 Thank you, Diego. Welcome, everyone. Yeah, I'm Mary Kuch, Education Manager at Moodle HQ. I'm Mary Kuch, Moodle Education Manager at Moodle HQ. I'm going to actually turn off my camera now so that you can just focus on the presentation. So if you give me one moment while I stop sharing my webcam. Okay, so the first thing before we even start with this presentation is you will need something to write on. You might need a piece of paper, a pencil, a pen, or maybe you've got something digital to write on because I want to make this interactive. It would be very boring if you just listen to me speaking for up to an hour. We'll leave some time for questions. So I want you to get involved. So while you're finding something to make notes on, if you want to, I will go on to the most boring slide, which is talking about me, which isn't really necessary, but it will give you some time to find something to make notes. So I'm speaking to you from the north of England. In fact, what you see in that picture is me at this minute. I have one of those sitting standing desks in my front room and I'm standing there locked indoors, even though it's a beautiful sunny day in England. I grew up in the centre of England, near Birmingham, but I went to university in London to study languages. I'm a linguist by trade, if you like. But then I moved to Preston, which is near Manchester and Liverpool for 30-something years ago where I began teaching. And I've only ever had that one of the job as a languages teacher before we even had the internet. And in 2006, my school, as with many, many schools in the UK, we got Moodle, and I was first introduced to online teaching and I fell in love with Moodle. And to cut a long story short, in 2013, I joined Moodle HQ remotely from England and now, mostly, I help in the community forums, I make videos, I help writing documentation, and wherever I can in Moodle, I do training. Now, mostly at the moment, since the beginning of the year, since the early January, I've been working on the Moodle Educator Certification Program. Obviously not just on my own, so I want to highlight Helen Foster, who is Moodle Community Manager, who is very experienced and has worked in Moodle for many, many years. She has been helping with the program too. And Anna Krasser, who has recently joined Moodle HQ, but also has many years of experience with Moodle partners and with training. And she is our MEC coordinator. So together, we've been working on the MEC. Okay, now, I'm going to ask you a few questions now before we get started. And I want you to raise your hands if you can. If not, you can answer in the chat. There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, just my curiosity. So, who has never or hardly ever used Moodle? So put your hands up if you can, although I'm not sure where you look at, where you see the hands, or mention it in the chat. Who has never or hardly ever used Moodle? And thanks to Julia for explaining that. If you've never used it, it's fine. I hope you find this presentation interesting and that you're going to learn Moodle. Okay, right. I'm going to move on to another slide. Put your hands up or tell me in the chat if you regularly use Moodle. If you use it all the time, daily, weekly. And this is very good because we have a mixture of people never used, used a bit, no. I hope you're learning something from this, the whole mood really. Okay, my next question. The next question I'm going to ask you. And again, there's no right or wrong answer. I would just like to know the next question is put your hands up if you have never heard of the Moodle Educator Certification. Who doesn't know what it is? Never heard of it or not much idea. Okay. If you've not heard of it, I'm really pleased because I'm going to explain it to you now. All right, that's absolutely fine. Perhaps you can guess what my next question is. Put your hands up if you have heard about the Moodle Educator Certification. Okay, that's also good. However, if you have heard about it, I would suggest that you blank your minds, because what I'm going to talk to you about now is quite different from what you might have heard before. And if you've never heard about it, even better, you already have a blank mind to find out about it. Okay, I'll be asking you more questions later. Now I'm going to do some introductions about this. So the Moodle Educator Certification, we did have one. But what I'm talking about is updated, simplified and streamlined. It's a very, very updated, simplified, streamlined training and certification program. And I'm just moving the slide forward. And it is launching sometime in May for participants to join and to work on. And you can access it from certified Moodle partners. Now what I mean by that is that Moodle partners around the world, including in India, who have themselves gone through the rigorous facilitator training so that they can then deliver this program. Now I'm giving you a link there to a place on our Moodle.com website where you'll be able to find out more information. You can certainly fill in the form to apply there. However, because this is so new, we're launching it in May. We're in the process of updating that page with the updated information. Sha Shaank, I can see your question. And I think the best answer for that is if you watch the presentation and then come to your own conclusion. And Jali, it is online. So I'm going to continue. Hopefully your questions will be answered as we move through. And I'm going to aim to leave some minutes at the end also for questions. Okay. So what is the MEC? I'm going to call it MEC for short from now on. When I define things, I always like, first of all, to give you a definition of what something is not. So let's look at what the MEC is not, first of all, because that can help clarify it. The MEC is not basic Moodle training. So if you haven't used Moodle before, then the MEC is not for you. But that's not a problem at all, because we already have basic Moodle training out there. Now, you can do basic Moodle training from Moodle partners around the world if you go to Moodle.com slash partners. I've actually put the three Indian partners here, because this is the Indian Mood, but of course there are other partners in other countries. And not all of them offer training, but you can search on our Moodle.com website. Obviously, there is also free training, which you can have, for example. Okay, I'm going to stop for a moment because I can see two people telling me there's no audio, and I do want to make sure that other people can hear me. Kim, it looks like you can hear me, so I'm going to continue. On the website, learn.moodle.org, we are currently running a free Learn Moodle Basics MOOC for complete beginners. We normally, Helen Foster and I normally run it twice a year, but because of the current situation, it's open all the time for the next few months, so anyone can learn the basics of Moodle from there for free. So, the Moodle Educator Certification is not basic Moodle training, nor is it Moodle Admin training. So, this MEC is not for Moodle Admins unless, and I will explain about that in a moment. So, it's not if you want to learn how to install Moodle, if you have problems with your server, with development, with themes, it's not for you. And again, that's because you can have your local Moodle partner in your country to help you with admin training or for very, very basic admin training. Again, for free on Learn Moodle.org, we have a Moodle Admin Basics course, which you can go and join now. It's mainly for Moodle Cloud users or complete beginners who are non-technical, who just want to know how to set up Moodle. I think I've clarified what the MEC is not. So, what is it? The clue is in its name. It is for educators. So, not for technical administrators, for any kind of educator. And it is a training which leads to a certification by Moodle HQ. So, the MEC is for experienced Moodle using teachers. Now, you may be a teacher in a high school, in a university, a professor in a university. You may be a trainer in a corporate environment or in a charity or a home schooler, anyone who uses Moodle to teach or train. It's for experienced users. It's really focused on meeting learners' needs with Moodle. What I mean by that is that this is not a course where you go in and your trainer says, okay, so this is a forum. Make a forum and then try to decide what you can do with it. This is a Moodle choice. Here's how to set up a choice in your course. Now, what could you use a choice for? We are doing it in completely the opposite way. We are looking at what the learners in our courses need, in our environment, and how we can help them meet those needs with Moodle. For example, we have language learners, and they need to reach a certain level in their writing. How can Moodle help them reach that level? We want to get our students collaborating. How can Moodle help them to collaborate? So Moodle is the assistant to help us teach online. This is online teaching with Moodle. And there are six courses. There is a badge for each course, and there is only one certificate. So as you can see, if you heard of a previous certification, this is updated and streamlined. Only six courses. You can just do one course that appeals to you and get one badge. Or you can do all six courses and get a certificate. Sukvinda, as I go through the presentation, you'll see exactly what it is. We are going to have a tour inside to give you an idea. So, has anyone, and you can type in the chat, yes or no, has anyone ever heard of the European framework for the digital competence of educators? Just type yes or no. Either way is fine. There is no right or wrong answer. And I'm pleased that there are quite a few no's, because it means that I can explain it and you won't be bored. The European framework for the digital competence of educators is something that was designed and developed by educators in the European Union. And although that's a specific number of countries, it is actually applied worldwide and anyone in the world can base their training on it. And so this is a framework that they designed, which shows the kinds of skills teachers online need to have in order successfully to be able to teach. So, this is not my graphic. It's too good to be my graphic. This is a graphic from what they call DigCom edU, because it's much too long to use the full title. And you can see that there are six numbers in different colours. These six numbers represent the areas of skill that the European Union decided or felt teachers need to have in order to be able to teach online. Actually, Moralidad is asking, is it offline teaching? Well, this program is for online teachers, but speaking as a teacher who taught offline until the late 90s, because we didn't have the internet, a lot of what you're going to see here can also apply offline. It's good basic good teaching skills. You'll see what I mean when we come to some of the examples. So, we have professional engagement, digital resources, teaching and learning, assessment, empowering learners, facilitating learners' digital competence, which is a very long name for basically helping your learners to work well online and to study well online. Now, these six areas, which were identified by DigCom edU, they're the actual names of the six courses in the MEC. So, these are the courses that you will do. Now, within each of these courses, there are certain areas of expertise, competence, which we cover. And the next graphic that I'm going to show you goes into them in more detail. And so, for example, here's one of my favorite ones. If you did the course called Empowering Learners, as part of that course, you would learn about differentiation and personalization, which is very, very important when teaching both offline and online. You'd learn about accessibility. You'd learn about how to design your course to make sure it suits people with all types of learning challenges and so that no one feels left out. Actively engaging learners. You would learn how to motivate your learners with gamification. There's one example. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to zoom in on one of the courses and go inside to look at it. This is where our tour begins. So, let's zoom in to teaching and learning. And if we go into this course, there are four competences or areas of skill, collaborative learning, self-regulated learning, teaching, and guidance. And in the course, we look at them how you can do these using Moodle. And if you think to yourself, for example, well, I don't know what self-regulated learning means, that's fine because you will learn that as you go through that area of competence. Now, we're going to go into the site where these courses will be hosted. And it's actually a Moodle workplace site. So, the site where you will go to do the MEC is a workplace. I think if I got it correctly, there's been a presentation on workplace already. When you go in as a candidate, you will have arranged with the Moodle partner that you're doing it with. You will have paid and you will get your login and you will go in as a candidate. And the program of six courses, if you've chosen the whole program, will be here. So, let's go in to the teaching and learning course. The first thing to note, this is the actual course. The first thing to note is that it looks very, very plain because of the very neat course format in workplace, which means that you can collapse the topics and you just need to click the arrows to open up the activities and the teaching materials in that area. So, once you've gone through the book explaining how the course works, the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to find what your prior knowledge is. So, we would click where it says what do you already know to expand it. And there is a self-assessment check-in, which is a quiz, to check your prior knowledge and understanding of Moodle. So, we are actually going to do this now. It's very, very informal. This is not the Gospel telling you your level of Moodle at all. But I did say, if you want to try, if you want to play along, because this isn't anything formal, you need your pens and papers. Now, so when we click on that, it explains that this is a quiz inspired by a self-reflection quiz on the Digcom edu site. And that's why I'm not giving away any state secrets sharing this with you, because this is basically adapted from a one that is already available publicly online. But we've given it a Moodle flavour. So, what you need to do now is you need to answer each of these four questions. There are only four questions, and they relate to teaching with Moodle. Okay, just write it down on your piece of paper or make a note mentally. Question number one, I carefully consider how, when and why to incorporate Moodle into my teaching to ensure it gives added value. Okay? And you need to choose A, I do not or rarely use Moodle. I make basic use. I use a variety of Moodle. I use Moodle to systematically improve my teaching or I use Moodle to innovate. Just make a note somewhere one and then choose A, B, C, D, E. I hope it is visible because I'm about to move on to the next slide because we're going to move on to question two. Okay? Right. Question two, I monitor my learners' activities and interactions on Moodle. And you need to choose A, I hardly ever use Moodle. B, I use Moodle but I don't learn it for monitoring my learners' activity. You don't need to tell me you can just write and make a personal note. C, I occasionally check my learners' activity. D, regularly. Or E, I regularly intervene in my learners' activities to offer motivating or corrective comments. Very quickly, choose to A, B, C, D, E and let us do the next question. When my learners work in groups, they use Moodle to collaborate. I think you should have a good idea of this. A, my learners don't work in groups. B, it is not possible for me to do this. Maybe your organisation doesn't allow it. C, I encourage my learners to use the activities in groups. D, I require my learners to use them. Or C, my learners exchange information and jointly create knowledge. Okay, and now the final question. Question 4 and you can see why it's so informal. You cannot make a judgement simply based on 4 questions. But it's interesting, it will give you a basic idea. Final question number 4. I use Moodle to allow learners to plan, document and monitor their learning themselves. A, this is not possible in my work environment. B, my learners do reflect on their learning, but not using Moodle. C, sometimes D, I use a variety of tools. E, I systematically integrate different Moodle tools to allow my learners to plan, monitor and reflect on their progress. So you now need to choose the last one for A, B, C, D, E. And then you need to see what answers you've got for each question. Because now comes the mathematical part, but not really very difficult, where you need to calculate your final score. So I'm now going to move on to the next slide where you privately on your piece of paper need to add this up. Okay, so each question that you've got A, 0. B is 1, C, 2, D, 3, E, 4. Now I was a linguist at school, humanities and languages. I didn't do many maths, but I do know that there are four questions, and the maximum, if you've got four for each you will have 16. And if you put A for everything you'll have 0. So you are going to have a score between 0 and 16. And I'm just going to let people add this up. You don't need to tell me, but you do need to keep that look, keep looking at that, because I'm now going to transfer this score to a proficiency level, and I will explain it afterwards. So look at the score you got. And for example if you've got between 9, 11, if you've got 9, 10 or 11, then you are B2, and don't worry if you've no idea what B2 is, that's what I'm going to explain next. If you put E for everything and you've got 60, you are C2, which is also going to be explained. And if you've never used Moodle, if you're one of the people who's never used Moodle, then you're probably A1. Okay, now as I said this is very, very informal. And ideally before you do the MEC, your Moodle partner will have done something like this to gauge your level really. You wouldn't be starting the MEC if they felt you weren't ready for it. But we can give these proficiency levels from A to C. We can give them names. So for example if you were A1, if you got not 12, you're a newcomer. If you are in the B level, you obviously use Moodle regularly, you could even be an expert. If you're in the C level, then you are a leader. You are what we call a pioneer or an innovator. Now again, this is only your choice. If there is anyone who would like to write what you've got, and it doesn't matter, then just out of interest put it in, okay? And it's great that we have a variety of proficiency levels. Okay. B2, C1. Okay. Any level is fine. It's just interesting to see. And remember, this is only informal. It's just one tiny aspect of Moodle. Right. Let's look at these proficiency levels a little bit more then. So look at the one you got. For instance, the people who said B2. B2, your teaching practice includes creative Moodle use. You experiment and reflect and support others. C1, your teaching practice actively includes creative and occasionally innovative use of Moodle. You experiment, reflect and share good practice. Others look to you for support. Okay. Now, I wonder if any of you have ever heard of or seen these letter levels before? A, B, C. Because they are widely used, we did not make them up. The MEC certificate people, myself, Helen Foster and Anna Krasse, we didn't make these up. In actual fact, these have been used for many years by, again, another European organization. And this is the common European framework of reference languages. And although it says European, this is, again, used globally. I've been in Japan and the Japanese universities use this all the time for their students learning, studying English to gauge their level of English. My son teaches in Russia and in Russia they use these levels again to gauge the students level of English. That's right, like French as well. So any level at A you're kind of very basic. B, you're getting to be independent and more confident. C, you're very proficient. Now, from the point of view of languages, that's a little bit like this. So if you're an A1 language speaker, French, German, Russian, whatever, you could go in a cafe and order a cup of coffee at the times when we are allowed out of our homes. A2, you could talk a bit about your family, your hobbies. If you get up to C level, this is where you are a professional. So you see if you have a degree in a language, then you are at least C1. If you use it every day, for example as an interpreter or a translator, you'll see too. Now, Digcomp edu and the MEC uses these levels from the point of view of digital competence with Moodle. So we also use these. So how do these into Moodle? If you're A1, you're just a beginner in Moodle and it's probably too soon for the MEC. Remember, I said you need to be an experienced Moodler. If you're around about B1, you're fairly confident. You could probably, you could start this MEC and you would benefit a lot from it. To pass the certification, you need to be at B2 level, expert level. And I would imagine that if you already work training or teaching with Moodle instructional design, you would already be at C1 or C2. The top trainers, I want to think your Moodle partner facilitators will be C1 or C2. So in other words, we need to be B2 level in this course to pass. So let's go back into the course and see what happens next. So we've done the self-assessment check-in. We already checked with our partner facilitator that we were at the right level to begin. And now we go to the overview. Each of the six courses has an overview where you are actually taught or you learn about the competences in that area. So when we click to open this one, you see that there are books. This icon is a book that presents information and then there are quizzes which tests you on the information. And there are actually four areas or competences here. So there's teaching. This is basic teaching with Moodle. You'll learn about it. You'll see some examples and then you'll be tested formatively on it. By formatively, I mean you can do these tests as often as you want. They're not counted in the final grade, but you do have to get 80%. Guidance. How to interact with your learners. How to offer targeted guidance. Collaborative learning. So here you will learn how to get your learners working together using Moodle tools. Self-regulated learning. This is how you can make your learners more independent. Get them learning on their own. So for each of these, there is a quiz and what we're going to do now is again we are going to go in and try some of the questions in the quizzes. Again, I'm not giving away any secrets because each of these quizzes has a bank of questions which we're constantly building on. So we're having more quiz questions as we go along. So if you were to do the MEC, you might not get any of these questions anyway. But I want you to see the kinds of questions that come up. They're not about what is the setting you do to turn over on activity completion. It's not about how do you add students to your course. It's not about that. It's about teaching with Moodle. Okay, so here's an example question from the first competence teaching. Oh, sorry. No, before we do that, let's actually look at one of the books. Let me go back. Do you see we have books and I was going to take you as a full tour. So let's go into the full tour first by looking at a book of teaching. So when we click into here, the first thing you might think is, well this is very plain. Where are all the beautiful images? Where's the H5P activities? Where are the videos? We would love to add these shiny, super shiny features. But we're very anxious that we want this to be translated into other languages and we want people to be able to access it with low bandwidth, with different devices. So we've kept it simple. The content is very detail, but the presentation is simple. And you'll see down the side on the right, this is a table of contents in this book. And for each one, you have an area where you'd learn about empowering learners, assessing learners. And what we're also very pleased about is that we've included a lot of examples of Moodle use. We call them case studies. Let me show you one here. So a case study is where you will read about a certain teacher using Moodle in their organization where they have a problem and the solution which they find using Moodle. And we've got plenty of these in this instance. Ralph is learning about how to help students collectively improve their grades. And then the solution is given which you can read about. Here's another one. This one is George, how to encourage staff to engage with professional development. George actually works in a legal firm. So it's important to remember that the MEC is not only for teachers in schools and universities. It's for anyone who does training of any kind including corporate. George's staff know they have to take certain professional development each year but they're not very enthusiastic. He wants Moodle to help him and encourage them. And I think he uses gamification there. So throughout all of the six courses that we have and in each of the competences in the books, we have plenty of examples because we feel that it's by reading about how other people are using Moodle that can give you some ideas and inspiration. And thanks to all these people and many, many more who donated their lovely faces to pick, survey and unsplash for us to use in these courses. Hopefully at some point we'll be able to have real case studies. These are ones based on reality but they're not actual people. Okay, so imagine that you've gone through the book, you've read the case studies, what happens next is you're going to do a quiz to test your understanding. This is where I was explaining before that you can do the questions as often as you like but you do have to get 80%. They may well be different questions as we move through. So now I'm going to ask you to get interactive again and let's try a couple of these questions. Okay, Sam has set up a standard forum in his course as in this screenshot but nobody seems interested in joining the conversation. He's checked the forum settings are correct so everyone can access it. What might be the problem? Select all possible suggestions. Now if you see here you've got the square box which means that you can choose more than one answer. I am not going to give you the answer I'm not going to give you the answer because you need to think about it for yourself. You can feel free to suggest answers but I don't want anyone to actually say the answer is or the answers are. This is just to give you a taster and as I've said we have many, many questions so you might not even get this one. We've moved on to different ones but I want to give you the idea of the kinds of questions that you have. So although although we are using Moodle, this is talking about a forum here, it's actually how you're teaching with Moodle using the forum. Okay so do you think it's because he's chosen the wrong type of forum because the cog icon is a technical fault? Do you think it's because his forum title is very vague or nobody wants to be the first to post, okay and it can be one, two, three or four of them. I'm not actually going to tell you the answer instead I'm going to move on and let's look at another one. Again to give you another taster Aliag or Oleg in English, Aliag wants to introduce learners to extend their discussions in the forum. In other words he can just reply with one or two words. How should he phrase his, I think it should be questions really, so it's to encourage them to elaborate on their responses. Select all that apply. Again, so these are squares and what this is asking you is what kinds of questions should Aliag ask so that his students will give him fuller more detailed answers instead of just a yes and no. And earlier on we were asked does this apply to offline teaching as well things like this actually do because this applies if you're a face-to-face class just as much as if you're teaching in a Moodle forum online. Again, I'm not going to give you the answer. You need to think if you were asked any of those questions which ones would force you to give more detailed answers, okay. How did you feel about that? How did you feel like that? Did you enjoy this? Tell me about okay. Right. Looking at the clock, I think we'll do another one or two maybe. I want to finish just about 10-2 so that I can have 10 minutes for questions. Okay, now this next one Simon has several self-regulated learners in his Moodle course. Which of the following are characteristics of a self-regulated learner? Again, it's the square boxes so you can add more than one. Again, if you don't know what self-regulated learners are you will have discovered this as you go through this course. They observe their own performance. They never need to ask for help. They have to work on their own. They engage in self-reflection. They are motivated to study or they persevere when the learning is difficult. It could be one, two, three, four, five, six, it could be one or all six or two, three, four. Okay. I'm just looking at some of the answers and obviously I'm not going to tell you the answer but it's interesting to see what people think. I'm not even going to tell you whether people are getting the answers right or not. So let's move on. This is a final example. Kwame is running training on a workplace site for future business managers. Workplaces moodle with a few plugins and so this NEC applies just as much to workplace and for future business managers, so again it applies just as much to them as to teachers in schools or universities. These future business managers are very highly skilled, digitally literate independent learners. To encourage them on the first day he adds five budgets to be earned when completing tasks such as reading the facilitator introduction. He's disappointed to read in their course feedback that they did not appreciate the budgets. Why do you think is the most likely reason for this? I've put in bold italics most likely because there could be quite a few reasons and if you look here you might think that there are more than one reasons but for this one because we have the round button you need to select just one. Again if you have gone through this training it will be clear to you what the most likely reason is and I won't tell you the answer. I will give you a hint which is that it's very important to read the questions carefully as we've been training facilitators for example we've noticed that some people who believe they know Moodle don't read the questions because they think oh I know the answer and they put the answer without thinking and reading and we do want you to think very much and read very carefully. Well sadly I'm not going to tell you and I'm not even going to say if anyone's got your rights instead let's just move on. Okay so when you have gone through each of the books depending on the course there are six courses depending on the course there are between three and five competences so books with the teaching materials quizzes to test your understanding when you've gone through them and got 80% in the formative quizzes you then do two assessed tasks. These are Moodle assignments and each one is worth 50% of the final grade and you have to get B2 level to pass obviously you can get higher but B2 is the minimum pass now surprisingly I'm not going to show you the text of the assessed tasks but I will actually show you the kinds of format that they take they are online test assignments where you need to write some text and it's for example your friend Dev has asked you for advice on and then you are presented with a scenario of online teaching and you have to give Dev advice on how Moodle could help him with that particular problem it's like in the case studies here's another example you've been asked to speak to trainee teachers about and again this might be about how to make courses accessible how to get learners collaborating or how to gamify your course something like that and you will need to write and present evidence of using Moodle for that so to summarise the two assessed tasks they need to be between 500 and 800 words and you can and we welcome including screenshots of an actual course that you have taught or that you've set up to demonstrate your proficiency using Moodle obviously without revealing any names or anything also you can include a link to a course it could be a course on Moodle Cloud that might be safer if you don't have real users if you have real users you've got to be very very careful with commissions and GDPR but you can do that for evidence you might find some Moodle partners will insist on this if they're not sure that the 500 words you've written are your own obviously you have to agree that it's not copied if you don't meet B2 level then you can try twice more so in essence you have three attempts then you will need to discuss with your facilitator and the minimum pass as I've explained is B2 okay now the assessments are graded using a rubric I've blurred this out although there isn't anything massively secret about it each course has different rubrics and candidates you will be able to see the rubric but you can see here that you're graded first of all on how well you completed the task did you answer the question and then depending on the course that you're in you're graded on the competence and you're graded at a level so again we're using these ditch comp edu and cefr levels from A to C and as long as you get B2 so on average you will pass and that basically is pretty much it so I'm going to repeat what I said from the beginning which is that there are six courses I gave you a tour into the course called teaching because that happens to be my favourite because it's kind of like a general overview there are the five others they work in a similar way and for each one you get a batch and if you take all six you get a certificate which says that you are a certified Moodle educator now moving on I'm going to stop the presentation in a moment and answer questions that I can answer if you have anything specific Anna Crosser is the Moodle HQ member who is dealing particularly with MEC questions and her email for the MEC only is MEC at Moodle.com do remember also that you can fill in a form on Moodle.com and when a Moodle partner in your area has been certified and facilitated then they will be advertising these courses the earliest will be May mid-May and I already know that there are some partners around the world who are going to be ready for that my email for education in general because I'm education manager not just of the MEC but for all free education such as the learn Moodle MOOC communityeducationonmoodle.org is educationatmoodle.com so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just to move on to the last slide which is my thank you and actually going to put my camera back on so that I can you can see me as I reply to any questions I don't have all the answers I know we have at least one facilitator who's going to be qualified within the next couple of weeks so perhaps she at least one I see so if there are some Moodle partner facilitators you're welcome to answer also so that's the presentation that was the interactive tour of the MEC so let's have a look at some of your questions I will answer the ones that I can answer other people please feel free to answer as well the MEC fees I believe fees are decided by the Moodle partners they will vary around the world typical timeline for someone in B1, B2 level well if you're asking about timelines and further down I have a question about will it be time bound or self-paced what happens usually is that Moodle partners offer these over a certain period it might be over six weeks or it might be over a couple of months so you work through them in what we call a cohort you are signed up to one particular run of the MEC with other people and a partner facilitator will take you through that now you might not have to do something on Monday Tuesday Wednesday you know but you will be working within a certain timeframe of weeks okay Kim who is going to be a certified facilitator partner is saying yes it's self-paced but it should be finished within two years you could easily do one course per week okay any other questions do you have the choice to choose the Moodle partner you can go direct to a qualified Moodle partner we are updating Moodle.com as we speak because Moodle partners are going through the training the facilitator training to announce that they are offering it and you can go direct to them or and this is what I recommend is that you go to Moodle.com fill in the form and then you will be allocated a suitable partner for you okay not all Moodle partners will offer it they will have their own training not all Moodle partners will be ready to offer it yet I'm thinking around about five looking at training schedule Anna is monitoring will be ready in May but hopefully more will come in June, July and August and so on now I think this is actually mentioning I do believe you can take just one course instead of all of them this again depends on the partner you work with and you're saying similar to remote learning modules counting towards university course credits we have been talking about allowing universities to pay some kind of subscription to run the MEC themselves as part of their online training and that's not going to happen in May we're focusing on getting the partners ready to deliver it but if you're in a university around the world and you are in charge of instructional design or training your teachers that is something that we have the goal to have in place later in the year where you can pay and then you can be one of your university people with a qualified facilitator to offer it as well okay on thing says I've completed foundation level digital competence of the MEC how to complete the remaining I think Kim might be able to help me on this but what we've decided is if you did the foundation level that will give you credit for this one that I showed you here which is the teaching certificate so you will already have the credit for that so you'll only need to do the other courses and we will see that because we've got we will see your badges when you go through a Moodle partner when you apply through your Moodle partner you'll need to tell them that you did that foundation level certificate and show them your badges or your certificates okay the validity of the MEC I cannot imagine it having lifetime validity however it's not going to be something that we update every six months our free learn Moodle basics Moodle with every release because although this deals with Moodle this actually deals with teaching online and many of the strategies and the approaches don't change from one year to the next so I can't give you a specific answer because we haven't launched it yet but certainly I don't think in 20 years time you can present your MEC certificate from 2020 and say look at me I'm certified so there will be some time but it's going to be fairly long yes this this have dips I am doing Moodle HQ MOOC do you mean you're doing the learn Moodle basics MOOC if so again your Moodle partner will have to make sure that you have enough knowledge the learn Moodle basics MOOC I would say is the absolute minimum learn Moodle basics gets you just above A1 and into A2 and we say that if you're around about A2 level you need to discuss with the Moodle partner and they will find out whether they think you're ready to ideally you need to have experience teaching with Moodle for quite a few months as well as having done a training because it's not enough to just do a training one month and then go straight into the MEC because these things need to sink in and you need to have some experience okay any more I notice just a few more minutes yeah Kim you do not want to attempt the MEC unless you have a fair amount of experience teaching it is quite rigorous you know there are some things that will really make you think and really make you focus and this was written by people with decades of experience in teaching not only online but offline so I think it's something that you can't just pick up you can't just learn it like you can do the MOOC basic minimum prerequisite well basic training and some experience I'd like to say a years experience teaching with Moodle but I don't want to put people off but you'll find out very soon that you need to know not just about Moodle but about teaching it's not the technical setup you might be very good at creating a course and adding a forum and adding a choice and adding assignment but not you know how to deal with students how to question your students how to give feedback to your students that won't upset them that will motivate them it's that aspect as well as Moodle aspect in some ways you could say that the MEC is about online teaching and people using other LMSs could benefit a lot from it but of course we're focusing on Moodle that's right it's not version specific we will each year we if there's anything that needs updating in the MEC because Moodle itself has added new features of course we will include those but it's not like the Learn Moodle basics MOOC which we have every six months now MEC stands for Moodle Educator Certification if I can just move my slide back Moodle Educator Certification is MEC thank you Anita thank you everyone thank you I'm not quite sure when to stop so I'll just keep talking until someone tells me to stop at the end of the session Larry you got like five to seven minutes to come over to everyone right Kuda which service am I supposed to choose from when you go there you need to choose your country and then you need to search for training or filter for training you can see which Moodle partners offer training in your country theoretically as I understand that you can take training with a partner not in your country if there is no partner or if they don't do the training but that's not my area of you know I believe that's how it works right Rajan would it be good for persons without classroom teaching experience but qualified in experience in industry yet it would be perfect you would be exactly right to give it a go when I say teaching I don't mean offline face to face you could be the most experienced online teacher and you would be very very good for an MEC candidate I'm just saying that much of what you do offline can apply to online but also there are very different skills depending you know a lot of what you do offline is asynchronous it's not at the same time whereas when you're teaching offline classroom it is at the same time so certainly please look at the MEC if you've taught online or you have instructional design experience okay Vidya Mantra is currently undergoing the new MEC facilitator training so when Vidya Mantra has passed the new MEC facilitator training which will hopefully be in the next few weeks then yes you will be able to do the MEC with them okay thanks Kim thanks Fiona that's right Moodle Partners we've offered an earlier version are currently undergoing refresher training so they are certified to use this new one and they will come on board with a new qualification over the next few months we want to get it out as soon as possible I have no patience that's why I'm really keen for everyone to pass the training and to be able to offer it to people thank you everyone thanks Kim for answering questions in the forums as well in the chat see how you stay on to Moodle I think forums immediately anytime I see text going well thank you Mary if there is no any other questions we will close the session thank you very much very interesting interactive it's open a lot of doors for a lot of people thank you very much for that