I'm keen to talk a little bit more about and I know Michelle that you're an online learning specialist. And that's your area of expertise and also obviously is in your role of heading up customer success. So what's your perspective what makes a customer successful so in this implementation of Moodle. Yeah, I think it really is it starts by looking at the organization's needs. Right, so we take a very customized personalized approach to an implementation, you know we're not just going to give you the same manual we give everybody this, we talk about, you know, what goals are you trying to achieve what's your vision for the learning experience what resources do you have. How do you want to work together. And then we work with the customer at whatever level they need. So for some customers, we have spent a lot of time talking through the instructional design learning design aspects right around content and the activities. And of course we are developing prototypes and templates for them to build their Moodle courses. And with yet others, we're practically embedded in their team, helping them with all aspects related to their Moodle implementation and whether that's work flows curriculum planning the whole breath and that's one of the things that I love about what we've done and what we're going to be able to do even more is that we're not just focused on the tool and the technology and telling you how to click the right button. It really is working with our customers as partners to figure out how to really create incredible learning experiences for those that they serve. And I'm really, when in bringing the learning design experts together across the organizations what kind of background to these people have are they educators or they come from technology backgrounds maybe both. Yeah, we're talking about just this integration. It is so cool to be able to bring together people that you know I've admired and, and, you know, in the space and to have all this expertise. So, gosh, I don't know on average how many years of experience and Moodle all of our folks have, but it's definitely significant. You know, having 10 years of Moodle experience is pretty common across our team. And then if you look at the practical experience we have people who have been working in the government compliance, you know employee training kind of things. We have people on our team who have worked in higher ed. We have others who have worked in education and K 12 levels. We really have people who have lived all of those experiences of our customers so they can really relate and know what they're seeing. And then we add to that all of the education and just engagement in the Moodle community so from the formal education point of view. We have people who have certificates on online learning multiple people have master's degrees and online learning or learning technologies, several that have doctorates, you know, in the area and have really studied that. On top of all of the wealth of information that people have drawn from the Moodle community and years of engagement there where people are talking very specifically about what works in Moodle and the best way to do that. And that's where we're helping define the best practice and also learn from the implementations of others. So, yeah, and so all of our customers get to take advantage of all of that experience and knowledge. That's a very deep pool of talent. And it is. Yeah, and that's awesome because the outcome for learners will be so much better. John, I'm thinking about customer success it's interesting to think about it from a learning design perspective but when you're working with really big contracts so very large institutions or organizations from a workplace learning perspective. They may have slightly, you know, a more a broadest definition of success I'm interested in hearing about that. Yeah, Jonathan hit on a couple of these points earlier but the reliability, the ability to scale Moodle to super large numbers of users and of course the, you know, security is, is a major criteria for success right now. Reliability has always been, you know, something that every customer needs. They're not able to provide but the last few years, the scalability is just gone off the scale. So we've got multiple clients now with academic clients with an excess of 50,000 users, we're supporting a government site that has nearly a million users. And these there were deals in the pipeline they're coming along and, you know, managing Moodle early any application that kind of scale takes a very specific set of expertise in terms of managing cloud infrastructure, security posture, those types of things. You know, we have existing clients also that, you know, colleges, universities, small medium sized companies that were running Moodle or Moodle workplace at a level that they could maintain up to the point of the pandemic and the pandemic just basically let everything on fire. So, you know, IT organizations, internal IT organizations were seeing usage levels, double, triple quadruple, and in some cases just really kind of expanding the point where it was beyond their internal resources and capabilities and that's what we've been able to step in. And you're working with our cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services to, you know, provide, you know, stable secure platforms. Yeah, the pandemic has had a massive impact I can see on the need to scale, scale to serve clients needs. I mean it feels as if, if online learning wasn't already on an exponential growth is accelerated in a massive way. And equally that the notion of online learning as being a really effective way to achieve learner engagement Michelle I think is more widely understood now so you know we're not going to be returning to the traditional classroom 100% there will always be a hybrid model would you agree with that. I would totally I think it's really opened people's eyes as to what's possible and what's can be most effective. Yeah, absolutely. Well Kathy, I know that you are overseeing the integration of the three organizations and I can imagine that is a big job. How many people are coming together in moodle us. I think the last count is a little bit over 50. And then together between middle headquarters and middle us it's possibly over 150. So, it's been a challenge and it continues to be one but it's actually a lot of fun. The people involved are highly experienced. They're excited about the project no one's being dragged kicking and screaming into this. If anything they're basically sort of chomping at the bit to try to get everything done they they're they're ready to go. I understand to it at a really deep level, how important it is to get it right as we do the integration as we pull the teams together. How important it is to get to know each other how important it is to get to know how we want to set up processes and systems. I understand that there are enormous opportunities to this particular merger, and the opportunities involve better services to our clients they involve, involve wonderful work environments for the people who are coming to work for moodle us. So I think that they really have a lot of buy in on this and if anything they would like this to have happened a couple of months ago rather than right now. Many team members are already working together spontaneously to solve a lot of complicated problems for a variety of needs within all three organizations. They're developing ideas and thinking out ideas to become more efficient. They're already establishing strong working relationships with each other just naturally they have a lot in common, they have worked in the same industry, they do a lot of the same things and in a sense, they, I've been calling it the tribe. They are unique in their own ways that have drawn them to moodle and the middle community over the years. And as Michelle mentioned, you know, a lot of folks have more than 10 years of experience with moodle and that is true also I think for all the organizations. So they're, they're really comfortable in, in working with other people who are a lot like them as well, and with clients who have such a wide variety of needs. The management teams have been doing exactly the same. We're more alike than we are different. It's been a lot of work. We've learned a great deal from each other. But I think probably one of the most interesting things I found has been sort of opening the door on moodle headquarters team. And while we have thought a lot about our own companies, we haven't really realized to the extent that we do now, how much remarkable talent sits behind us now or with us. And that is awesome. Personally, I've had an opportunity to work with people in culture, which is just an amazing team in and of itself. I've had opportunities to work with customer success and I've even been working with DevOps, and everyone I've encountered is just so invested in the success of this project and in the success of the customers who are with any one of the single companies that are coming together, but also with the customers that come to us to moodle us as a new entity. The culture holds still a lot of work. No one will deny that. But there's not a team that's more prepared than this team is right now. They're just awesome people. Yeah, that's very exciting. Moodle is a global company. I know that's very important to you, Martin. You must be really excited about all these people joining the big global Moodle footprint in ways. I really am. I mean, I've been really wanting to get to this day of us launching. But as you've been hearing, all of these folks were very complimentary as well. The range of skills and the complementariness of it, like it fits together, it just seems like it was meant to be to come together under the Moodle name. So it's four companies coming together and I couldn't be happier. Fantastic. And we've talked a lot about the benefits potentially of Moodle services to customers in the United States, but they said benefits to Moodle. Moodle HQ is it sometimes known. But yes, so this is about the United States primarily and you know, I've even, you know, Moodle Moots in the US over the past few years. A whole lot of people have talked to me and they were waiting for something like this to happen. And I knew it was going to happen and I would sometimes say just wait a bit longer. And you know, here we are. So now's the time to call us if you're listening. But it is focused on the US and it's a very particular US issue that we that we're that we're focused on together. So high quality services in the US, we have a network of 100 certified partners globally focusing on all the other areas. And they'll continue to do so and the partner network is still growing strong and we're getting into all kinds of, you know, sometimes quite tiny countries, all through the world in South America and throughout Asia in Africa. And that's, and that's really a big part of Moodle going forward. So no changes there. No changes to the community in the way we work with the community. The Moodle users association continues to be a really strong group of people who are helping set the roadmap and that continues as well. I think one of the major things that we are hoping to be a little different is that Moodle. Having this direct connection with services. We have an opportunity to actually strengthen the services of our partners by providing infrastructure and experience on this large scale hosting or hosting lots of people to just provide stronger services globally. And that won't be forced on anybody, but it'll be us, you know, doing the research and the development to provide those solutions and just make Moodle hosting and services globally as high quality as we can make them. Yes, it really is exciting times ahead. Well, if any of you got any questions for each other or anything to add at this point. Any final words, Mum? Well, I did want to reiterate about, you know, the balance of open source and commercial ventures like this that services that open source organizations need to be sustained. And if you look at some of the biggest most important open source projects in the world. So look at Linux. Most of the world all those dot coms all those unicorn billionaire companies completely reliance on Linux to operate. And that is mostly powered by services you look at companies like Red Hat and others. They're the ones who are providing the funding to allow Linux to continue and all of the collaborators will look at WordPress. It's over 40% of the world's public websites run on WordPress completely open source GPL license just like us. But they have WordPress calm and they have services that essentially funds most of that development. And we're no different in a mood also project that's relied on by over two thirds of higher education around the world. A lot of companies and corporates a lot of K 12 all education sectors. And I think we all owe it to all these people and all the world to keep open source projects live and the way to do it is by services and that's what we're doing here. And in addition, it doesn't hurt for us to have even more contact with users. So we just really want to hear what people want, improve the products and get that virtual cycle going where we all win, win, win. A cycle of improvement. I think that's a nice. It's a nice thing to finish on. Well, I want to thank all of you for coming today. Thanks Martin, Jonathan, Michelle, Kathy and John. It's been great to talk to you. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to click the link on the screen and we look forward to talking to you again another time. Thank you.