 Okay, this session will be our presentation from Martin Dugmas. He was sharing the Moodonade as the way to organize OER globally. Yeah, so I changed the screen to you, Martin. You can start. We have 20 minutes to go. All right. Thank you, Marian. And hello everybody. Thanks for coming along. And very nice actually to be in a conference where there are people in my time zone for a change. I'm in Perth, Australia. And that's not that common these days. So I'll share some screens here. So I'm the Moodle CEO and founder among other things, but I'm just going to talk about one very specific project, which is MoodleNet. So MoodleNet is a new thing that we've been working on for a while. And the idea for it and the purpose of it is to try and fill a gap that I've seen that to try. Generally when I see OER initiatives and there are many and lots of great ones, they tend to be repositories of content. And they are all over the world in different places and different languages. And what I think there needs to be is a way to make those things easier to find from one point. And that really needs to be a curation process. I don't see that as being an automatic thing. It needs to be done by human beings who are saying there's a good thing over here and a good thing over there. And these are the things that are really useful for teaching this subject at this level in this language. Given privacy and security concerns and also as a general trend of openness, it makes sense that this system is not yet another .org site or .net site that has the same problems as the other ones. So we're trying to build this in a federated way so that lots of people can run different pieces of it and it fits together into a single system that is easy to use. And another good example of something that works like that is, for example, email. Nobody owns the email. Everyone owns email and everyone uses email and we've all been using it for 30 years. It's one of the most successful communication platforms that exists. So we also want to make sure that there are places in there to store data if you want to into that network so that you can upload files into it. So they have a perhaps a longer life than they might on just a site that exists for the length of a grant or something like that. So this has been an idea of being trying to get off the ground for a few years, but we only really put some resources into it as Moodle in 2018. And we formed a very small development team of five part-time people that came on board slowly during 2018. That team were very enamored with a particular standard called Activity Pub. This is a W3C standard and they focused on the prototype was really seen as a social network more than a repository. And there was a few, we've had a few iterations of that and some of you may know those and have been part of those even. Unfortunately, this particular approach did not meet expectations a few times in a row late last year and into the early part of this year. The UX wasn't really working the complexity of the way it was designed under the surface wasn't great. And I put this here not to place blame on anyone or anything, but just to show that making software is quite hard. And also just to explain actually if you've been hearing about MoodleNet for a couple of years why you can't use it yet. And this sort of tells the story that we had most of the team left when they failed to hit the release time at the middle of this year. And the current state is that we have a MoodleNet 1.0 beta with that software that was developed. And you can go and try it now if you want go to Moodle.net and you can try it. And you're probably pretty soon running to some of the problems that I'm talking about. But that's where we got to with that. Given the problems with it, we actually took a step back over the past couple of months and we've been redesigning it again, learning from our previous mistakes. And we're looking at a new team to take this forward. We're simplifying the technology. So the stack of technologies to build this thing. And we're also simplifying the user user experience as well. And so that's what I want to show you a bit of in this session. One thing I really learned out of all of that is if you're going to build a real production system, it makes sense to use production established production techniques. And this was a bit of an experiment with me. I let MoodleNet be a project off to the side and there's a term for it called the Skunkworks project, which works for some things perhaps. But if you're going to try and build something that's very stable and going to last for years, I would advise that you don't let this happen. This team wasn't very well connected with the rest of Moodle and our organization that was funding it. And it went down a path that wasn't really very sustainable. So I would advise you if you are building a technology, any kind of technology project to try and make sure it's embedded in a sustainable thing. And that the people themselves are also embedded in that sustainable thing so that it becomes better supported. So I've learned something there and that's that's a good thing. So the key features are we are we're dropping this communities feature from MoodleNet. There was quite an emphasis on creating communities around the topic. And there are already so many places to do that. We have, you know, all the social media and many other places to create communities. OEG is a community too. We don't we shouldn't be trying to do that. It's a lot of work to do it well. And no one has really a lot of space for yet another community. I'm sorry that flipped forward. So we're just really focusing on the core core thing which is resources that are tagged the subjects and other metadata. Collections of those and comments and likes on things. So very simple, very clear mode. And the mechanisms that work around this is like Spotify and YouTube. Both of these have places where you can declare a resource or upload a video or, you know, a song. And then there's playlists and playlists are controlled by individuals who say here's a playlist of things. And we want to really want to keep it as simple and easy to use as that. And then a community communities will kind of arise because you'll have a lot of people following particular playlists or particular resources. I don't think there's many technical people in this in this meeting but if you're interested, we are actually making the software stack less esoteric than it was that was also a problem. We had people building technologies on a framework which was there's not many developers around who know how to use elixir and these kinds of things. So we're looking at something that's a lot has a lot more support and there's a lot of developers around who know this stuff and that'll really help it take off as an open source project as well. So graph QL is graph query language is really interesting and I thought somebody might be interested to see this one of the development drawings from that we have recently, but you define concepts with relationships in a kind of a graph. And you're able to store things in the database, just as objects. It's a very fluid way. It means we can grow the system without a lot of development time in the future. So it's a pretty good thing. I'm imagining a lot of you will be interested by the metadata and and how we would define resources in this thing. And that's really tricky because there are so many options and standards around that that choosing them as is hard. So this is what we've chosen and I'm really open. We're very open to feedback. We have implemented some of these already but they can change if we get better info but the best, the best way to define what our education levels for example if you want to say that this resource is suitable for, you know, lower high school. The best thing we can find is the international standard classification of education or I said, and the 2011 is the most recent version and that defines the levels of education. Similarly for the taxonomy of subjects or fields. Again, there's no single international standard but the best one we have is the international standard classification of education fields from 2013. I have to say both of these are not the most obvious to me and my background or to anyone and anyone's background what they've tried to do is is is to make something. And this is UNESCO project to make something that that works for across the globe. So you can have equivalencies in levels and subjects. There'll also be a folksonomy on top layered on top of that so a hashtag mechanism as well. Licenses we're definitely pushing creative commons, plus others. We're not restricting ourselves to particularly creative commons licenses because a lot of resources out there already come with certain licenses and we can't change those. So we need to be able to support the system. This is an interesting one like how do you define pedagogically what the thing is, is it a lesson plan is it a text is it. What is the format this is like what is it for pedagogically is it a whole course. So we had to build our own for that because we just could not find a single good definition and very happy if you know one to if you let us know but the I triple E, and then double and core systems had some of it. But we needed to extend it with things that they didn't have same for formats. The format of the thing is that is it a PDF is it a video is it a that kind of thing we need to have a reason to develop something ourselves languages we just use ISO that's pretty easy. So those are the main metadata being attached to every resource. So this is what the new UX looks like this is an early peak this is a mock from a mockup done by UX, one of our UX team based on a number of new discussions. The current interface go look at moodle.net but this is roughly what the new interface is going to look like in a couple of months. So, what we're looking at here is a fictional university called University of Western Samoa, and this is their moodle net instance. There are, there'll be many instances of the software around. When you do a search, you're able to search all of them. This particular instance is this site. So, we want to we want to make sure that this site which probably will focus on particular interests or subjects shows that so there's so much you can customize this front page for your own instance and it'll be all the word cloud of the subjects that are being used in this instance. And some new use as well related to what's happening on this server. This is something that the old moodle net didn't have and it was really turns out to be quite important. So if you dive into a particular hashtag in this instance say boomerangs because I have quite interesting boomerangs. I make them. You might have collections or around boomerangs and these are boomerangs throwing and boomerang crafting techniques and boomerang physics. And also resources that are tagged with that as well. And there are comments relating to this subject and you can follow the subject. So if you're interested in any new stuff that's coming in on the subject, you can follow that and get notifications. Going a bit deeper into one of those collections you could see a collection is owned by somebody. So it's cute. Every every collection has a curator and here are the resources in that collection. Now you can start to see the integrations for LMS is so moodle will be the first one of course because we're making it. But we want to make this open to any anywhere you want to push this collection to because a collection is going to be a very good basis for a any particular online course. You might want to just push all these into your online course and then play with them in there and work them into the rest of your course. If you aren't the curator, you might want to suggest a resource. Pardon spelling because our UX guys from Spain. The you might want to as another person to say hey you know what you're missing a really cool resource here and you suggest one or you upload one and then the curator can accept it or not. And again comments at that level and we go down one level deeper into a particular resource and there'll be previews tagging and so on. You can just send that off to some other system and and again comments. So this is sort of similar to a YouTube page in this case, but this could easily be a whole moodle course here. This could be a PDF. This could be a website. It could be any of those things. Along the top you'll see there's this the things that you're interested in your own things that you're following always appear there so you can always you know you probably have five or 10 things that you're always following and you can jump to them very quickly at the top there. This is what the search page could look like so that when you do a search for boomerang at the top here it shows you here the subjects and collections and that are related and here are particular resources. And this is where if you check this box and say other moodle net sites that will do the search across the whole world through all of the moodle net sites, which are all connected via a giant search engine. And you're able to filter down by license or by type or by date or other things as well. And then of course you have profiles, a user profile for yourself, where you can control and there's going to be a notion of points that you build up. You gain points for doing things so anytime you upload resources or create collections or like or comment on things you gain points. And this is someone else's profile. You can also give people points. So if you just like what someone's doing and you just want to give them a something you can do that too. So social media doesn't really have that you can follow somebody, but maybe you don't want to follow everything they're doing you just want to give them some sort of kudos so the idea is that there'll be a way to do that as well. And that's it like other things we're kind of leaving out we're just keeping it super simple. And we really want to make this a usable solid first release. So naming for that in very in early in 2021. It's not going to take as long as the previous versions did because we already have a lot of the pieces and a lot of the work is done. We have a much better idea of what we're doing and we're keeping it simpler. We are hiring if you're interested in getting involved. Talk to me very keen to talk to anyone who's interested in making this concept of reality. When this release comes out and it's available and we will have one main instance running at moodle net and that will be connecting to others and so there's there's ways you can help. We hope you like it and you will use moodle net which will we will always maintain as a free service and it'll always be the primary drop in point. You can run a server yourself to extend that network. Maybe you have a particular interest in curating OER in your area and you'd rather do that on your own server and have full control over that. Then fantastic. And then you just you just tell the moodle net network that you have the server and it'll appear in searches for everyone else. We'll need help finding funding and developers to improve the functionality from that point. There'll always be improvements we can be doing. For example, integrations with other software is going to be a pretty early one. And lastly, I think that if we had a place like this to store curations of OER, it would be great if new and old OER projects. Could see that as part of their part of their project to, you know, as well as creating repository of things to make sure they get listed in moodle net somewhere in some instance of moodle net to say look we have all these resources and that can be an automated thing. So that's that appears in the network can be easily found. And then other people can curate that into their own collections as necessary. So that's some things we see coming up. So I'm, I'm going to stop there. That's a brief update on moodle net and where we're at and what we're doing. Get in touch. I think we have some time for questions if there's any. Okay, thank you Martin. Yeah, you are right on time. It's almost one minute. I'm half German. That's how that works. That's one question for all of you. That is how to deal with grant granularity of items such as the media or your files. Anything you have income on that. So we are. That's these open questions. We're really trying to keep that fluid. That in the description of the type of resource. That that is one those things are mentioned. So you're able to say this thing this resource is a whole course of things. It's a collection of things. So you might just be pointing to a site that has a million things on it. And you're able to say that. In the search, you could you'll be able to choose what granularity you're looking for. So if you're looking for a particular thing, you might say, well exclude the big sites and or something like that. So. Okay. I think there are more to talk about. So I welcome everyone to to discuss more in the OIG connect with you. Yeah, I think you will be there always. Thank you everyone. I'll say she will end here.