 Hi everyone. Welcome to our presentation on how to optimize your Moodle Cloud site for success. I'm Barbara. I'm a customer support consultant for Moodle Cloud. I've been with Moodle for just over a year as part of the Moodle Cloud and Moodle support teams. But most of my Moodle experience actually comes before that as an educator for about 10 years using Moodle. My name is Matt. I've been with Moodle since 2015 when I joined the Moodle Cloud team. And as I'm now a technical architect for the Moodle Cloud. I was with Moodle Cloud during COVID, which was a very interesting time. And I was very interested in the previous presentation because it explained the kind of thing that Moodle Cloud aims to do at a much smaller scale. We aim to do about 1% of the example that was given about the Nigeria University for about 1% of the cost as well. So in this presentation we're going to give you an overview of what Moodle Cloud is. Who our users are, common challenges they face, and then a few tips to make everything work a little bit better for you. I'll save everyone some time because the previous presentation you will now know exactly where the software as a service system is. That was well explained before. The difference with Moodle Cloud is that we aim to reduce everything that is customized or made especially for one client. We have thousands during COVID close to 100,000 sites, but the larger plan is limited to 1,000 users. So it gives an idea of the scale of it. Tiffany will have a great presentation about Moodle Cloud a bit later that will explain a bit more what it does. The main difference, and that's where it's more interesting, is what Moodle Cloud is not. Moodle Cloud is not a customized setup. So yeah, there's a few limits very much by design to Moodle Cloud. It's not a customized installation. Some features that require extra infrastructure like global search, for example. Order features seen as better supported by partners are disabled and not available. Think of LDAP or CAS authentication or anything I think to do with external databases. While we offer some great extra features like document converters, some other features are limited. Mainly we don't allow additional plugins and themes. This definitely makes upgrades easier, as was explained before, and improve the security of the platform. Speaking of upgrades, they're run and bulk. The upgrade window, yep, we don't provide a customized upgrade window for each site. And so at this time the customers can't request their upgrades to be at a specific time. And obviously this is not a self-managed server, so customers don't have SSH or even FTP access. So, who are our Moodle Cloud users? We have predominantly individual educators, so single people or micro-organizations of about two to five educators. And in the scenario, the educators are actually taking on the role of the site admin, as well as the content developer and educator. We have some small-to-medium organizations that have a designated site admin to deal with that side of the site, as well as multiple educators, and then very small numbers of larger organizations that actually prefer to use multiple individual Moodle Cloud sites for each department or faculty and sometimes even in conjunction with a Moodle LMS site. To understand what our Moodle Cloud users need, we analyze their common challenges. A few of these are, the complexity of the site admin settings is often underestimated, and therefore the time it takes to learn to use them effectively, particularly managing the roles and permission settings and knowing the authentication and enrollment options that are available as well as troubleshooting issues when trying to set them up. The course backup and restore process is often overlooked until needed. The challenges here are finding and following the course backup options and settings, and then finding the backup area to download and use the files. A very common request is how to delete files. In Moodle Cloud, this is done through the user interface, and the challenge is the process of finding where the files are stored within the site from this list, and then when finding them, accessing and removing them. Of course, improved site speed and better performance is always wanted. Site speed and performance concerns are often caused by compounded issues, but some of the simple causes are slow page loads due to media files that are unnecessarily large and take a long time to load. Slow course copies due to large courses or large question banks within the course. Slow response or timeouts when large complex reports are run. Slow question bank loads due to large numbers of questions, and slow site speed due to large numbers of users accessing a quiz concurrently. So from the challenges raised by our customers and users, we have identified a few ways that you can optimize a Moodle Cloud site for better performance and improved student experience. So in the next few slides, we'll look at course content and structure, question bank structure, exam, test sessions, activity completion and conditions, and backup schedule. So for the course content and structure, balance the amount of text and media for student engagement, of course, as well as page load times. Therefore, use essential media at the smallest possible but appropriate file size. Use the course layout show one section per page to display course sections over multiple pages and therefore only load content when required. If you are creating and copying course templates, keep them simple. Use a skeleton template to build up a course rather than copy a course and try and remove the files. Then maintain course content. My deleting unused content using a good file naming practice helps with locating where your files are. With the question bank, we all know the question bank stores questions for quizzes, but understanding what it can do and how it works helps us use it more efficiently. Questions are stored in a database and can be organized into categories and subcategories. This is particularly useful when setting up quizzes to limit what is accessed when the quiz runs. Maintain questions and the question bank by identifying and removing unused questions and categories. For optimal performance, keep the question bank as simple and small as possible. And lastly, avoid unnecessary duplication. Be aware of what is included in course copies and imports so that the question bank does not contain unwanted questions and categories from other courses. This comes as a shock after the previous presentation, but for a large model cloud site where there might be a thousand users, it might cause issues if everybody attempts to connect at the same time to do a quiz at the same time. And here, the problem is not so much the quiz. It's much more the fact that there's, in this case, 954 people trying to log in at the same time and expecting to come into the quiz at the same time right there. With a maximum number of a thousand users, model cloud is capable of hosting quizzes for all users, but we've got to consider how that's being implemented. It's not so much the quiz as much as the connection that said. Model is to create the session as to store it, and that takes some effort. Having 500 students connect at once will slow the system down much better if people connect in a staggered way. And if on top of that, everyone expects to start the quiz at the same time, it will lead to some suboptimal performance and not meet expectations of students or teachers. So in this case, the recommendation is to suggest to students to connect a bit before time. The other challenge that we've seen a lot of model cloud sites facing over the last few years has to do with the combination of completion tracking and conditional access. There's some teachers that over-engineer their courses, not necessarily with a lot of benefit to the geological goals. And while the performance has improved a lot in the last few years, we've seen courses where hundreds and hundreds of course modules are all interlinked with using both activity completion tracking and conditional access leading to pretty bad page load times, especially for the first time the students loaded. So this is a feature that's probably better used with moderation when it makes sense to do so. And finally, just before escaping for the break, I'll say something that's pretty obvious, but that sadly a few people forget until it's too late. Take advantage of the automated backups. They work really well. And it's much better if they use at a reasonable frequency. They'll be part of a big model cloud site export at the end when you want to move your site elsewhere. There you go. Okay, so with all of this in mind, all our customer challenges and the tips, there are three fundamental things to consider before designing a model cloud site. Yet to know model cloud, the product, and the software model. As with any software, learning to use it starts with understanding what it is designed to do, its purpose, and what it can do, its possibilities. Then learning how to use the features becomes easier. Secondly, understand the digital world. Occasionally it's good to revisit the basic concepts. Content is data. That means everything you add to your site. But to get your students to see the content, it needs to be transmitted to them. The more content there is on a page, especially high resolution media files, the longer it will take the page to load. Each student's region, internet, and personal network infrastructure will also determine these load times. Thirdly, evaluate your student needs and what your organization needs to deliver. What type of content does your site need? What type of assessments need to be carried out? What learning experience do you want your students to have? This question should actually be, how will your students be engaging with this content? What is their reality? Only then start planning and designing your optimized Moodle Cloud site. A well-built course leads to better outcomes. Moodle Cloud is a great solution to teach online. Give it a try. Thank you.