 Hello, it's very much a pleasure to be here. So the first time we've had a Moodle event in this corner of the US, which as you said is a very unique place. And I'm really glad that we're here. I'm gonna point out the obvious that this isn't a massive conference and it's because we had a couple of moods this year. We had a hurricane and about six weeks ago everything was looking a bit scary and different and we just about canceled the whole thing. And last minute we decided to keep going. I wanna really thank everyone who has come here. What I, when I see a group this large though, I still say, I can't talk to you all in this time we have anyway, except for all at once, but not individually. So I think we can still, and we will still have a lot of rich conversations and there's gonna be a lot of good connections to be made. So I'm really looking forward to the next couple of days. I have my slides somewhere here. Here we go. Are we good? Can you switch over? There we go. So, so welcome. I have just come off the, I'm in the middle of like five weeks of travel. I've just come up through South America and then through the US and then I'm going to Europe and I'm gonna go to Asia and I end up in Kuala Lumpur and then back home to Perth. So it's around the world. And I feel a little bit like I'm doing a tour and I'm a bit of a frustrated rock star. I play drums and I didn't get anywhere with it. So, but I'm thinking next time I do this I'm gonna get tour dates on the back of the shirt. So let's call this the empowering educators tour. And I wanna get straight into it and talk about how this year is a little bit different or a lot different for Moodle than any previous time in our history and a very pivotal time and a very exciting time. At the beginning of this year we sort of republished our mission and vision for the whole project. Some of you may remember the mission we had before and it was like a bullet list with a whole bunch of stuff that was crammed in there and we tried to boil it down and this was the result. And it's about empowering educators to improve our world. A critical thing with that mission was I had to fit on a t-shirt and you're getting one of these t-shirts or one of the other, there's two styles, the other style. That's every word in that is very important and that's why we exist. That's why this whole thing is here. Our vision is to give the world the most effective platform for learning. That may seem more obvious but the mission is important and I want to drill down into the reasons why that is the mission. Let's start with our context. So the pinned tweet that I have right now is a picture of that and I like to, I don't know, I always like to look at pictures of the earth for like, I don't know, 30 years. This is this little speck of mud floating in the cosmos. That's our context. That's all we have to live on. That's the only, that's our home, it's shared. And as Tom was alluding to, I think all of us have an equal right to be on this thing along with the animals and the plants and everything. And it's, we're at the point now where we're actually having a lot of control over this thing and we're endangering this thing. So overall though, we've done all right as a species, as a human species. This is some graphs of the last 200 years and it shows some of our progress in, for example, reducing extreme poverty from something like 94% 200 years ago down to only 10% live in extreme poverty now. So it's still quite a big number but it's getting better, right? Basic education and literacy. We're talking about the basics. That's improving. There's only 15% of people in the world can't read now. So good job us. Democracy, 50% of the world has some sort of government where everyone gets a say in it. Now you can argue about the implementations of that and sometimes the results of that in particular instances but I think everyone would agree that it's probably a good idea that everyone gets some say in how their houses run. Only 14% of the world isn't vaccinated and only four out of 100 of our kids are dying before they're five. So you know, we're doing okay relatively. Now the UN, which I always wish, because I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, I always wished the UN was like in the science fiction books where you had like world governments that would create world currencies and like do cool stuff but our UN is a little bit more restricted and has to work with a lot of countries but they've come up with 17 sustainable development goals. So these are 17 things that they say we have to do just to make the earth sustainable just to make living here something tenable for the next, you know, 500 years say. I'm gonna focus on a few of those. I like to really just focus on these ones particularly because they're very more impactful I guess. So number one, we have a massive increasing inequality going on. There is a tendency for the gap between the lowest earners and wealth to be very far apart from the highest. At the beginning, sorry, about a year ago was 143 people at the top. Their wealth was equal to the bottom 50%. So you know, like we're talking about three and a half billion people at the bottom. At the beginning of this year, that number was down to eight and in July, that number was down to five. So it seems inevitable. We're all gonna be working for Mark Zuckerberg at some point. And he's running for president I heard. Awesome. Food, food, water, security. A lot of the world doesn't have, I don't wanna pick on Mark because there was four others in that list as well. Food, water, security in many countries due to reasons, they can't rely on food. A lot of what's happened in Syria is because of climate change and droughts going on in the country and people had to move into the cities and that exacerbated political problems, et cetera, right? Food and water security. 65 million people don't have a country to live in and on the move. And that's going up. Climate change is, there's so much evidence for it. All sorts of things are happening, more craziness in the climate. It's so slow that it's hard to perceive and we get thrown off by the occasional hurricane or drought here and there, but it's the trends that we have to worry about. Data privacy and ownership. There's massive battles going on now for who owns all this stuff that we think about that we're making and who controls the systems for how we collaborate and work together. We're rushing headlong into automating all kinds of jobs, all sorts of things are being automated. And I have a computer science background and I'm as excited as the next person about the possibility of automating, say, cars or all kinds of menial jobs such as being, I don't know, I'm not gonna pick at any, but are we making plans for the people who don't have those jobs in the next generation? What are we all gonna do? How are we gonna live? If the economy kind of requires you to have an income from a job that you've applied for. Healthcare quality. Some countries do healthcare better than others. I'll leave it at that. Education quality. We talked about basic education, but wouldn't it be cool if everybody had a college degree, like everybody? Just think about that situation, what that world would be like. So, look, for me, I think to solve those kind of problems, we need these kinds of people. You need people who are globally oriented, multi-culturally aware, by which I mean you can't understand or have any empathy for a refugee, unless you understand it's just a person on that side of the planet in that particular situation. And environmentalists, so actually having some awareness of impact on the planet and things around us, and being caring, and being citizens. Citizenship is an interesting thing. It's not necessarily, in my view, just the fact that you were born on a piece of land, and then you get to vote for someone. It's more that you are able to think about the issues and vote responsibly and take part in civic activities here and there. Maybe not just voting every four years for one of two choices. I think if we had a planet full of people like that, we could solve those big problems pretty quick. But there's a lot of forces against us, and we have to work towards that. For me, it's all about education. I think a lot of you probably feel the same way, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You're in education, probably, well, you had to feed your family for one thing, but secondly, you probably believe in it. You probably think you're actually making a change, and if you look at the impact you have on how many young people or adults that you're able to enable to have careers and have lives and be productive, useful, cool people to hang around, you know, there's a lot. We have a lot of impact as educators, and I think education is what has great impact. And it's across all subjects, every discipline. There's not any discipline that's necessarily, I would say, more important than any other. They all work together. It's all part of the tapestry of being a human being. Now, our government's gonna solve education. Our government's gonna fix the education system. Can I have a yes or no? Look, I wish we had that science fiction UN government that just fixed it all for us, but most governments that control the education in various countries, they focus on short-term election cycles and quick wins, generally, because they're focused on the next election or short-term things, generally. They're not usually, and they're exceptions, but they're not usually focused on where's our country going to be in 100 years or 1,000 years? That's usually three years. As a result, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't seem to matter who you vote for. Do you get that feeling? I know it can be very, very divided on certain things, but if you look back over the last government, whatever color it was, was there really such a change? Really? It doesn't really seem to matter who you vote for sometimes, particularly in Australia. There's very few change, a lot of talk, a lot of noise, but what are the real changes going on? It's because there are these economic drivers and what they tend to do is decrease money to public education. There seems to be an increasing focus on administration and reporting and loading up educators with more reporting responsibilities, giving them less time to actually do the coal-faced stuff. And there's an increasing focus on training people for the workforce. I ran into a CEO of a university, which for a start threw me off, and he was talking about how interested he was in working with other universities in other countries outside of the US, and joining them together with corporate programs here to train people in those countries to work for these big corporate companies here. And there was this focus on just training people for the workforce and not building citizens necessarily, right? Not the whole person. And you know, I'm generalizing here, there are obviously lots of exceptions, but these are trends that are going on, right? Can capitalism solve education? Now, I'm not standing up here like an anti-capitalist at all, particularly, but does that system solve this education? Does it improve education a lot? Most companies are designed around maximizing profit. It's very obvious, all right? So profit is excess cash. So you spend money doing things, you get more money back, and that excess money goes to buy usually things that are not the company, right? They go buy yachts and whatever. So the capitalist system says demand will balance everything, and to an extent that works. If there's demand for something, then someone will start a business that will service that demand, and everyone's happy, and products are created, and we have 50,000 brands of toothbrush to choose from. But unfortunately, the environment, the young, the poor, they don't have any influence in that system. They're not creating companies. We don't see the kangaroos of Australia getting together to form a company. I'm gonna point out a fact here, and it's not, I love being in the US, so I'm gonna really stress this, but it is a fact that this particular part of the world is 4.2% of the population of the world, actually. It has 25% of the world's wealth here, and it requires 30% of the world's resources to function because of the way it's been structured. And there's still areas of the US that have terrible poverty. Don't need to point them out. You know about them, right? It's there in many of the cities. There's lots of poverty around. But that model, this structure that happens to be here and in many other countries, too, but not all of them, it can't be replicated everywhere. There's not enough resources to go around in the world. There's not enough of food and oil and all that stuff to have the same system everywhere. So there's something not right about it. The Silicon Valley culture is focused on capturing and selling your attention in little blocks. And they're very open about that. A lot of the designers who build the very juicy and addictive apps that everyone is staring at as they're walking down the street, they're capturing your attention bit by bit. They've got autoplay on the video, taking... Here's something else you wanna see. Here's something else. Here's something in Facebook that pulls you in. You wanna talk to your family, you have to do it through this system. So they are capturing your attention, selling it to the highest bidder, advertisers, and they're selling your data as well. There's little incentive in that system to look after you as a person. At the time, if they're making you watch a video, you know, I get addicted to it as much as the next person. It's a constant battle because they've designed it for our brains. That time you've spent watching that video is time you haven't spent doing something else. So I don't think that when I hear education companies that are in this model saying things like education is broken, teachers can't cope with the load, students have poor quality education, we will fix it with this app or this system that... And we will do this thing. I don't really believe that's actually the future. I can't see that future actually panning out. That power is concentrating the fewer and fewer hands. Like there is a definite language going on in our society about disruption, replacing, control. It's about... It's really about control. When you disrupt, you disrupt things and you can replace them and then you have control over it and then you suck money out of it. And this money through the... If you look at the ownership of most of these companies, it goes up through venture capitalists and then up to the super wealthy, right? So everything's sort of funneling up. I prefer the language of supporting, of nurturing, of improving. Like I think education is so important to us that just because an education system is having problems, that's a clear sign we need to fix it and put energy into it and support it. And it's not necessarily... Let's get someone else to build a system that's going to replace it. For me, the only thing that I can see out there that makes sense in this environment is open projects, open standards, open knowledge, open music, open spaces, open innovation, open government. This kind of open movement is a way of building structures in society that companies don't necessarily control, that will outlive individuals, will outlive governments, will outlive any company. And I only see good things out of these models and there are so many really cool initiatives happening everywhere and Moodle is one of them as an open source project and that's why it was started that way in the first place. So openness I think is the right way to go and the second thing is that if you're trying to empower educators, I mean as a goal, what I would love to see is that educators are empowered to the point where the best school or university is the one closest to you. They're all good, right? So you don't have to fight and pay or whatever, they're all good. Wouldn't that be ideal? Wouldn't it be good if teachers were respected like doctors or politicians or Kanye West or CEOs perhaps? I'm only using that as an example because CEOs get coverage in the media, right? When they say things, teachers don't generally. If teachers were supported with tools, good professional development, unrestricted content so they didn't have to fight the copyright systems and things, if we had that, we could promote global cross-cultural collaboration between them and then communities can start looking at those big problems together and that's why we have this mission. So we're very much in there. We're trying to empower educators to improve our world. That is supported by five main values. So we have values underlying that. So the first one is education. We put that in there as a value. Every situation where you're talking to somebody or interacting with someone can be seen as an education situation. This is one, every conversation you have, sharing what you know with other people around you can only help. Openness, I talked about openness. We promote accessibility and internationalism all over the place. Respects, so we try and respect everybody, including competitors, the people in our team, the people in the community. We try and have integrity. We're striving towards having ethical standards that are demonstrated when you're alone and also when you're with everyone else. And innovation. Innovation is a value. We value innovation. We're really trying to build environments where everybody can innovate. Everybody can take the thing and build on it. And obviously Moodle, the code is a very direct example. But we have lots of other projects you're gonna hear about in the next couple of days where you can also be involved. And even inside the Moodle HQ, we're really working towards building a situation where anybody can innovate and come up with ideas for what the company should be doing. So we, actually, I should have updated the slide. I think we just cracked 92,000 sites. It's going up a lot more rapidly now because we actually made the registration button visible. So you're gonna see these numbers climbing. And I had them all, they're going up so fast that yesterday I actually went around to all the teams inside and said, are you dead sure these are correct? Are all the systems working? Are we, in fact, going out there and because we remove sites, because we have an automatic robot that checks the sites. And if a Moodle site disappears, we take it off the list. So there's no dead sites here. These are live sites. It goes every week. I said, is it all working? Is it really working? Can I use these numbers with confidence? And everyone goes, yep, yep, check that, check that, check that. I'm like, okay, great, good. This new registrations button is working. So things are growing and it's very international. You can see in that top 10 US is at the top. USA, USA. This is on the side at the Olympics. It was Australia versus the US in volleyball. And there was some Americans there going, USA, USA. And some Australians joined in with a chant and they changed the emphasis. So it became USA, US, A, US, A, US. So we share a lot our two countries. It's pretty cool. And the next one is Spain. We've got Brazil, Mexico, India. In the past three months, India has shot from like the 10th position up to fifth. Very fast growing in India. Italy, UK, Colombia, Germany, Australia, and everywhere else. One thing you'll notice is that only one to three of those top 10 speak English as a first language. We have a very international project. I had a bunch of preamble towards this but you probably heard the news already. Now I've just been talking about venture capitalists and all that stuff, right? I spent a couple of years trying to find a way for us to really accelerate moodle development. Because the last 15 years has been pretty much that growth curve like that. And which is great, good. But I have to say my sites are much higher now. My sites are on, we have to be not only competitive but better than the Googles, the Microsofts, the Facebooks, the big things that are in all of our devices. I want moodle to be chosen because it's actually a better product than those things. And to do that, we really need to take our sustainability that we had. Moodle has never been in debt. It's never had any investors before. It's just run like a corner store. The money you get in, the money we spent. And we wanted to take it up to a much higher level of sustainability. And to do that, we needed like a boost. And I've been talking to a lot of different people and investors. And as soon as they start talking about, so how much profits are we gonna get or when's our exit gonna be? Sorry, go away. Anyway, finally found an investor I really like. And oh, I had a slide about it but it's gone. So it was, I was at a conference in Israel and I got up and had a rant for about 20 minutes. I don't think I even talked about moodle. And in the audience was a couple of people from this family in France. And they pretty wealthy people who made their money in the last couple of decades through a company called Decathlon, which is a sports company. And you might be going, what relation does that have to education? Well, they have a real deep belief in helping the masses. And in their view, their sports company, which is very global, it's like 10 billion euros a year or something, lots of countries. I think it's opening in the US this month or something is trying to encourage people to be active and healthy and fit through sport. And they're trying to make sport equipment that's as cheap as it can possibly be. It's easy to get into as possible. And when I looked into them, I was so impressed with their whole corporate strategy, the way their vision worked, their values, and the way it worked. And it seemed very compatible with us. And I could start to see the compatibility. And we talked for a few months, and then we worked it out. And so they've become an investor in moodle with a minority percentage. And they've given us six million bucks to just get started. And this is allowing us to really wrap things up. And in the past month, we've already hired five or six people. Another five or six this month and a few more and we're hiring a lot. So we're growing fast. That's really good for me because we've been working with, like there's been parts of the whole moodle process where we didn't have someone who was good at that particularly, but we may do. You know, everyone pitches in and we make do. And you probably know in your own organizations when you have that kind of, there's a pain point and you find somebody who's the right person to fill that space and then you just take it to a new level. So that's all happening now. And I'm very excited about it. So it's time to make moodle amazing, right? We've got the breaks off and it's a very exciting time. So let me talk about, let's be honest about the problems of moodle. Now I know about the problems more than anybody because I'm very concerned. And I really wanna, I'm always listening to people and we wanna do a lot of hearing you at this conference. So be very, very open with your gripes. We want to know of them. But in general, moodle's often seen as being complex, not easy, you know, it's old. It doesn't look so simple as my app usually does. Although moodle is somewhat complex for a reason. It's handling a lot of cases and doing education which can be complex, not a simple process. However, it should feel easy, it should feel simple. As a result, we know many teachers don't drive it very well. They'll use some basic features. It's probably the 80-20 rule applies. And it's not their fault. They don't really have enough support. Most of those people teaching in these systems never learned, they never did their school on online education. They don't really know what it's like from that point of view. They never had a good model to follow. So that's a problem. Now moodle partners provide support but that's only if you're with a moodle partner or you have an institution that resources support correctly and then appropriately. Moodle is not where people are so well. Moodle is not super great at being on mobiles. It's not in the social spaces. It's not in the places that you are all looking at every day so much. You have to go to Moodle, it's separate. So there's some problems. And so here's the solution. So this is the plan, what we're working on for the next couple of years and we'll set the tone for the future as we get into like a new level. There's five big projects we're working on and in a couple of years, you'll be seeing that as moodle. The five things working together, linked together, that's moodle. But to break it down, I want to go into the five different things and explain them now. So let's talk about moodle, the core product. Let's call it the server, the server product. The one that you download and install and you have an LMS. I'm not going to go into lots of detail but our major focus is here, foci. Number one, usability. Usability, usability, usability. We're going to keep banging away at that. And there's been some very good strides already in the last couple of years. The boost thing was the first step towards a new interface that's evolving quickly. We have some amazing prototypes under development. But usability of, in terms of workflow, little tasks. You need to do a task. You're coming in two grade sum assignments. What is the path to get there and go through that? So all those little workflows and loops that you need to do to be a teacher, to be a student, to be an administrator, those are all the things we want to optimize and reduce the steps, make it easier and easier. Integrations. And I'm particularly focused on integrations with open things. However, we're working on integrations that people need. So a lot of you may be using Google Docs. In fact, we use it internally in Moodle HQ because, yeah, it looks a good system. Just because one company achieved a system without usability doesn't mean everyone else needs to stop developing software. There's all sorts of other collaborative systems coming up across the internet. So yes, we worked on a Google integration and a Microsoft Office integration at the beginning of this year, which came out into 3.3. The same integration will also work for NextCloud, which is an open source file repository and collaborative editing suite. We have all those sorts of software. We're gonna integrate the same way. So people have options, they have choices. As well as that, there's the world of content and we really want the world of content to be very available in Moodle, to be connected with Moodle, so that it's much easier to use that stuff in an education context, et cetera, et cetera. There's integrations all over the place and that includes things like standards, supporting standards. So now we have a little bit more resources. We're gonna be a bit more active with, say, IMS Global and get more involved with the standard process there and also other standards bodies in Europe and other parts of the world as well. I wanna fight for a seamless consistency across all devices because if I imagine, like me, you have found that you are switching devices a lot. You know, we're all pretty wealthy. We'll have multiple devices. We're not all, we're not on one. We've got phones, we've got tablets, we've got laptops, we've got desktops and you move between them, right? And ideally, everyone had all those devices, what maybe one day they will. But we should make it so that it doesn't really matter what device you're on. And even if you'll say halfway through a forum post which you're doing on your phone, sitting on a bus or in the backseat of your limo, and you get to school, and I'm not gonna finish this here, you put it in your pocket and you go inside, sit at your desk and there's that post to finish and you finish it on the other device and you keep going. One example, this kind of seamless operation between devices I think is a good thing to aim for and it's not super hard to be honest, we just need to focus on it. And lastly, we really wanna make Moodle an active participant in learning and I've been talking about the idea of computer aided teaching and computer aided learning for years and years. This relies on AI technologies, it relies on all of that analytics. But the good thing is we're not alone, we're not developing this from scratch. There are so many open projects out there that we can take advantage of and build in with Moodle, use the data we have. We have our analytics project in SPI which is now in Moodle and it's just the analytics framework. We have, fortunately in our industry, all the users of Moodle, a lot of the Moodles of users, a lot of the users of Moodle, Moodles of Moodles are academics, researchers, so much amazing research going on in this field of analytics and AI. So we really wanna help with our analytics framework, get them working with us to build better and better systems. And I'm really, like I'm quite anti the idea of building systems that replace teachers, obviously, got on my t-shirt. But if you're gonna manage a class of 500 or 1,000 students or 30 students with quality, you need a bit of assistant, you need literally an assistant. Someone who tells you what's going on, gives you hints, check this out, check that out. Going a bit further, we want Moodle to talk to us. And we already have a prototype where you can talk to Moodle Cloud and say, hey, Moodle Cloud, how many students are on my site and it will talk back to you through Alexa. And we've got all those APIs we're working on and that stuff's all around, we just need to connect it up. So those are kind of the four big foci we have. The system of Moodle, and you can't read that, it's like a central core with some plugins and integrations around it. That basic structure of Moodle is not gonna change for a long time because it doesn't need to. The basic structure of, if you're gonna call anything a course, it's going to be a sequence of activities. That's probably in 500 years, it will still be a sequence of activities. I assume we can rewrite Moodle in 500 years, but it doesn't need to change in a hurry. And so you access that system through different interfaces. So you've got your desktops and your mobile and tablets. More and more, it's gonna be augmented reality in VR and voice interfaces. And we can do that. We can build interfaces to the existing systems and have those cool new funky ways of operating with technology without having to throw away 15 years of thought that have gone into building Moodle and all of the plugins and ecosystem that are on top of it. So that's kind of how, that's what we're thinking about. Augmented reality and virtual reality in particular, how many people here have tried and a virtual reality headset that had controllers that you hold in your hand? I wanna see a show of hands here. So many more here than when I was going through Moots in South America recently. So it looked like about 25% of you. The rest of you highly recommend you try and do that soon, right? Get hold of like an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift with controllers. And the reason I'm saying controllers is because it is five times better to have your hands in the environment. If you're just looking around in effectively a movie, a 360 movie, that's nothing. I don't worry about that. I'm talking about having your hands in there. Because when you can actually manipulate that world, you really start to see how truly game-changing it is. The problem is it's super bulky right now. We've got these big helmets and cables and all that stuff. But it doesn't take a genius to see that it's gonna get down to the size of that in not very long. And you'll be operating off your mobile, which I've mislaid somewhere, if you find it, let me know. And the glasses can combine the digital world with the real world. I can conjure up. Instead of me using that archaic projector over there and putting a picture on the wall, if I could put that picture in space here, and maybe it was three-dimensional, and maybe I could walk over and grab some bits and pull it around and do things with it and maybe throw something over to you and we've got the digital world here among us, it gets very, very interesting. Oh, great, I've got sound here too. It's gonna be very, very interesting. And if you play with that technology now, it's around, it's just not evenly distributed yet. Now, I don't see Moodle in that space very much. I don't think you're gonna be pushing blocks around as a teacher to change your activities, right? It's not very useful. Much quicker to use different, we'll probably talk to it, it would be faster. But many developers are building simulations and experiences in those sorts of environments and they'll be educational and there will be assessment in those environments. And that assessment needs to go somewhere, right? It needs to go into, I'm told to stand on this side, sorry you guys. That stuff needs to go into an LMS. So imagine the scenario, you're a teacher and you say, okay, I want you all to do this simulation experiment right now. So you do it in Moodle, assign that to the 50 students and then they, in their own time, come along and they go click, run the simulation, put their glasses on and they're doing it, right? Maybe they're, I don't know, sailing a boat or hacking something or saving a nuclear power plant or whatever it is. And then the assessment, the results of that system and including a recording of that system, hopefully, of the experience, flow back into Moodle. And now as a teacher, you see, oh yeah, 45 out of the 50 students have done that now. Let me see how Mary did. That's you. So they click and the teacher can now see in their glasses, they can watch Mary doing that simulation. They go, oh yeah, give us some feedback, some comments, maybe the grades automatically going into the grade book. So you can kind of see how that would very easily fit together, how Moodle plays a part in that environment. Very exciting. It is coming, it's coming slowly, but it's coming. Right now though, we've got things to focus on. In 3.4, we focused on usability. It's not many new features. The main headlines, is there a session about it later? Maybe? Not really. So we overhauled the calendar interface with drag and drop and a bunch of other really needed features. So that was specified by the Moodle Users Association and delivered in 3.4. We combined the participants and enrollment pages, the interface of that which was always one of the most horrible parts of Moodle that I always hated personally. It could be better, I think even so, but it's a really solid step forward in usability there. We've got, the analytics engine is now in core as well. And it does things now out of the box, but it's gonna grow. It's in core so that people can really start to use it and start to help us build it out with plugins, extensions, ideas, and we really wanna have a community of people building the analytics up. Moodle 3.5 onwards, we're still focusing on the usability and the integrations, but one big, big project that's happening is to work on privacy regulations. Now, there are always privacy regulations around. They weren't always so stringent as they are becoming. Stringent as they are becoming. And this is driven largely by the EU and a big thing called the General Data Protection Regulations, GDPR, which from May next year, everyone needs to comply to. So if it's anybody here have students that might live in the EU, anybody? Okay, you are affected. All of your systems need to be GDPR compliant. If you have a server there, if you have a company there, obviously, but even if you have people who are there or if any of your data goes into Europe, it has to comply with this thing. And if it doesn't, the fines can be like 4% of your total revenue, quite big. And we have a responsibility with Moodle to make sure that Moodle Core supports those things and in a lot of ways it does, but there are a bunch of things we still need to work on that we're gonna work on and as much as possible, we're gonna backport it to three, four, maybe three, three, we're analyzing all that now. And there'll be information about that soon. But that's a very big, that's like our number one priority actually right now to make sure that we're compliant with that. It helps everybody. It means that all of our systems will be better at privacy. You'll be able to withdraw data from the system a lot easier, control access to data in the system, et cetera. Our mobile app is really coming along and it's quite a milestone that in 3.4 next week, the mobile app has achieved 100% coverage of all the major features in Moodle for students, the core Moodle features. And that was something we had to do first, obviously. From now on, we're focusing on the third-party modules and how plugins and extensions will work with the core mobile app. And that's our focus now. There's also a project to work on the the new app coming with 3.5, it uses a new framework, which is gonna really help our development. It's gonna look a lot nicer and work a lot nicer too. So we're using Ionic 3. Now, you can change the interface of the mobile app. You can put a CSS file in your Moodle site and when someone connects to the, this has been around for a couple of years, when you connect with a standard Moodle mobile app to your site, you can change some of the CSS of the interface. But we also offer a service where we will brand the app for you. So I'm just gonna pick on UCLA because I see you there, Nick. This is an example, completely random. So say UCLA wanted to have a UCLA app for students so that they could click on it and download it from Google stores and iOS Apple stores. UCLA is listed there, they download it, it's got the UCLA logo on it, they click on it, it comes up with logging the username and password, doesn't ask them for the site. And the students get in and they're in the Moodle app. It's the same Moodle app inside, but branded. So we offer that service and it's about 5,000 Australian a year which is a lot of Colombian pesos but only like three and a half thousand US dollars a year. Peanuts, peanuts, and we will update that every two months. We will make sure all the certification and certificates in the stores is all taken care of and in certain circumstances we can even customize it and add functionality to it. So if you're interested in that, come to Moodle.com and we'll get you started. The Moodle, we have a Moodle desktop app as well. If you go to the Moodle download site, you'll see we also have a desktop app which runs on Macs, Windows, and Linux. I nearly said Winix. And that's a full screen, that's good for laptops. It has the same features as the mobile app and it works offline. So you can, as a student can go download whole courses onto their laptop and then go offline and do a whole bunch of stuff, do some quizzes, do some SCORM activities, do some forum posting and next time they get on the internet it all synchronizes back. And that works really well. So that can also be branded to. And I did mention Inspire, which is our analytics project. We are still collecting data. If you want to participate, one way you can do it is by talking to Elizabeth here. This is Elizabeth. And she'll get you started or otherwise go to research.moodle.net and we'll give you a plugin that you can put in a copy of your site and it will anonymize all the data and you can give us a copy of your database. And the purpose of that is then we have real, actual, messy, year on year data of students doing stuff and teachers doing stuff with all the logs and everything which we can use to train the analytics brain, the heart of the system. And also we run a lot of tests. We use it for testing. So we test hypotheses on real sites and that really helps us understand and learn in the development process. One more thing here connected with Moodle is that a lot of people are researching around Moodle and they have grants to do work around Moodle and they're not coordinated. And we're starting a Moodle foundation. It's going to be based in Europe, in Brussels, near where all the money is and focused on connecting up grants and funding that's floating around. Like Europe puts out billions of euros a year into innovation projects and research projects. We want to be involved in that. So if anybody is using Moodle or as part of their online education research that some of it goes into core, let's use that energy to put it into core. I go to these, I've been going to a few conferences lately like engineering conferences and engineering education conferences. So we have a lot of professors and their students talking about research they're doing into online learning to teach vast numbers of software engineers or something. And they write their papers and they do research, they write plugins, they analyze the data, they come up with results, positive or negative, they publish it, they get their PhDs and they go on to their career. That work never went anywhere. It's so frustrating to me. And I was at a conference and like 70% of the papers had Moodle in them. And I hadn't heard of any of them. We hadn't heard of any of them. So that's what this is gonna do. The foundation is gonna be coordinating that stuff and be more involved in the research around Moodle and helping the community have input into the project. All right, five things. That was a big one. Now these four are a lot quicker. How much time have I got left? Can anyone give me a time call? 10.15, I think. Okay, I have negative three minutes. No, no, it's okay. I'll be another 10. Yeah, just try and stop me. There's four more things I wanna talk about. So we have Moodle Cloud. It's been running for a couple of years. We currently have 25,000 Moodle sites on there. And the team are now gearing up to upgrade them all to Moodle 3.4 in like, you know, it takes a few hours. Just boom. It's a great, it's really working very well. I almost did a Donald Trump there. It's a great system. It's a, the purpose of it is to be a cheap, effective Moodle for anyone. So if you wanna play with Moodle 3.4 because your institution is gonna be on Moodle 3.2 or whatever it is on now, because I know they lag. Just, you don't have to download the package and install all the MySQL databases and stuff. You can just go click and get one. We're gonna have more packages in there as we're building that out for more sectors and specific needs. And that's got a Moodle with plug-ins or different customizations, et cetera. We're gonna have more integrations. Some of the integrations can only be done with other SAS software as a service platforms. We'll be doing more of those there. And eventually we're working towards having support for MOOCs, i.e. course hosting. So if you just want to host a Moodle course away from your precious IT systems and not invite a million randoms into your systems, but just host one of your courses outside, you can do it here. This is a place for that. So it's an alternative to using edX, Coursera, FutureLearn, all those other MOOC platforms. It'll be a Moodle one where you can host your course. That's not gonna happen in the next few months. We had a prototype of this, but we're rethinking how we're gonna do that now. And it's gonna be part of Moodle Cloud. So Moodle Clouds range from $0 up to a thousand Australian, which again is around like 750 US or something a year. So it's cheap, small, low-end stuff. You're not gonna be running a university on there. How does it stop people trying? Some people get like 20 Moodle Cloud sites and link them together and it's like, ah, guys, jeez. Anyway, number three, learn Moodle. I'm not gonna go into this very much because there's a big session tomorrow. Tom, the word man this morning is leading the education team and most of the education team are actually here because they're mostly based in North America and so you have an opportunity here to really get involved in this project. This is a complete curriculum to teach online. I was talking about teachers don't have the support. People don't know how to teach online. Well, we're building that curriculum and it'll be like a standard international multi-lingual curriculum that you can do face to face or online and the team are doing an amazing job on that so far and I'm really impressed how it's going and where it's going. There's gonna be a certification infrastructure if you wanna get certificates. We're looking to get it aligned with accreditation and so on and if possible included in other curriculums, even university curriculums so looking at all of that. I just wanna point out one thing that really makes this different from anything you might have seen before. So you might remember we had the old MCCC, the Moodle course creative certificate from years back. Now that certificate mostly focused on the functionality of Moodle. This is what forums do, this is what quizzes do. Now that stuff is in here too but there's also much more pedagogy about how you use it and there's a framework here that really goes into why you're teaching and the mode like what are you thinking about? What are you trying to achieve with this course? You're not generally trying to just dump information in someone's head, there's more to it than that. So I'll leave the rest to the rest of the presentations happening, just a foreshadowing, an educational foreshadowing. Number four, Moodle services. So that includes partners. We have a lot of services here. We talked yesterday, maybe you weren't here and we have a lot of our partners right over here so please go and talk with them. Integration partners and Moodle partners and there'll be other types of partners potentially in the future. Our job is, we want to connect Moodle users with services when they need it. So if you need help or you need an extra something, we want to find the most efficient way to connect you with that. That's kind of, we see that as our job and some of it will be built into Moodle itself and some of it will be built into the other initiatives that I've just talked about. The last thing is that there are some very large commercial projects out there, bigger than any one partner and we see our role as being the organizer of those, the facilitator, so that Moodle comes in and does the work to decide who should work together on this particular large projects and there's some very large projects in the world, educational projects that we are getting involved with. The last one, the fifth big major project is MoodleNet and this is the most exciting in a way because it's a completely, well for me as a product maker, this is a whole new product that doesn't exist. In fact, it doesn't exist in the world and it's a new social media platform for educators and Doug Belchor who's sitting here is leading this project, just joined us and has a session this afternoon where we want you to help envision that project and I think it's gonna be really interesting so I hope you're all there this afternoon for that. In short, it's a social media platform that is on all your devices but it's also connected with your Moodle site and it forms the connection between the you, the educator, your site, services and content. So you can kind of see it actually at the middle of the new view of Moodle. Got MoodleNet in the middle there, have I got a pointer here? Ooh, no I haven't, yes I have, I can't really see it. Got MoodleNet in the middle, connected to self-hosted Moodles such as probably most of yours and MoodleCloud Moodles and Partner Moodles of course, I got them under self-hosted here. You access them by the Moodle mobile app as well. MoodleNet's connected to data and open education projects. It has its own app, I'm not sure why my thing cut out there, it has its own app. I wanna see that MoodleNet logo right next to your Facebook logo. Probably the one you hit first. Let's make it, just push it over to the left. And it connects you to Learn Moodle, it connects you to Moodle Moods. So if you wanna, you say, oh there's a great Moodle Moodle happening in Miami, I wanna register for it, you just register. I think, not another system, it's just like going to that, click. Yeah, there's a slide here that shows some of the thinking inside it because we're short on time, I'm gonna skip it, but come this afternoon we're gonna cover it there. There's one more thing here. We are expanding where Moodle is. So that map shows where the employees of Moodle HQ are currently, a lot of us are in Perth, we have some in Barcelona, but we are expanding a lot, we're hiring a lot in Barcelona right now. And you'd be going, hey, what about all that news recently? Don't worry about that. But yeah, we're really going more into Europe because I don't know if you've noticed but Australia's very far away. It is literally on the exact opposite side of the planet from where we are now. The, what's the word for the opposite? That's for the P. The what? Okay, the, oh, the antipathy. The antipathy of us, in this Perth, is in Bermuda Triangle just off the coast here. So we often have battleships popping up off the sea of Perth and we often wonder what's going on. So yeah, it's the time zones are difficult, the business, we're far away from everything, we're building up in Europe and I'm personally going to be moving to Europe. So I'll be a lot closer to the US as well. So we'll have a lot more things happening up around here. So we're going to be busy. And I want to just very quickly in my remaining negative two minutes tell you how you can join us in all of what's going on. Get a branded Moodle mobile app. It's a no brainer. Just get one and never use it if you like, we don't care. Come on, three and a half grand, it's nothing. So come to Moodle.com, get that. We've got, don't be a wimp. Jesus, come on, join the Moodle User Association. Emma's right here. The chair slash president slash emperor of the Moodle User Association. We'd love to have you all be members of it. Again, you don't have to use it, just pay and go about your business. No, no, seriously, come in there and help because you can actually have a real direct influence. Like I mentioned the calendar project, that's the MUA decided on it. They planned it in detail, and they managed to, they paid us for it. We did it. Like it's a priority for us to serve the MUA. 75 bucks US, it's a no brainer. Starts at 75 bucks goes up to 77 and a half thousand. We prefer the big gold member, you know, don't mess around. Now all the alpha nerds are using Moodle for research. We know that. Our prime alpha nerd right here, Elizabeth Dalton, use the data in Moodle for research, get involved in, you know, if you've got grants and things, let us know. You can, when you're, anybody here a researcher, or am I talking to the wind couple of you? So look, think about this. You can do, if you wanna test something, you can build a tool to study that at your university or your situation, but you can also distribute that tool. You can collect data from the world. Imagine how amazing your paper slash thesis will be. Do you need a quick small Moodle site? Come to Moodle Cloud. That's why we built it. Do you need services around Moodle? Please use Moodle partners for those. 10% of what they, what you pay them comes to us and pays the developers. It's about sustainability of the project. If you think you've got great ideas about anything I've said, I really should change this word. Collar is a bit of Australianism. We can grab someone by the collar, you know? There's a bunch of us here. I think there's 11 of us from Moodle HQ here. We've got, we've got special badges. We have orange badges. So stand up actually, just wave at everybody who's here, we've got some people here and around. So just, you know, tell us, come to me, we're here. That's what we're here for, to listen. You've got lots of money in some grant project. Just let us know. Or maybe you want to like jump ship from wherever you are and come and join us. We are hiring in all sorts of areas right now. So maybe not immediately, maybe it's next year or something, but you know, get, start talking with us. Maybe there's some interesting opportunity here. You want to get involved in our project. We're very keen to talk with you. That's what we're after, I think. Does anybody disagree with that? It's hard to disagree with it, I think. Can't say, we would like everyone to be narrow, small-minded people who don't care about where they live. Doesn't really make sense. So that's me. Thank you very much. Come on, one more, very small thing. On the program, we did have a hack fest planned yesterday slash, I don't know, maybe it wasn't the right word for it, but we didn't think maybe there was enough developers to really have a full-on thing. But if any of you, I want to see some hands up. Do you know what PHP is? Put your hand up. Okay, keep your hand up if you know what Docker is. Okay, keep your hand up if you know what weblib.php is. Okay, keep your hand up if you are in a telegram chat called Moodle Dev Chat. Okay, there is a telegram chat called Moodle Dev Chat. You should be in there as well, all of you. But there was about 10 people. If you are interested in having a bit of an unconference to get nerdy about Moodle development, we're gonna make a time at 1.30 tomorrow. There's another small room we have booked just around the corner. So if you wanna, an unconference is where we kind of will make up the itinerary on the spot and you can present to each other, show each other what you're working on, and it should be interesting. But I don't want everyone going to that. It's really meant to be developer focused. There is a very good learn Moodle session happening here at the same time. That's me, thank you, okay. Over to you, Tom. Good. Thank you.