 I've got a confession to make. I'm having a secret love affair with learning. This was me. It started as a kid in kindergarten. This is day one, me getting ready to go to school. Thanks, Mum. She's packed the suitcase with lunch, ensured my pants were tucked up well above my navel. I can see at least our one fashion crime there. But I love school. I love school so much. I eventually went back as a teacher. I've worked in education. I have worked in education for around 20 years. Been moodling since around 2004. Education matters. And thankfully, Moodle has the potential to empower us to improve our world. But the big question is how best to be highly effective at what we do. So let me share with you some ideas to perhaps squeeze more source from your Moodle. Here's the secret source. Five key ingredients. Okay, and we'll go through each of these in a short while. Experience, design, assessment, reporting, mobile. Okay, so first key ingredient. Let's kick off with experience. By that, I mean you may have heard of learner experience. So it's often shortened to the acronym LX. Important fact. Whether you're in a school or university, corporate government or elsewhere, the learner is your customer. That's your student, it's your member of staff, it's your client. Okay, the learning experience of the LX needs to be extraordinary. I suggest that you treat the learner as though your job depends on them, okay? You're depending on them to be able to keep your job or maybe you're in a promotion. I like this Arab proverb. It says a lot. Journey for a thousand miles starts with a single step. So if you like, it's the perfect metaphor, isn't it? That learning is the journey. We need to ensure that the learner sets off on the right path for that journey. So in the context of Moodle, where does the journey begin? I think the journey starts here. It's a fairly innocuous, harmless looking page. That's the login screen. That's often a person's first look at Moodle, okay? So we're going to dig a little bit deeper with the LX and the user workflow in the context of Moodle. Okay, now I appreciate that. Not all of us are system administrators. Some of us may be editing teachers or trainers. I'll try and differentiate the settings and where the settings sit. I think it's in your best interest to ensure that the settings are optimal for your organization and your requirement. Okay, so self-registration, what that's all about there and hopefully this helps in terms of highlighting or zooming a few things. The signup page, it really does depend on your requirement. If it's for internal purposes, you're going to have perhaps central control over who your users are and the distribution and management of user accounts, fair enough. If you've got an external public-facing audience or it's a hybrid approach where some of your users are internal, some are external, it may be in your best interest to open up what's known as email-based self-registration, okay? A lot of sites and services do this. So there's really two places that we need to enable and you may have done that already with your Moodle site. There's a recapture element optionally as well and where that fits, just to give you a little more context if you haven't come across this before. Again, Moodle, like a lot of sites and services on the web, allows users to self-register. So you sign up, you nominate a username, a password, an email address and then toward the bottom of this signup form is perhaps an image with a string of numbers and letters and it's a challenge and response, Moodle's kind of challenging the new user to say, hey, I'm a human, I'm not a robot. So it's one mechanism to keep out the spammers. The next thing Moodle does, we'll send a verification or welcome email with a containing a link. So again, the new user needs to go to the mailbox, click the link and then return to Moodle to log in, okay? So that's sort of the process, the workflow, if you're not familiar with it. You need to be cognizant of that. Sometimes these welcome or verification emails don't arrive in the inbox, they might go to spam for whatever reason. To that end, I guess beyond email-based self-registration, what about guests? Do we open our sites to anonymous users who may be able to browse your Moodle site? Is that a good or a bad thing? Is it desirable or not? So consider that. So we would need to enable the guest login button, okay? So by default there, if guests could browse the site, they would be able to look at your course catalog. It's unlikely by default that they can access courses and see what's going on inside, so fear not, okay? You'd need to open up the guest access enrollment method for that to happen. So they could sort of window shot, you know, look but not touch and see too much. Forcing users to log in. This is a serious consideration, I guess, when any user known or anonymous points their browser at your Moodle site, where do you send them? Okay, and do you force them to log in before they can see or do anything? Auto-focusing the login page. And we'll revisit these elements in a moment on the login page to recap it. But the idea is we can place the cursor in the username field that can make it very convenient for users just to type in their credentials in a way they go, okay? But there are considerations for the visually impaired. You know, there's accessibility considerations there. On the same token, do we try and make it easier for our users to access the system? Do we allow not just a username but the email to be entered in the said field for users to access Moodle? Again, it could mitigate a support payload where people forget usernames and it can't access your Moodle site. Remembering usernames, okay? This is an option we can enable as well. It's all about ease of access. So sort of streamlining that initial user workflow and again, just a more pleasant user experience potentially. These are little considerations and we add these little things together. It could make a big difference to an end user's first impression of your Moodle site. Authentication, so what system are we logging in against? If it's not one of the default systems, it may well be a third party of proprietary system. So, you know, you could connect your system to Microsoft or Google or some other system for SSO or single sign-on. Again, the benefit there being users don't need to remember two sets of credentials. So, a quick recap. Again, we could force users to log in before they see or get anything. We could autofocus the cursor in the username field. We could optionally allow users to allow their browser to remember their username for subsequent visits. That's not recommended, incidentally, on public or shared devices. Guest access, that's a consideration. And if enabled, naturally the guest button is there or else it would be out of sight. And then, of course, down the bottom, we've got create a new account. We would have enabled email-based self-registration. A quick show of hands, perhaps, who's got that enabled on their Moodle site, who has a Moodle site open for an external audience. Looks like perhaps about 20, 25%. That's curious. Look, beyond authentication or logging, the next consideration around LX for our first-time users is where do we direct that traffic? Where do they go? What do they see? So, by default, Moodle has set up Dashboard as that place. So, it's the next stop on the journey. If you're using Boost in a fairly recent version of Moodle, it may look something like this. It does speak to the learner. You know, we've got the learner's name and avatar at the top there, and perhaps a list of courses or learning that are current or present, and then perhaps future or past completed learning as well. So, a very personalized page, I believe. In contrast, another option with that navigation is to direct users upon login to the front page of what's known as Site Home. So, think about your Moodle site and the user workflow. Where do you send your users upon login? This is perhaps a little more generic. One size fits all. It maybe does not speak to the learner in quite the same way. All right. Key ingredient, too, I believe, is course design. So, what does that mean? What does it look like in the context of Moodle? Firstly, a quote from Leonardo da Vinci. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. So, I think we need to keep it very simple. That's sometimes said that any edit can make something complicated. Okay? So, we really do want to go by the mantra of less is best. Okay? So, how does that apply to the context of course design? Well, now for Moodle, with what we've got here, some of these settings, thankfully, we won't be dependent on a system administrator. We, as editing trainers or teachers, can access some of these settings within our course. So, course layout is something to bear in mind there. So, I don't believe this is the default, but to show one section per page. So, a section is like a week or a topic, depending on your course format. What does that do for us? Well, it can mitigate this thing known as the scroll of death. Okay? Which is, I guess, it's a usability nightmare, especially on a small handheld device. So, we want to aim to chunk the learning into bite-sized bits. That's, you know, that's recommended its best practice for course design. Okay? So, this is just maybe a snippet from a course that's set up to show all sections on the single course page. So, also known as the scroll of death. So, a section, again, being just simply a topic or a week, there could be a lot more down here that we don't see at the moment. So, imagine that on a tablet or a mobile, there would be a lot of swiping. Not highly usable. Very overwhelming, I'd imagine, for a first-time user as well. Imagine you had 10 topics or sections looking just like this, and the user comes in, they see it all in their initial view. It could be quite demoralizing. So, what do we do? We chunk up the learning into bite-sized digestible bits. So, this is the alternate layout, one section per page. So, you've got the topics there, or the sections, or the weeks, depending on your course format. And then over on the right side, we've got an indication, I suppose, of the activities that are resources that sit there behind. So, we would click the relevant section, and then we go in there and focus our attention on this particular section, so that might be an activity or a resource. We can navigate forward or back using the links or the jump-to menu as well, okay? So, it's highly usable, and it flows quite nicely, in fact, for, you know, a unified experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile, especially via the Boost theme. Next consideration, as far as course design is concerned, will be file size upload. So, I reckon 10 megabytes is fairly adequate for a simple piece of media, a typical document or presentation. You will be completely fine, and so will be your learners if they're uploading, sharing, collaborating. I'd say the general rule is this, if it's too big to be an email attachment, it may be too big for Moodle, all right? So, you have to think, again, about chunking this up or breaking it down into smaller, quite-sized bits. It's better course design, and think about, you know, your lowest common denominator, and that may be a learner with very limited access to internet, maybe on a slow, you know, slow-speed internet. It would be a very painful experience if we're constantly sharing very large files with them or very big pieces of media. Okay, so, further than that is this idea of columns, and that flows into the notion of blocks, and you might be familiar with each or both of those things, but this is very much a single-column layout. The Boost theme does encourage that. It seems that Moodle is moving away from blocks and promoting this single-column layout, and it unifies, again, across desktop, tablet, and mobile. Incidentally, if you've used, for example, Boost or some of these modern web-responsive themes, Vira browser on a tablet or mobile, and you've got blocks in, say, a second or a third column, maybe on the right or the left, you might have noticed on your tablet or mobile those blocks get demoted to the bottom of the page. So it is really, it's telling us, hey, let's think about this single-column layout. So what's the benefit of that? Well, the idea really is to focus the learner's attention. So we can see here we've got some, you know, we've got some blocks, perhaps, on the left side there. You could argue that may be a distraction. Certainly with the Boost theme, we know that we can, if I point there, we can, we can collapse that left block and it's out of view for our end users. Okay, repositories moving along. So we can go beyond text, and I mean there's empirical studies and research that does show that, you know, online learners have less tolerance for text, and in fact we could go further than that and say the smaller the device or the screen real estate, the less time we can expect from them. Okay, so again that idea of simplicity, less is best, chunking up learning. We've got to go beyond text if we're going to engage and captivate. So thankfully Moodle has a suite of repositories that we can enable and configure. This is just some of them. Who's using any of these? A quick show of hands. Okay, about 40 or 50%. That's tremendous. And again there might be a couple there that are relevant to your organization. Say for example, you know, maybe Google Drive or OneDrive or YouTube, and you can hook into these. Not just for teachers and trainers, but your learners can also be sharing their resources with the course and the community. So it works like this. We can configure the repositories. These are the default ones, and they're typically enabled. But if we go beyond that, there's the list there. Okay, so we enable them, configure them, and away we go. So these come into play wherever you see Ato, the default editor, text editor and Moodle, you know, you might be going to insert an image, insert a video, you're uploading a file, and you will see the enabled and configured repositories in the left pane here. There could be, you know, Google Drive, YouTube and so forth. So it gives you more options to make the learning experience and the course rich. Discussion forums. Look, in two words, use them. I see a lot of Moodle sites, and unfortunately forums tend to be underutilized. I think there's a reason that every new Moodle course is given one activity to start with, and it happens to be a forum. They really ought to be part of the staple diet for blended and online learning. Okay, we can post announcements, share ideas, ask questions, get answers, and help each other. Okay, more to the point. You know, regardless of your industry or sector, you can build a community of practice. So, you know, forums are a basic building block, I believe, of effective blended and online learning. Okay, ingredient three is assessments. So this is where we as educators get a chance to measure learning, define the sequence of learning, and gather feedback, and we can reward achievement. Hopefully a combination of those things. I see this a lot. Too many sticks. So what do I mean by sticks? I guess sort of threats or deterrents, you know, maybe some sentiment around punishment if you don't do something. So you oftentimes hear it, you know, express like, you know, you've got to do this straight, you've got to complete the course. You know, you've got to do this to keep your job. You know, I want you to do this so I get to keep my job. We need to do this together so we can tick that box. So a lot of sticks in training and learning. I'd love to see more carrots. Carrots are like, you know, incentives, motivators to learn and achieve. So let's recognize that achievement, and that could be the recognition of competence, knowledge, skill, understanding, and the like. Okay, to that end, we've got completion tracking. So firstly, this needs to be enabled globally by your system administrator, and then you can come into the course settings right here and just ensure that it's enabled. You may not want to track everything in your course, but you can be, you know, use your professional judgment and be judicious about it. So you come in, you add an activity or resource, you'd be familiar with this, and if you're doing activity tracking, you may have wondered what's in here, so here it is. We open that up and there's a raft of options. There's essentially three modes for activity tracking. Either don't track. Option two is allow students to manually tick a box. Very dangerous. I don't generally recommend it. The third option is desirable. So we can show an activity as complete when conditions are met. And you can see that the requisites there and the tick boxes alongside them, we can choose what the conditions for completion are. And the requisites will vary, you know, depending on the nature of the activity or resource. Is it an assignment? Is it a quiz, a forum, or just a, you know, a plain document or presentation, a file. Okay? These expected completion dates, if you're curious about that, you know, you tick the box and then you set an expected completion date. It's not a firm date, like an absolute deadline, like an assignment or a quiz, but that date will flow through into the user's dashboard. If you've seen the timeline there and things can be flagged as, sort of, due in the next seven days or 30 days, that's where this expected completed flows to. So that's a quite a neat little thing. If you're using, say, Moodle 3.5, you can hook into that. Okay. Restricting access. So our learning, it's not everyone's pot of tea, but if your learning needs to be conditional by nature, very sequential, you know, sort of do A and then B, then C, this could be very pertinent to you. So we add a restriction. There's some options there. I think the easiest way to get started is with an activity completion restriction. Right? And this is an example. I prepared this one earlier. So the student must, in this case, complete a forum before they can do this particular activity. So do A and then it unlocks B. And this is an example of how it might be in a course. Again, the forum's there, so the student may need to read the forum or respond to the post or start their own discussion, depending on the requisite conditions, and then it will unlock this activity that's restricted at the moment. Quick show of hands. Who's using restricted access or conditional activities? Well, lots of us. So if you're using that, that was maybe 60% or more. It's fair to say you're probably tracking activities as well. I wonder if you're doing this next thing and we'll get to it in a moment. Now, we've got feedback. Naturally, you know, if you're serious about education and continuous improvement, you want to refine what you're doing version for version, year for year. We need to give an opportunity for our learners to tell us what worked well and what could be improved on. Okay, so a feedback, you know, if you use a survey, a questionnaire, this wonderful tool in Built Within Moodle allows you to build one quickly on the fly. You can collect some very helpful, qualitative and quantitative data and then analyze it. Refine what you do for next time. So my advice would be this. Ensure that the feedback is set up as anonymous. That way, look, firstly, your students are more likely to complete the feedback and then secondly, be honest about it, okay? So there's no fear or concern that, you know, if they give some brutal feedback, that it's going to affect their final grade. Okay, badges. So look, with everything we've done here, we've learned experience, course design, assessment, tying it together again, recognizing learning in a digital sense. I guess badges are sort of the 21st century equivalent of a certificate in a lot of ways. So firstly here, look, your system administrator needs to enable this globally and then we as teachers and trainers can add badges to our courses, okay? So again, it's all about recognition of learner achievement, motivating, rewarding, incentivizing. So it's turned on there by the system admin. We come into our course and we manage badges, okay? So we add a badge. We give it a name, a description, and then we add the badge itself. So the badge should be like, I guess, an avatar. It's a little image, maybe circular, colorful, meaningful. If you've got an array of badges that you're planning to issue, because your organization in this case would become an issuing authority, I'd suggest the badges should look like they're part of the same family, all right? If you've got a graphic designer, that's terrific. If you don't, come and see me. I've got a couple hundred badges that'll help you get started. So we set that up. We specify the criteria. In this case, it may be activity completion. I reckon course completion, okay? And then we enable it and set it off into the wild. So the idea is the learner earns the badge, or they're issued with the badge. It'll likely get emailed to them and they get notified via Moodle. There'll be a little notification pops up the top. And they can push this badge out to Mozilla, potentially. It's an open backpack. And then, alternatively, you can add the badge in third-party sites and services. So maybe LinkedIn, Facebook, or elsewhere. It might actually help your learners earn a job or a promotion, all right? So at the very least, show off their digital competence. Okay, reporting. Let's track progress and measure outcomes. So the simple ways to do this, naturally, if you're tracking activities, we can report on them. This is the learner snapshot, I suppose, for us as trainers, teachers, administrators. That's the bird's-eye view of what's going on in your course. Before this, back in, say, Moodle version 1.9 or 2, it was very much sort of learning limbo. No one knew where anyone was at in a course. So this has been a quantum leap. We can go one better. We can aggregate some or all of those activities that we're tracking through to course completion, okay? And the end result is this is a course completion report. We know who is inducted or on-boarded, who's compliant, who's finished the training, whatever its nature may be. So the rightmost column there will tell us the truth of the tale, okay? And naturally, you won't expect to see a tick in the rightmost course completion column unless you've seen ticks in the preceding columns. Righto? I know we said Moodle's getting away from adding badges to their courses and to lay out the theme supporting that, but if you were to add one block, it may be the course completion status block. Looks a bit like this on the right side there. So the learner comes in, sees their status and where they're at and what they need to do to complete the course. So they click in there for more details, and you can see, you know, the requisites, the criteria and the status. So it's very visible. I suppose it will become more visual with time, I think more graphical perhaps, and that can certainly, as it does already, flow into the dashboard. Lastly, mobile. Let's face it, many humans are attached, some would say addicted to their mobile devices, okay? What does that mean for us as educators, online educators? We've got a potential, a massive potential audience waiting to be captivated, okay? Some would say it's like shooting fish in a barrel for one of a better phrase. So here's a big stat. 80% of internet use will be mobile by 2019, according to ROI agency Zenith. So that's a big stat. And look, the mobile share of global internet use is growing, it continues to. In fact, in the developing world, many people's first interaction with the internet is on a small handheld device, a mobile or tablet, okay? They never use a laptop or a desktop device. So what does that mean for us as Moodlers? And how do we get mobile ready or mobile friendly? A few simple things. Firstly, ensure your system admin has enabled device detection. This is for a browser-driven experience, incidentally, okay? So Moodle then becomes intelligent enough to know if the user's accessing the system on desktop, tablet or mobile. And if you've got a theme optimized for the said device, it will be a better user experience, okay? I see this too often. The default device is set up in the theme selector, maybe for Boost or something that's clean, modern and web responsive, that's terrific. But mobile and tablet down the bottom of this particular settings page are neglected. There's nothing set there. That's disastrous, okay? If the very least come in or get your system administrator to select, the Boost theme for tablet and mobile. And if you're wondering about legacy, that pertains to antiquated, outdated mobile, mobile, I should say, browsers. Right, so there's Boost. And you might have seen this already. All right, getting away just quickly from the browser-driven mobile experience. The other option is an app. So, you know, Moodle's got a freely available mobile app on the various stores. You want to enable web services for mobile devices. This is a sysadmin setting. Make sure that's ticked. And then come into message outputs and enable mobile as well. So, you'll have something like this. So, very unified across the tablet, mobile, and even desktop. Plug-ins, so as we said there before, people have got less tolerance for text. We've got to really have some pop and wow to our courses. Media could help to that end. Video consumption is paralleling, if you like, internet consumption via mobile devices. It's a similar trend, okay? So, enable a multimedia plugin, and then you come in here and select the players that you want to tap into. So, VideoJS, Vimeo, YouTube, HTML5. I'd suggest Flash is dead. It will be very soon, 2020. So, this is it, enclosure. Just bringing all this together. Here's the recipe. So, less is best. We've said Streamline. We want to minimize things like click, scrolls, and text. We're going to maximize media where appropriate. Display this essential information at the top in the area they call Section Zero, whatever's pinned at the top and persists. Chunk the learning into bite-sized bits and consistency everywhere across Moodle. So, that's from the theme to the courses, the layouts to the blocks. If we use them, where do we position them, et cetera. And, furthermore, enabling these things. Think about repositories. Use forums if you're not already. Let's get mobile ready and friendly. Configuring. So, we can track activities through to completion and report on it. Listen to your learners. Gather feedback. And, again, as we said there before, less sticks, more carrots. Finished with a quote from Archimedes. He was a Greek thinker, a mathematician around 200 BC. He said, give me a platform strong enough, a lever long enough, and I'll move the world. So, I trust you've now got some leverage to better use Moodle to move your world. Thank you.