 It's day 3 of Moodle Mood Global and I'm here with Chris Nelson who's a senior product development manager with the Open University and Chris alongside his colleague Tim Hunt did a really interesting presentation on the first day of the Mood about quiz related improvements in Moodle 4 which I found really interesting but before we talk about that the Open University have been using Moodle for some time is that right? Yes since well we started looking at it in 2005 and started using it properly I think from 2007 we then had a rapid acceleration project to onboard and move everything across to the new learning management system and I think it pretty much became our central delivery from 2012. Wow that must have been a huge project because how many students do you have? Currently just over 265,000 I want to say. Huge! Huge! For the UK yes, I mean it's a completely online learning experience so although there is the big Milton Keynes campus we don't have students there they all study from the home on the computers and mobile devices etc. Yeah so you need a very robust system I'm sure that's been extremely scalable do you host with AWS? We do yes. Interesting and I was really curious about your presentation because it just seemed so learner-centric really the improvements you've done to quiz and obviously improved how you deliver for educators can you tell me a bit about some of the work you've been doing with quiz? Sure okay well actually I just want to say first that although internally our customers are the business, the faculty is the schools etc. everyone at the Open University is very conscious about how important it is to serve our students so therefore the feedback that I get from the business is essentially from the students themselves. Some of the more recent stuff that we're doing to improve the student experience in particular is to do with our diagnostic quizzes so this is to make it so that there could be sectional scoring so students can take a single quiz evaluate its reading writing and possibly speak in Spanish for example and that can be graded by the system and that gives them a much better idea of where to start with which module or course indeed and where they need to begin the student journey not all students come to us ready to start maybe at level one for example we do have a lot of access modules. Sure and so educators can then deliver content that's suited to that student or cohort of students? Absolutely absolutely sometimes knowledge changes over the decades so someone who hasn't been a student for 20 years needs to start perhaps a lower level than they might have thought. Sure and do you work very closely with your educators so the you know faculty who are actually delivering courses to think about improvements? We try to I mean given the scale of the Open University is very difficult to do that so we do have representation on groups I do try to get out to all the schools and talk to as many people as possible and also the production teams. Generally we use a lot of data to give us an insight into what are the worst blockers in our systems so we rely on that student feedback to come through from the surveys etc. So it's multifaceted you're getting input from learners, educators, representative groups. So much data. So much data and so you obviously see something that you want to achieve do you have a big team of Moodle developers who are working? Yes both onshore and offshore support. Okay great. Yeah it just becomes a problem to work out how to prioritise what is the most important and then we have our quarterly releases and of course Moodle releases big versions every six months as well so we have to work within that time frame. Yeah heavy pressure I think. Yes it's always go go go. Yeah and I know that Open University have contributed to Moodle a lot over the years would you agree what kind of things do you do in terms of community contribution? Well certainly in terms of the development team a lot of them have produced large features of core. Tim Hunt who I work with on quiz developments he also spends his weekends and evenings also developing Moodle as a volunteer etc. So there's quite a lot of overlap I'd say between what the Open University has done and does and Moodle itself. But that's the great thing about Open Source you know if we don't have it in Moodle and we want something we can build it and what's there if it's not quite doing what we want we can improve it.