 Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Okay, so let me just move on to the first slide. So here we are. My name is Jason Norton. I am the Head of Virtual Learning Environments at University College London and the Moodle product owner. Sorry. Alisa Spark, my Moodle technical lead and service operations manager and Aria Suley, who is, was our learning technologist recently at UCL and has now moved on to bettering greater things. So just a little bit about UCL. UCL is made up of 11 academic faculties. We are the largest campus-based university in the UK now. We are second largest university by total enrollment with only the opening university being larger and we have the largest postgraduate enrollment in the UK as well. I put this up because UCL is an institution that politely acquires other institutions. It grows by taking over other universities and has spread through North London. And this has led to a very unique situation about how our faculties work together. The multidisciplinary and recently polycentric is the word that we are using at the moment. So this is very important for where I'm going. Our Moodle is big. We have, on average, 50,000 unique users a day, 140,000 sessions every day, and it's grown substantially. As I said, our student numbers are now around 49,000. So it's a big Moodle for the UK. And this has left us, as we've grown, with some quite serious problems. We've been very traditional. Pre-2018, we had one production Moodle, which was on-premise. But every year, we would take a snapshot, which would become our permanent record of that Moodle. And we'd freeze it and say, right, here's a snapshot, bang, frozen, and that's the record. And I know a lot of other institutions do this. But we also have to comply with data regulations and our faculty say, well, we want our students to be able to go back and look at their courses. So we want you to maintain those Moodles. And we got a point where we were having seven years of snapshots going back. And we were having to maintain all of those snapshots and the verges of Moodle and keep them upgraded. And it just kept our small team exceptionally busy. And it also made a bad experience for our students, because say you're a third-year student and you want to go look at your first-year course, which Moodle am I on? I'm going to go back to that Moodle and find my course and has it been hidden? And we can't search. So there's a lot of complexities to this. But the key drivers for that was retention of the information and keeping the student journey complete. Now, it then changed again in 2018 because the institution decided to move in a process called our late summer assessment program. So this is where students, for whatever reason, have failed to complete their course but need to continue into the summer to do reassessments, new essays, whatever. And they still need access to those courses that we were snapshotting. So we're going, oh, hang on, we've gone from a period where we had one Moodle, then we had a snapshot, and pretty much the snapshot was where people were going, look, you can't go and work there. But now we had, oh, hang on, we've now got to make that snapshot available for them to work in for a period of four months. So we were then maintaining two production Moodles simultaneously and then snapshotting, basically making that second one read-only at the end of November. That's created a lot of difficulty, especially over the summer period. We worked with catalysts to build a hub page so the students would land on one page and go, which Moodle one we're going to go to? Am I a postgraduate? Am I a late summer assessment student? Where am I going? It created a lot of confusion for students and for our staff. But we still have these underlying principles of data retention and late summer assessment support and keeping the student materials together. So that's where we were. And what we realized when we sat down and looked at this is that the idea of an academic year for us does not exist. We have so many different academic processes, different groups of students, different faculties, medical schools, undergraduate, postgraduate, all the courses starting at different points, multi-cohorts coming in, and we go, well, how can we keep freezing this? How can we keep having one Moodle and then shelving these things off to the side? And we said, well, we can't. We just simply can't. So in late 2019, 2020, myself and Alistair sort of sat down and went, well, how are we going to deal with this? We need to remove snapshots somehow. We need to move to a single instance of Moodle. Makes sense. The idea of past in progress, future, should have some real meaning, whereas at the moment, everything's pretty much in progress. So we also wanted to empower tutors and have one environment, wanted to make use of things like global search across all courses, and we wanted to automate all these processes where we could. And then obviously, 2020, our plans go out the window. Everything that we wanted to do, COVID. The whole focus was reshifted to making sure the institution survived for the period, everything shifting online, massive changes. We moved our Moodle to the cloud to support it. We partnered with Catalyst IT and we had a whole load of work. So all that work, we basically had to forget. But time moves on, 2021-22. We suddenly went, well, we're going to do this. So, and our institution was bringing in agile and a much more stronger product focus. We established our own development team and we worked in partnership with Catalyst IT to design what we call the course lifecycle tool or CLC for short. And it's been a really productive partnership with Catalyst because the way we worked, one of the key things that we worked is that we didn't just go, oh, here's some development we want you to do, Catalyst. Come back later. We actually partnered with Catalyst internally and one of the developers has joined our development team and she worked hand in hand, day by day, to develop what we wanted. And this was, the key things was, we got rid of course resets. We connected to our student information system and built the category structure in our Moodle based on what our student information system was doing and we built a course rollover tool. So I'm just going to hand over to Ori to talk about our date manager. So just before the course rollover tool was created because we needed it for the previous academic year effectively, we worked with Catalyst. They amended the OU date manager plugin to provide the ability to amend dates and names of the Moodle activities that have dates. So anything date sensitive, such as your forums, database, lessons, et cetera, in one page. So the idea, and I'll show you in a minute when we go in demonstration is you have a report, you open that report, so you've got all your activities in one place, especially all your assignments, et cetera, and you go and amend the title if it's date sensitive, amend the date. You can make a date available or unavailable as well and the brilliant thing which I love is that at the bottom of the page, you get a timeline of all your activity dates so you can see where they fit in in your course. Clearly rehearsed this. Yeah, so I guess that coming back to that timeline, we implemented the date manager in that summer because we only had so much capacity to get things done for that summer, but we then needed to prepare for the following academic year. And the first building block for this whole suite of tools was to create the category structure in Moodle based on our department, faculties, department, and entities which are recorded in SITS. So one of our developers, Shagun, who's in the room over there, actually built that integration to generate the category structure in Moodle and that way we would do that every academic year so we can reflect the changing and evolving nature of UCL and keep that current for that specific academic year. Then the next step from that was to look at the rollover so the idea being you can do a course backup, you can do a course copy. We wanted to do, you can do a backup, restore core Moodle has a course copy but our rollover does the copy but it does a lot of suggesting in terms of where the course should go in terms of that category structure, what it should be called, looking at the SITS data for the specific modules that are mapped for that course and providing the course end dates, start dates and allowing that timeline on the dashboard to then be populated and accurate. So let's go back a step. This is a course, a Moodle, a module in our Moodle. So this is actually, I'm showing you in what we call demo environment which is where we've done a lot of our training and testing for the course rollover tool. It's a little bit slower than normal Moodle so we've prepared some things. So what you would do typically on the module, you just click in the settings or course administration block and then course rollover and it will take you to this beautiful page which has the two steps. So the first step is the alignment and in here we select what kind of alignment we want for our course. So module, program or miscellaneous. So these are the different types of category that we have in Moodle. So once we select that automatically the tool will know which category type it will go in for that student record delivery basically. And then the next bit looks at whatever was there last year. So in the last module, 2021, I've got some mapping or alignments to the student record systems for enrollments. And if they don't use the student record system for enrollments, they can just search for a module delivery code in the student's record system with a search box and it will then suggest it here. So it suggests automatically the next academic year in this case or if there's no data because they use manual enrollments or the enrollments plugin, they can just search for it in here. It won't work without the student's record system data because it needs all of that to create the next page. So basically I would just click module and next on this page that's all I have to do as a tutor or course administrator. And then on the next page, it will suggest my current course data. I can change dates because these are the ones pulled from the student record system and actually I've got a late summer assessment that's been mentioned earlier. I can just extend it to later in the year if I wanted to be kind of in the in progress area of module for longer. And then I have a suggested naming convention which we suggest they don't change, obviously. And that's automatically suggested from the student's record system and so are the start and end date of the module on the category. In this case, because I've chosen module, it just goes straight to the course kind of category. And then I just click schedule rollover and it will send me, it will schedule that rollover, pick it up the next instance and then I just get an email when it's ready and I can just go and amend my course as an academic or as a course administrator. And I can just return to my course at any point. I can go and check. This is a little bit slow, that's all. I can go and check the status by just going in the course rollover which is also useful for other teams. So if there's a team member that's done a rollover and somebody else is trying to do it, they know that somebody else has tried it, don't repeat it and do multiple copies. So they can see that here, I can see it's currently pending and there's different statuses. If it failed, we would know because we had a report built as well as part of the work of Catalyst IT and our developers. And from that report, we would monitor and support the failures there were and as one, we've fixed them and tell the users but also where they were common failures, we would actually kind of patch that effectively in the next incremental release of the tool, release the fix for it. So we were trying to be as proactive as possible in incrementing the tool regularly throughout the process. And just very briefly, once I've got my, I've lost my mouse, that's fine. Yay. Once I've done my rollover, also these are the category structure which I failed to show you earlier. But once I've done my rollover, I can also go in reports, which I can't see that far. Okay. Not just going there. There, my reports. And then in here, I've got date manager. And as an academic or administrator, I can go and review all the dates for my course and update them all for next academic year. And I don't know why it's not working. But I keep clicking. Yay. So what I do here, I tend to do is expand all. So I can see all my activities in one page. I think it clicked on it. I can also select specific activities here if I wanted to. So if you want to just change assignments or forums, et cetera, you can actually focus on that or expand all. And then go to the specific activities, change the dates or enable the date if you want to. And then at the bottom of the page, you also have the timeline I mentioned. There are a lot of activities in that course. I'm not sure about the course design. But, oh yeah, not creating, because there were three years plus, okay. But you would get an activity for the module that runs within one academic year. You would get a timeline and then save your changes when everything's ready. And that's it. That's it. Still me. I guess it was probably worth mentioning that the date manager, there's a link to that email we mentioned, once serve all over is complete, there's a link to this report to edit directly. And the idea is we're relying on the core modal processes to do backup and restore, and it's gonna shift the dates automatically, but this allows the finer grain, final tweaks to be done, essentially. Oh yes, I failed to mention that when you do the rollover, if you got assignments in your course, it actually moves the dates based on the assignment, the modules start and end dates, so they don't expire, especially if some of you use plagiarism checking plugins of a certain brand. So yeah, so you don't want any classes to expire. So to support staff in this process, it was a big change for them because they were used to this snapshot and having to reset things over the summer, and they only had a really short time period to reset things, and things changed quite a lot. The whole process and timeline has changed. So the release of the tool was on the 1st of June, just before a British bank holiday, and we actually started training from the 6th of June, but we had the documentation ready before that. So we have a weekly, it's conference weekly, and we put together different scenarios, depending on what they want to do for that, and explaining what the scenarios were. We had a training page and also a place where they could see known issues so they can self-resolve things or don't report an issue that's already known. And so the idea was to support them with this documentation, but also two or three 30-minute sessions per week, so scheduled sessions at different times, different days to allow different people to attend via our teams, so the staff could just come along, register for those sessions. And we had three trainers, initially me and then two other trainers, and then the weekly drop-in session that we allow again 30 minutes every Thursday was extremely well attended. We're not used to having drop-in sessions that well attended, so it was really good. The engagement of staff has been really good for that. Yeah, so just want to talk very quickly about the benefits, because this is the start of a journey that we're going to keep moving now. It's already made a better student experience from getting me to snapshots, having a single Moodle instance. Things like global search will now, as we expand those courses, a student will better look across their entire experience rather than there's the one experience of one Moodle and having to jump to another Moodle. The staff experience has improved because it's actually given control to our course teams. They can now roll over the courses and reset the courses when they want, how they want to, which is where as previously, they had to wait for a master date to occur, for a snapshot to occur, then there's a whole lot of work bunched up to that point or bunched after. So that's all gone. A natural experience, whereas we used to do course resets and the time that a course reset would take and all the date change thing, that could take quite a while. I mean, what I said quite a while, 10 to 15 minutes, say, just to get a course sorted. Now they can do a course roll over in two to five. So it's been a substantial course time saving. And when we say that we've got over 6,000 active courses per year, that's a lot of time when you have those figures together. We're also having a better alignment with SITS, our student information system, that's something we're going to build. So this is one of the fundamental sort of base blocks that we're moving towards. And obviously one Moodle. Obviously we have a historical archive that will now basically decay and those will be shut off. But all of our ongoing instances and years will now be in one Moodle. And first, that's really critical. Yeah, and I guess the magic kind of probably wasn't obvious, but it's that piece of relying on that data integration with the student record system to auto populate everything, which makes StarFly Visa is a huge amount of work under the hood to enable. But that's what made that tool so useful. The way forward, we've implemented bulk roll over at the start of the month. We are working on implementing the read-only functionality that we had in the snapshots within our live production Moodle. So we can't be relying on not writing to the database, because that's all we're doing. We're just dropping the rights previously, which was a nice way to do it at the time, but you can't do that in prod. So we're relying on context freezing, which was implemented in core a few versions ago. And our MVP's done and hopefully going live in November. The next stage from that would be automating the roll over. So potentially SITS, as we go create the new category structure for the new academic year, if all these alignments that we've had StarF enter this year are all good, they could automatically generate most of those without having the human invention of clicking through those screens, which I think might benefit again, Starftime. And just generally, we want to reintegrate with SITS and integrate more deeply. So things like faster enrollments from SITS, so we could have push enrollments, so instant enrollment in Moodle, not waiting for an overnight sync process. And our SITS, as apparently, indeed going to the cloud by Christmas, date to be announced. And so one of the key things that comes with that is that we need to move to an integration model that is API based. And I guess it's one of the points is I really think it's a shame that there's 400 Moodles with SITS and Moodle, and there's 400 integrations between SITS and Moodle. And we'd really like to see if there's anyone out there who's interested in joining us on a journey to make a really nice Moodle SITS integration that's API based that the whole community could use. And I guess that ties in with generally releasing this rollover plugin. I think we're generally really keen to release these, but at the moment it's really tied in with our data integration, which is not very nice in some aspects. But if we can have a really nice standardized SITS integration and then that integrates with this, then that could also be a tool that benefits more widely. Any questions? Thank you very much. First question here from Marty Dolberg. So I mean, I have thousands of questions, but obviously I can't ask them. But the one thing I'm curious about is the OU date report. What modifications have you made and is it available to other people? So the short answer of that is, I don't know because I was on holiday when it was made. And they were mostly hacky ways of changing, but we obviously looking at Moodle 4 at the moment and all of those hacky ways of changing will hopefully be contributions to the official plugin that we can upstream. I need to speak to Tim at some point. Thanks. You are copying course content to the new analogy without user activity. You mean like backup and restore or something more? I mean, backup and restore doesn't copy teacher glossaries and witty pages. Teachers ask for them. So if I understand your question, you're asking if we do like a backup and restore with clearing all the data. So we do, but we don't. So backup and restore and then there's a reset process and there is a configuration page for the tool that's there where we can exclude some things from there. So for example, we don't include glossaries and databases. So these are the content is copied over and then in the guidance I showed earlier on the Wiki we tell them if you want that cleared, if you don't want an empty glossary, you just duplicate it and delete the old ones. So and that granularity goes on to groups as well. We can carry on groups over. They don't get deleted. So that all the groups are there ready to be added in there. But again, it's like, it depends on the needs, but yeah. Hold on just a second. Do you say the microphones or we have? So probably the key is to perform the reset, excluding some models and then the backup. That's the key to. No, it's backed up, restored, and then some elements reset. Yeah. Have you taken into the consideration the growth of database tables now that all the courses are being kept in one single model? Because if you reset it every year, you have a for one year long database tables. Now you'll have it for seven or eight years. Yeah, I mean, the size of our database is quite large, but the bulk of it is the log table. We've got 100. Well, I think it's probably 300 gigs at this point of logs. That's where the storage is. The other tables, there's a few gigs that I'm not really concerned about that. And we're all in AWS and scalable and very bright splitting and all that stuff. So one of the things with the rollovers, we saw if there's a lot of rollovers happening at a particular time, you might have an impact on the database and the load or the system. And we want to cap it and ensure it doesn't have effect system performance. So it uses all of the Moodle schedule tasks and ad hoc tasks. So it only does three at a time. We could do more if we really needed to, but it uses all the good stuff in core Moodle to manage the load. And it happens, basically, hence why it sends an email when it's done, rather than telling you it's going to be done in five minutes. I think we do have time for one more question. Hello, thank you. I wanted to know if the plugins you had developed are available for everyone? So that's what I was saying. At the moment, they're not published. We're quite happy to share and maybe have a discussion because the first three weeks of development will work for anyone because it is just back up with store and a target of a category anywhere in Moodle. Pretty much everything after that has been really tied to our data integration and where we store in specific internal plugins our data integration. So that stuff probably wouldn't work for you, but you could probably rip it out and tie it to your own data integration. But you're happy to share it and talk.