 I should introduce myself. My name's Stuart. I'm the managing director of a Moodle partner in New Zealand. So that's why I'm here. But I'm hoping that lots of the things that I comment on and talk about will resonate, at least some of them, at different levels for each of you. So we've been a Moodle partner for 10 years, which actually makes me feel incredibly old, first of all. But it does mean that, unlike lots of you here who unfortunately have probably only seen one or two Moodle sites in real depth, we've seen hundreds. We've seen schools and universities and not-for-profits and all types of strange installations. And of course, our learning curve has just been fantastic through those 10 years, seeing all the different ways and actually getting involved with them in some depth solving problems as well, of course. I actually found it difficult to get down to 10 points. We actually had sort of 15 things that we would have loved to talk about. Anyway, so let's see where we start. We're probably best known for a lot of the community stuff we kind of do. We have a lot of PHMs, which are the particularly helpful Moodlers on Moodle.org, because we've always thought that it's important to be part of that community. We run a podcast which you can look for on iTunes and SoundCloud and a couple of sort of free project sites for people. I think it's important to have a balance between business and actually community and keeping that balance, right? Okay, so let's go on to the first slide. The first area that we see over and over again. So quizzes. Quizzes are fantastic in Moodle, right? Just one of the most sophisticated, flexible quiz systems you could imagine. But ironically, we see a lot of people running off and getting all enthusiastic about quizzes, creating them lots of questions, lots of quizzes. And what they miss is the kind of structure. They miss the fact that you should have a nice question bank organized in categories that you can then reuse, blah, blah. We've even had people call us up and say, oh, none of our great thing or results are working. And we get there and we find out that the only reason this organization has Moodle is because of the quizzes, right? HR said to IT, we need a quiz system. IT recommended Moodle. The only thing these people are using it for is quizzes. They didn't even know it did forums, right? Or assignments or anything else. That was an interesting conversation. We also have seen people create a quiz with 20 essay questions, right? And then they phone us up and they say, oh, the students aren't getting notified when someone grades an assignment because they're just answering one question. Or they say, you know, this isn't flowing through into the grade book. You know, people using the quiz quite horribly. And of course, linked to the quiz is the grade book. I always feel a bit guilty and a bit bad criticizing the grade book because I think it has an astronomically difficult job to do, right? Because it has to work for you guys in university, has to work for you guys in school, has to work for you guys over in the fire service or the blood service or whatever. It's trying to be everything for everyone. And that's a big ask. The problem with the grade book is that it offers 600% functionality and most people only need 10 to 20. Yeah, it's confusing. And of course, the major disaster always waiting to happen is that people don't set up the grade book before they run the course and they try and tweak it as they go. Or they start going in there and manually overriding grades, which looks good on paper, but unfortunately, the students don't know about that. Yeah. Difficult one. Let's go on. Who else have we got? Reporting. We get an awful lot of requests for better reporting in Moodle. And, you know, it's a reasonable comment. However, I would say that 90% of students have no idea how to change between the user report and the outline report, which shows them their grades across all the courses in one go. Teachers generally unaware of all the different types of reports they can get, the activity report, the participation report, they just generally focus on the grade book and not those different report options. And of course, for administrators, administrators get other reports as well. And they can install reports. But an average Moodle administrator is not a teacher and doesn't actually know which reports people would want. All right. And that highlights one of the great disconnects with Moodle. Doesn't matter where you are, which is that the academic side and the IT side, you know, life is never necessarily smoothed between these. But for Moodle to work efficiently and to work well, there has to be a huge amount of coordination there. All right. Because administrators, when they upgrade, there's options every time. You know, here's any function. It's disabled. Should we enable it? Administrators wouldn't know that. How many times does an administrator sat down with the academic side and said, this is our test upgrade. And these are the options we're going to have from now on. Can you investigate these and tell us, should we be switching them on or off? You know, that's how the process should work, ideally. And of course, you know, you've got the reporting plugins such as configurable reports and ad hoc, which are all fantastic. And if you can develop a little bit of MySQL, you can get a lot more reporting out of there. I'm going to mention SCORM. How many people are using SCORM in some way within there? Okay, that's quite high. We of course don't tend to see SCORM being used in a school level so much or even university, but where it's heavily used tends to be the commercial sector and private training companies and so on. Not to say that universities don't have some of this. I've kind of put all not in there because the irony here is that SCORM is the shareable content object reference model. And 99% of the SCORM objects you create are put in Moodle. They're not shared anywhere. They're actually taking advantage of the shareable nature of SCORM objects. Unless you've got a Blackboard site and a Moodle site and a Canvas site or whatever, that's highly unlikely. So your shareable content reference tends to be just actually in one system, which is interesting. But of course, people generally are using SCORM because it produces stuff that looks nice. I would suggest to you that probably 90% of the SCORM content we see could just as easily and just as effectively be created in the Moodle lesson using some nice graphics, some audio files, a video, a well-laid out path, some interactive questions along the way. Seriously, I would say 90% of the SCORM investment I've seen could be replicated just as well and just as easily in the lesson. And there's a big point there because very few people have the ability to go and edit that SCORM content afterwards. You may even be charged if you want to edit that SCORM content afterwards. But if it's in a Moodle lesson, anyone trained in the lesson can actually go and edit it. So it's putting you in a more powerful position actually with your information. Okay, moving through. What else have we got? SCORM. Authentication and Enrollment. I'm kind of going to skip across that one a little bit. Apart from to say, one of the new functions that we have in newer versions of Moodle, some of you may know, is the ability to log in with an email address. We need to think about that in terms of security. It's not always easy to guess someone's login name within an institution, but it's actually pretty easy to work out what their three email addresses are just by looking around on the web. And if I know their email address, then I only need to know the password. So I'm already halfway there. It makes life easier, but it may also carry security risks, I guess, is the way I might say that. So, themes. Yeah, one of my favorites. I'm actually a graphic designer by trade. So, what do we see with themes? We see managing directors and marketing spending inordinate amounts of time, and sometimes money, which we don't mind, a lot of time, on their Moodle branding and their theme, right? And it's all about, is the logo on there, does the color scheme match? Is this the right font to match our catalog? Blah, blah, blah. Should we have the logo on every single page? Yeah. You have to remember that your Moodle site is not a marketing tool. The front page might have some marketing value, but once you're logged in and doing things, it should 100% be about the learning and 0% about branding and those things because they're already your customer. They're in there. You've already sold them the car. You don't need to keep showing them the brochure. Thank you. So, in a world where we're thinking about all this in the right way, you would have one theme, right? And then you would have at least two versions that all your users can switch to. You would have one version that works perfectly for people who are color-impaired. You would have another version that is higher contrast, maybe a larger font, right? Yes, we know that you can make the browser thing bigger. We know that you can go into your browser settings and use the colors and fonts, but really, how many people do that, right? And even if they do on their own machine, they might come into your institution and just use a machine in the library so they haven't got that power to do that. I'm just interested to know how many people have one theme on their site that's so tightly controlled and how many people actually have these variations that would be so, so easy to create. Just put your hand up if you have one and everyone gets that. Yeah. Put your hand up if you actually have versions that are optimized for people who, yeah. What a horrible statistic that is. We had, I think, two people, two people. And this is an easy job. Once you've got the basic theme, a bit of extra work to change the CSS, and you've got your other versions. Yep. Just about finished. How long have I got? Okay. Plugins. If I come to a Moodle site and I see you're using one, two, three, four, five plugins, probably quite happy. This sort of audience, probably turn it in. That would be important. Certificate, maybe questionnaire, till feedback was in core. All good stuff. If I come to your Moodle site and I see you've got 10 plugins, I instantly start to get worried because, number one, you're probably using plugins to do things that could be done anyway in core if you knew how. And secondly, the more plugins you have, the higher the risk is that you're not going to be able to move forward with the next upgrade of Moodle. Because if you have a plugin here that is not available for the next version, it's not maintained, you run the risk of having to hold your whole institution back, move into the next version of Moodle, getting all that new wonderful functionality just because people are relying on this one plugin from way back. You really, really, really need to think carefully about this. And in fact, one of the things that we hate is the fact that in Moodle now, administrators can install a plugin through the GUI. It's brilliant for testing, it's brilliant for people who know what they're doing. I'll tell you now, we disable that on all our client sites because we actually want to talk to people before they start installing plugins and we want to work them through the process of making sure they're making smart choices for the future. Yep, okay. And then finally, what have we got? I'm not going to talk about that one. Go on, one more training. I just want to talk about training and development because this is the big one. It doesn't matter what your technology is, doesn't matter how much money you've spent on hosting, doesn't matter which Moodle part you're working with, doesn't matter how many great IT people you bring in. Ultimately, the biggest single factor on the success of your Moodle site is the understanding and the level your staff on the ground floor, on the Coal interface, working with students, how much knowledge they have to use Moodle effectively. Again and again, that's the biggest area we see for improvement and some effort. So just want to go to the very last slide. Your challenge after this is to go away after this session, go away after this Moodle, just identify 10 things you can improve. If you're a teacher, it's 10 things you can improve in your course. If you're a administrator, it's 10 things you can improve on your site. Some of those could be small, should we change the word in on the front page? Could make it clearer. Some of them could be long, medium term. What should we do at the next upgrade point? And some of them could be longer term, strategic. What should we be doing this time next year, this time in 18 months, right? But go away, use this as a positive. You only get better by criticising what you've got and really looking at it and being prepared to put some hard work in and solve those problems. Okay, thank you.