 Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today we are running our first webinar on Moodle Workplace and title a window into Workplace, MEC. With me today I have Emilio Lozano, the product lead of the Moodle Workplace, and I am Anna Carci, Education Advisor and MEC Coordinator. Emilio is going to introduce us to the Moodle Workplace and then we will take some questions from Emilio. And then I will walk you through the MEC site, which is the site that we maintain here in Moodle HQ. And we want to see things in detail. So Emilio, the floor is yours. Hello everyone. Thanks for inviting me. Anna, I'm ready to join this session. I'm very happy to be here and to be able to talk about workplace a little bit to this audience. As Anna said, I'm the product lead, product manager for Moodle Workplace and I'm based in Madrid, in Spain, and I'm going to talk to you briefly about workplace and then I will show you some, I will give you some sneak peek to what is coming in workplace for. So, okay, so this is the workplace team where we are nine people right now, we're a remote team, we're mostly distributed in Europe. So, most of the people is from Spain, we have also two developers in the UK and one developer in Ecuador. And we're hiring, so the team will grow a little bit during this year. So, okay, so what is workplace? Let me talk to you a little bit about our model. So basically, as you will probably have heard, we are not open source. So workplace is essentially an upper core offering, because workplace is not open source is not freely available, but it's built on top of Moodle LMS. So 90% of workplace is basically is LMS. And on top of that, we have our features or plugins that make up the Moodle workplace product. But even if we are not open source, we want to contribute to Moodle LMS product. So from time to time, every release, every major release, we release, we roll out to Moodle LMS, some of our selected features. The last feature we are going to add pretty soon is report builder. So report builder in LMS in Moodle 4, it's coming from Moodle workplace. We released other features in the past like the workplace certificate modules. We have the activity module and the certificate manager. We have open source them and they are available as community plugins. We also roll out custom fields for all entities and countless of small fixes and patches that we work on as part of the workplace project. We used to fix many things in Moodle LMS or even contribute with smaller improvements. So as I said, Moodle workplace is only available through service providers, which is basically Moodle partners and Moodle US. But the reason behind that is because we want to improve Moodle workplace sustainability by helping our partners to have more revenues. And in the end that is coming to, a part of that revenues are coming to Moodle HQ so we can pay all our developers and all the staff in Moodle, not only the developers, so we can improve all of our products. So sustainability, so Moodle workplace is not only for revenue, right? So we don't want to only think of revenue. So as I said, what we want to do is increase the sustainability of the Moodle project. This product is built for workplace, for the workplace sector, but not only for companies, but also for organizations. So, and it offers us the opportunity to engage with these kind of organizations because as you know Moodle LMS is focused on education. So the feature it has are awesome, but mostly focused on education. It lacks some features that are very demanded on the corporate sector. So what we did with workplace is creating like an advisory group formed by Moodle partners and they help us to define what needed to be in this probe for the corporate offering and also for organizations. So this is our model and a little bit about workplace, as I said, Moodle workplace is built on top of Moodle LMS. It's based on LMS so everything that is coming in major releases in Moodle LMS, it is available, it would be available shortly after that in the corresponding workplace release. And it's very important that we are built on top of Moodle LMS. So we are synchronized with Moodle LMS with every minor or major release in the next day or two or in the same week or some weeks after depending on if we're working. We're talking about minor releases or major releases. The same releases, the same version is released in workplace. So everything that is available in Moodle LMS is available shortly after that in Moodle workplace. But apart from that we have our own features in every release and we have a different release cycle for now we release new features in every minor release so every two months you get new features in Moodle workplace. On top of Moodle LMS we have our plugins or our features that are basically plugins and Moodle workplace produce is built with over these features. I will mention them very briefly because I know that Ana is going to give you more detail about the different features but the features we have are multi-tenancy which is basically the ability to have different Moodle workplace sites within the same organization. But those sites or tenants are isolated but you have some ways to share content across all tenants so you can reuse your content while you keep your users separated. Our organization instructor is to create a hierarchy of jobs and departments that are basically to help you to model your organization reporting lines in workplace. We have also of course a report bill that is coming to LMS to create, for users to create their custom reports based on existing report sources and also it is an engine, an API that the product itself uses to create system reports. So basically with report bill that what we are doing is improving the reporting across the whole solution so you can use this new API. We internally Moodle too and also planning developers they can use this API to build their reports. We have programs that are learning pathways where you can add courses, a set of courses with some hierarchy and you can define different pathways within the program with completion criteria, availability restrictions for the courses within the program in a very simplified way and also relative dates for everything. The certifications are recurring programs so basically a certification is a way of making a program recurring and defining an expiration date for it. So it's very demanded in the corporate sector and with this you can just help your staff to get up to date with their compliance. Then we have the certificates, the diploma the pieces of paper, basically PDF that you can generate using our certificate module. I'm pretty sure that you all know about this because it's a very popular feature in Moodle LMS. So we have our own certificate plugin that we open source with some very cool UI improvements and additional functionality. By the way, this is this plugin is based on the custom certificates plugin that exists in the community, but we needed to duplicate it for some reasons because we need it that way in workplace. But it is the functionality similar with some improvements. Then we have a migration feature to basically that will allow any admin to migrate content from one site from one workplace to a different site or even to the same site in a different tenant in a very easy way is that we start with three or four steps. You can just export all the content in your site or selected content and import it into a different site or the same site. It's really convenient and it really helps with deployment and you know, rolling out courses and programs within your workplace site or on all your workplace sites. And with Dynamic Cruise, we bring automation to workplace. This is like a Swiss knife because it allows you to create automations based on conditions that are predefined in plugins and actions. So you can just create like a recipe using conditions and when the conditions are met, the actions will execute. Let me give you an example. It's like, so maybe you can just issue a certificate when a user is complete given course or program or you can create a database and when the users complete this program, allocate them to this other program or to create onboarding tasks for all new users in the systems, allocate them in the onboarding program. Or when a user is complete this course, add them to this cohort and things like that. We have like, I don't know, maybe 20 different conditions, some the same number of actions, and by combining them you can create really powerful automations in workplace. And last but not least, we have the appointments booking, which is an activity module to manage booking, basically, as the name said. So with this, you can create either seminar-like sessions that are spun in several days or you can create time slots, so meetings, small meetings in time slots for users to book. That's basically that. And of course, we have workplace app. We have the specific workplace app, it is obviously also, we have obviously a branded app too, so it can be branded. This app, it supports all the features in a standard model app, but also the features that are present in workplace, especially multi-tenancy on our dashboard. But with this app, you can have a multi-tenant app or even you could have different apps for the same site working in different tenants. And what about the road map? So this is what is coming in the next six to 18 months. We're working right now in workplace 4. We started working on it in early this year because we needed to have a stable version of MoonLMS or development in a stable version of MoonLMS. So we are planning to release workplace 4 by July 2022. And in this feature, we're going to add, of course, all the features coming in and improvements in Mooder 4 and also some features that I will show you shortly. We're also working on some integration improvements of making workplace more ready to be integrated with anything, especially taking advantage of specific or advanced features. And then in November, we plan to catch up with workplace with MoonLMS releases. So we release workplace 4.1 in November. And for that release, we're planning to work on course-level reports and user-level reports, which will be also available in MoonLMS. We'll see because this is not final yet. But this is the ability to create custom reports at a course or a user level. So they are available in selected courses for the teachers or students to use them. And then later on, we'll work on different features that have been prioritized by our product advisory group. The top priorities for us are the learning catalog and the visualizations or graphs in report builder. The learning catalog is exactly what it says. The thing that we're lacking right now, we don't have, because in MoonLMS, you have the course catalog, but in Mooder Workplace, we don't have that equivalent because programs didn't exist in MoonLMS. So once we have the new workplace for my courses page, we will start working on the learning catalog, which is basically the ability for the users to discover the learning they have that is available to them in the workplace set. So we can even enroll into those courses or programs or find them using different criteria. And of course, it will also have some e-commerce functionality and public access from the outside. So without, so not requiring the users to be locked in the system. And we were also going to work in some improvements in the multi-tenancy and programs. So that is what is coming in the next six to 80 months. Okay, so let me give you a quick, very brief sneak peek of Workplace 4, because what I'm going to show you are prototypes working on this, but the real productivity is still far from being there. Okay, so the first thing is the dashboard. You know that in Workplace, in Mooder 4, in the dashboard you'll have the timeline and the calendar blocks. We think that in the workplace sector, this kind of dashboard is not that suitable because courses usually don't have an end date or even don't have dates at all, because you know, in the corporate sector, the way the courses are used is quite different. They have less kinds of activities, mostly all of the courses are composed of scorns, quizzes and maybe some static content. So for that kind of courses it will be that timeline, the timeline block will not work exactly, you know, as it was designed. So we are introducing two blocks in the dashboard, in the workplace dashboard, that are the improvised courses and new available courses. And basically the new focus of the dashboard will be telling the user what to do next. That is what the dashboard in Workplace is going to do. So improvised courses are all the courses that the user is taking at that moment, and when a new course is available to them, either because they have completed a course within a program that is required to unlock this course, or because that has been recently unlocked, it will show up in the new available courses, or if you have been enrolled into a course by someone, or it will appear in the new available courses. And that's it. So you just need to focus on finishing what you have been in progress courses and then, and then starting the new level courses and, you know, continue with that cycle. The courses page is really an improvement for us. This is very welcome because we have programs or certifications in Workplace 311 but we don't, we didn't have any place in Moodle and MS where we could put all the, you know, the catalog, your personal catalog of learning catalog of courses and programs. So what we did basically is using the dashboard and Workplace 311, all the information is in the dashboard and it could be, it could get quite busy sometimes. So with this new MyCourses page, what we did basically is moving all that functionality, all the catalog functionality to these MyCourses. We'll remain, we will maintain, we'll keep this MyCourses name, but this is really the MyLearning page. And the only thing that, at least for users is in our, in our user testing, the MyCourses name was better in most of the cases, that's why we're keeping it, but in this page, the user will see all the learning that is allocated to them. We'll see the courses and their program. And with these new pages, we will allow users to navigate through all their learning to search for the courses and so on. And it helps us to remove complexity from, from the dashboard. As part of the MyCourses, we're also creating this course cover page. And this cover page will be shown to the user the first time they access to the course. It has basically a summary of the course with the overview, the name of the course. If this course is part of a program, they will see what exactly is a program and they can go to the program details. And they will see all the, the custom fields, dates, teachers that we call trainers in, in workplace. And this will show to the user just the first time they access to the course. Once they have seen this page, they will see, I don't have the screenshot, but in the course index, we have an additional tab, it's called information. And this, this course cover, the old information, this course cover page will be also in the information tab within the course. We have the program pages in workplace, we don't, we didn't have a program page. So as I said, all the information about the program was in the dashboard. But now we have independent program pages. This is like the program, like the course index in LMS. It's similar. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar. This is now a new independent page. And it will have also this program cover page. So the first time users access to the program, they'll see the cover page with the same information this day. I just show you for the courses. And then when they get into the program, they'll see the content, program content in this page and they can browse this page. This is, is, is everything is in the same page with Ajax loading. So it's interactive. They don't need to reload the whole page to navigate through the sets and courses, and they can see the completion criteria for the program and the sets and they can see the detail of every course in the, in the system, in the program, sorry. And they can see, as I said, they can browse through sets. So this is the, this is the program view and then when they click on a set, they will see the same page, but for that set, for that set with the breadcrumbs for easy navigation. So we did this to make navigation through programs courses and certifications more consistent. And then we'll have the my team space in, if you don't know about the workplace right now in workplace in a dashboard, we have like two tabs, the learning tab and the teams tab. If you're a manager, you will see the learning and the teams tab and the teams tab, you will find information for about your team. And we're doing in workplaces that we're moving this my teams page to the primary navigation, but it's not only about the movie in this page we're creating a new feature, this custom pages feature with this feature you can build custom dashboards or pages for a specific audience. So you did and this is a good example this my teams page is a custom page this available only for managers. So if you're a manager if you if you meet the, if you're in the audience for this page you will see it in the main navigation, the primary navigation, and you can see whatever at the input in this page. This custom page is creating by default on installation so all workplace sites will have the my teams page available for all managers. And the admins will be able to other remote blocks from this page, if, if they want, but they can create also new custom pages like I don't know, but page for the sales team with some dashboards on with some reports specific to them, or they might want to create a page only for teachers, or they have different blocks for them, they can have like the course overview blog, or something like that if they don't want to add that to the dashboard. So these open apps, a whole world of possibilities because they can create, you can create custom pages that are like custom dashboards, but they're not exactly the same thing because in what a dashboard for technical reasons when you, when you log in and decide for the first time. You get like it will your own copy of the dashboard and you can modify it and if the admin wants to add something to the dashboard for all users they need to reset the dashboard for all users and things like that. It's like a dashboard is more like a template page. So you don't need, well, you don't need to reset this page for the users and and so on. So the my teams pages, the pages is a custom page but with the my teams block and this block what it shows to the manager is the information about their team so everybody reporting to this manager will will be in the list and the managers can drill down and see reports on learning and performance for all the users in their teams. Yeah, and that's it and that's everything I can show you of workplace for. Thank you so much, Emilio. We do have a question in the chat from Charles says, what are the main differences between programs in workplace and learning paths in LMS. I say that programs in workplace are simpler. To be honest, the learning paths, I don't know them very well. Right. So, I know what they are, but I haven't used them that much, but in workplace programs are. In workplace you create. So you create a program by adding courses you have courses and sets created in a hierarchy and you define completion criteria for those sets and courses so to me is more similar to a course where you are adding activities within sections and you're configuring the restrictions between among all the activities. And then in programs you also have a user staff where you can manually enroll users, or you can create automations to enroll users in a program so to me. The different the main difference that in workplace the programs are like it's another learning entities like a higher level learning entity that is built with courses. I don't know if that answers your question. Yep. Thank you. I was thinking exactly the same that programs in workplace it's more. It gives you a greater capability of doing things and much more easier than in the learning paths. I do have any other questions. I'm afraid that we will have to. Hello, Emily to move on with his really heavy schedule. So if you have questions to him, it will be nice to ask them now, because we are going to move on with taking a look in the MEC site. I'm moving on about the MEC workplace site. Just before we get there I would like to give you a quick introduction about what is the MEC MEC stands for model educator certificate. The MEC is the an international certificate for teaching with moodle MEC has been developed by the education team of moodle HQ, and it is exclusively offered by authorized the moodle certified service providers. So it's a quite simple seam we have six certification courses that lead to six badges, and once someone has all these badges is eligible to get the MEC certificate. Now, what is the business need behind the MEC that led us to use moodle workplace instead of using the moodle LMS. Well, we have to understand this first because it's the most essential point I would say from one hand we had the MEC that is a product offered by certified service providers. The network of certified service providers is a big international network of almost 80 independent companies who have their own employees, they have their own facilitators, and of course they have their own customers. On the other hand, we have the six MEC courses that form the MEC program. These courses needed to be unique in order to ensure quality among all providers, creating different copies, for example, of the courses for each provider would inevitably lead sooner or later into different versions of the courses, as courses are updated annually. Also for quality assurance, the editing rights in the course are given only to the moodle HQ staff, while MEC facilitators have non editing rights. So last, at least we have one certificate. And this certificate should be awarded after the firm approval of the education team. So this is the business need we have and we had, so we needed a moodle site where all certified service providers could work independently, but in the same six courses. And at the same time, we want to give moodle HQ the ability to overview, monitor and facilitate the process for all. And workplace with the tenants future covers exactly this need. And this is why we choose to use a workplace site instead of moodle LMS for offering MEC. And how we set that up. How else step by step. I won't go too much into details on the process, but I list here the steps we followed. We first start by setting up the six courses and the MEC certificate. The course development is exactly the same as in moodle LMS, since workplace is built on top of the Moodle LMS. And then we set up the MEC certificate. Using the certificate future of workplace, as Emilio said, this is built on top of the custom certificate plugin and if you have used that in moodle LMS, you will realize that the workplace certificate is a refined version and much, much easier to use it. And then we built and run the MEC facilitator training process. The MEC facilitator training process is illustrated here. One or more employees from a certified service providers who take the six MEC courses, get their MEC certificate, then complete the MEC facilitator training course, and then they receive their MEC facilitator certificate. As soon as a facilitator gets the MEC facilitator certificate, then the service provider is eligible to offer the MEC. The facilitator training, I say that it is offered and supported by the education team of moodle HQ, and it takes place in a dedicated tenant, the partner training tenant. So, after setting up the courses and the certificates and we run the facilitator training for a while, then we had authorized service providers, and we had to create a new tenant for every provider who was authorized to offer MEC. So, in its partner tenant, we created the MEC program and set up a few dynamic rules to automate some of the standard processes. And later on, we set up the organization structure that allow us create all the necessary reporting lines utilizing the report builder. So, let's see, that was a big picture, and let's see now a little bit, I think, in more detail from the point of view of a system administrator. In workplace, the special workplace features that exist are of two kinds, the tenant specific and the global ones. Those that are tenant specific are created inside the tenant and when accessed, they display tenant related information. These are the programs, the certifications, the users, the appearance, organization structure, dynamic rules and report builder. While the global futures courses certificate all users, all tenants and migration, give site administrators inputs from all tenants. For example, if I click the users icon on top, I will be seeing the users created in the tenant I'm currently in. But if I click the all users at the bottom, I will be seeing the users from all tenants registered in the site. Let's go through the process of setting up the MEC site and specifically some of the global futures. Starting from the courses, we started setting up the six MEC courses. As I said before, the course development process is identical to Moodle elements. If you have set up Moodle course before, you will be able to use workplace in exactly the same way. And one thing I would like to keep in mind to underline is that the six MEC courses have been set up in forced separate groups mode. And I will explain you in a while. The MEC facilitator training course, which is a seventh course, it's not it's mandatory only for the facilitators and it's not part of the MEC program. It doesn't have groups. After the courses, after we set up the six MEC courses and the facilitator training courses, we set up the certificates. The certificates are to the MEC certificate template and the MEC facilitator certificate template. And as you can see from the screenshot, you can just add elements and build gradually the whole picture of the certificate with all the items you need in. Now, having set up the courses and the certificates, we started running the facilitator training. Facilitator training is offered by Moodle as I said before to service providers and lawyers. So when a partner is interested in offering the MEC, they nominate one or more employees with strong educational experience, and we create their accounts in the partner training tenant. They go through the MEC courses and the facilitator training course and they acquire both MEC and MEC facilitator certificates. So we gave some time and we ran this for a couple of weeks and after some time we had our first certified MEC facilitators and we were ready to set up the service providers tenants. And we start setting up the tenants. How? Very easy. From the old tenants icon. It's actually the service provider side and all it needs to be set up is a name and because we want to give them the ability to have home course of their own to handle as they want. We also created a category for his tenant. It's that simple just filling up the form. The new tenant is set up. We switch as administrators to that tenant. And now we are going to see things, the tenant features in more detail, starting with the programs. So to set up a program, we provide an image and we choose to create groups for this program. So all users from this tenant will join the MEC courses in their own group. And as the courses are set up in separate groups mode, if you remember, the user of one tenant won't be able to see or interact with the users of the other tenants. Now, saving this form, we move on to add the courses into the program. And here we have the six MEC courses. If you noticed that in this screenshot, the link color has changed from the default blue to red. And this is because the provider in this tenant has individualized the tenant's appearance by applying their brand colors. And this is a great plus of using the model workplace and tenants future. Also, the exclamation point next to its course indicates that these courses may be used by other tenants as well. So the users by different tenants will be allocated into separate groups. After that, having set up the MEC program, it was time to set up some dynamic rules to automate the standard procedures. So dynamic rules follow an if this then that conditional approach to trigger actions when certain conditions are met. So we set up dynamic rules for MEC facilitators, new users, certificates, a word post MEC feedback and organization structure job assignment that we will see in a while. So for example, each time a facilitator is added into this tenant, they automatically get enrolled as non-editing teachers into the MEC courses and as editing teachers into the tenant's home course. Similarly, when a new user account is created in the tenant, the user will be enrolled in the home course as participant and will also be allocated to the MEC program. Now, at this point, I must say that the setup of all these elements was not that linear as a process as we described here. It was more like, like a spiral process. I mean that from the very beginning we started using dynamic rules, but first we used only the first three facilitators, users and certificates. Then the idea of the post MEC feedback arose and we revisited dynamic rules to include one more. Similarly, with the job assignment rule, that one was last created a few months ago when we decided to use the organization structure. After running the MEC for some time, we needed a need for quick and accurate statistics occurred. And it was then that we decided to use the organization structure. The organization structure is a combination of three futures, departments, positions and jobs. The positions specify where a user is operating. Positions specify what a user's function is. So we set up department and position hierarchies to represent our organization structure, Moodle HQ organization structure, and define reporting lines by assigning jobs to all users in the site. At Moodle HQ, it was important to be able to have overall and pertinent statistics. That's we needed, for example, to see how many certificates we have generated in total and which provide which providers have generated how many certificates. In order to be able to have this overview from all tenants, we created the organization structure in the search space. The search space is exactly this, a place where we can set up things that will be available to all tenants. This affects, of course, the tenant specific futures, because global futures are global anyway. Now, in this screenshot, which shows the workplace futures, do notice that users, tenant users icon is not available here. And that's because we are in the search space. And in the search space, we don't have users at the moment. The department's structure, as mentioned before, asks us that where someone works. So this framework set up, this framework set up follows a regional structure. In Moodle HQ, we have, we have on top Moodle HQ, and we have four regions below. Asia Pacific, Europe and Middle East, Latin America and North America. And of course, we set up the organization structure this way, because this reflects our whole company organization structure. Under each region, we have listed the providers that belong to it. The position answers the what a user does. So the MEC positions framework start from the HQ managers to MEC coordinators, channel managers to partner CEOs to partner administrators to MEC facilitators to candidates and candidates 2019. So these are the positions. Having set up the departments and the positions in the search space, it was time to define who does what and where. To do this, we had to go through each tenant, as we need to have users to allocate them into the right department position. And you can imagine that in a site of almost 1000 users, assigning a job into each one of them might seem like mission impossible. But truth is, things were very simple, because we had the ability to use dynamic rules. So, instead of assigning jobs to individual users, we just set up a dynamic rule in its tenant and run this rule and quickly assign the jobs to all users. And when everybody had a job, we were ready to set up our reporting line lines through the report builder. Of course, a report builder was available from the very beginning, and we were using it from the very beginning of the MEC. But with the organization structure set up, we had the ability to create the reporting lines needed for our company. And here, you can see that it depends on our business need. And our business need was to be able to see the overall reports from all partners and compile inputs from all tenants and also be able to see per tenants reports. And that's why we build a number of reports in the shared tenant. Through there, we also set up the reporting lines scheduling reports for the channel managers who receive a compiled and analytic reports from the tenants of their responsibility. And while HQ manager get over reports. And that was it. I didn't go through the detailed process of how to do things, but I hope we have managed to give you an idea of workplace capability, opening a window into the MEC site. Do you have any questions? Alexi asks if it is possible to import courses from LMS to workplace and yes, Mary already answered this one, it is possible to do it. It's like, it's like backing up and restoring courses from one moodle site to the other. Mary is asking, would it be complex to migrate our existing LMS to workplace including creating tenants. Is there a limit of how many tenants you can create. As far as I know there is no such a limit. I mean, I haven't seen that. We have already in the MEC site create about 40 tenants and I don't see any problems with that. But I've already answered this, that migrating from LMS to workplace is similar like upgrading moodle elements from an LMS version to another. Organization structure, Gregory asks, means that we can also imagine to assign automatically training regarding country and job position and this is absolutely yes. You can easily set up your programs and by using a dynamic rule you can just say that these users with this job assignment should take these programs or those courses, and I will quickly wrap up this session. And I would like to ask you that if you have enjoyed this session and moodle academy, you may consider getting involved further and help us grow by contributing to its development. Now being in the academy, you can be an active member, you can suggest topic ideas, what would you like to see us covering the future. And you can join the getting involved course and make your own suggestion, ask the subject of your interest, vote for subjects that have been already suggested. 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