 Hi everybody, I'm Shalamar. Listen, we've all been sitting for like a minute. So I just wanna invite you just to take one 15, 30 second stand and stretch if you feel like you need to. No, nobody, just me? Yeah, come on, get it. You're in a body, respect your body, right? Yeah, listen, we've had some great talks in here already today, but we're about to move into the world of silliness, okay? We're gonna start to take a light-hearted approach to what's happening. So as Carlos introduced, my name is Shalamar and I work for Moodle US where I am the manager of our customer support team. Constantly in the hot seat, constantly answering questions. So a couple things that you need to know about me. I have been Moodling since 2007. I am an aspiring comedian. In fact, this picture of me was taken this week at a comedy club here in Barcelona where I did a short set. Thank you, thank you. I am a Dungeons and Dragons nerd. I'm also an analog game designer and an alleged procrastinator, but sources are unconfirmed on that y'all. I don't believe it. So what's the deal with switching to a new version? There's lots of resources made available to us from the beautiful minds at Moodle HQ, but making time for a new version can be hard. We serve over 600 clients at Moodle US and we're expected to be experts on a new Moodle version before they get it. But when you are constantly taking questions from folks about Moodle version 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, it can be really challenging to say, hang on a second, let's look to the future. It's also sometimes challenging to feel like you're just me entering around a new system. And if you're like me and have ADHD, it can be really hard to sit for any length of time, especially if there's not someone watching you. So I always ask myself, what would Mary Poppins do? Y'all know Mary Poppins? A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, right? So why not make version training a role-playing game? So a little bit about Moodle US is that we work in pods. Some of the brilliant minds at Moodle US, Michelle Moore in particular, turned us on to this idea of breaking our interdepartmental workforce down into these teams of cross-functional minds. We have four pods at Moodle US and we work together all the time. We have weekly cadence meetings and we have used the pod model to have a sort of competition, which was thoroughly enjoyed by everybody, I think. I don't think, actually, I know we took a survey. So our role-playing game is really rooted in nostalgia. In the States, we used to have this show back in the 90s called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. Oh, thank God. So to kick things off, I made a really ridiculous intro video where I asked what in the world can't Moodle 4.0 do, which is a joke because it obviously does everything and the dishes. We introduced the pod games with some stylized aesthetic presentation slides. It was a four-week event, this last one, and we had weekly meetings. I had multiple voices that I used in the introduction to bring our characters to life, such as the chief. She was a no-nonsense voice, right, just like the chief in Carmen San Diego. We had a timeline. Our timeline lasted for four weeks with multiple points for the pods to get together, chat about what they were about to do, and in week three, actually between week two and week three, we threw a wrench at them. So we told them what everything was gonna need to be in terms of the assignment that they had to do, and then in week three, we introduced some chaos into the game, which is always fun. So our pods were given the choice of two fake clients. One is Miskatonic University, which is a infamous fictitious university in the States invented by writer HP Lovecraft, which with a rich history and lore, all about supernatural do-ings in New England. And our second fictitious client was a municipality of Night Vale, which is all about a podcast called Welcome to Night Vale, which is delightfully absurd and also very X-Files-y. Then we offered the pods that choice between the two, and each of those choices had a case file. The case file included an assignment document which outlined all of the criteria that we were gonna be judging the competition by, as well as user story stakeholder requirements, such as as an administrator, I need to be able to bleep, blop, bloop, or as a learner, I wanna be able to, right? So all kinds of different user stories. Also a lot of lore and background for each of the clients so that our teammates could really dig in and find a thread that resonated with them. And it was just chock full of Easter eggs, nostalgic references, nerdery, and room for play. For several weeks of conferring, our pods got together and gave presentations in a virtual room, a Google Meet room. And it was awesome. I'm not the only nerd at Moodle, so people adopted their own personas. They looked into the lore and found some characters within that lore that they could embody. So we had people dress up, we had people use different voices, and they presented these Moodle sites to clients in these personas. So this is what one of the Moodle sites looked like. It was actually our winning sites. They chose to go with Night Vale and they really embodied it. And it gave them the chance to build out a site with their own Easter eggs and lore and have a really low stakes way to get involved with the new Moodle site. And by that I mean, if you wait until your clients or your users are on the new system to fully test it, it feels like trial by fire, right? So this was a way to reduce that pressure, let them play in a playground and not just a generic sandbox self led but actually have a goal in mind. So after our pod games, we had a survey and we kind of took the temperature on how people were feeling. We found out that they loved it. We didn't have a ton of responses because our team was a little bit smaller at the time. So about 20 people across our organization participated in the pod games. And the response was just super positive. So they felt much more confident in Moodle 4.0's new features after going through our competition. They felt overwhelmingly better prepared to help our clients navigate those new features and they felt more connected with each other than they had previously because of the group work environment. Some of the feedback that we received in their own words is here on the screen for you. My very favorite is at the top. Personally, my attention is grabbed and hooked when there are fun, creative details and surprises and I am able to retain so much more. You guys, that's, come on, that's everything, right? Retention is kind of a big deal, it's kind of a big deal. So I know that I'm going to be short today, which is good because we've had some time here, but basically at the end of the day, the winning pod got a half a day off, right? That's what they won by really leaning into it. They got half a day off and we all got to come together and present to one another in the spirit of silliness and play and joy with one another. So as I sit here telling you, hey, how to get ready for a new version? Well, one, you're going to want to take the pressure off your people. It doesn't matter if it's 20 people on your team or five. There is a way to make the stakes low. There is a way to model silliness and make a safe space for play at your organization. No matter how fancy your university or how prestigious your tech company, you can make a safe place for play. You're going to want to offer a desirable prize. Time is money. Half a day off is money in your pocket, right? So that's desirable. If you lead with creativity and silliness, they will match your energy. And as a sneak preview, especially for any Moodle US folks in the room, I think next time we're going to be focusing instead of on building a Moodle site from scratch to a client's needs, we're going to be focusing more on inundating with the help desk with questions about 4.0 from fictitious organizations. So we're going to shift it every time. Okay. I have a lot of time for questions, huh? I'm not doing the stand up. It's not happening. No questions. You guys are already doing pod games or play based version training. I guess I'm late to the party. Okay, hang up. I think there's one back here. You mentioned that the pods was new to Moodle US. Had you done any activities as the pods before you did this training to sort of build them as teams or was this the first sort of new thing they had to do? That's such a great question. This was actually the first big activity that we did together to launch our pods. And so that was a really helpful way, I think, for us to build that culture around pods. Prior to this, our support team had done similarly gamified activities within the support team. So we used to have a new version testing party, which was like the early iteration of pod games where we would come together, we would make a playlist on Spotify. And we would just kind of party and complete a whole bunch of testing activities that resulted in spots on a bingo card. And then we would give people prizes when they got their bingos. So we have a long, rich tradition of incorporating play into training our support team. And we were really very fortunate and thankful to be able to expand that out beyond the support team to our pods at Moodle US. Yeah, thank you so much. Hi, Shalemar. Thanks for the junkier from the University of Glasgow. We're going to upgrade in the summer from 3-11 to 4-1. And our focus is on upskilling staff. So what to be aware of. And we've got a bit of a roadmap for that. But if I were to ask you, like, if I would say what would the three top things we should be focusing staff on as part of our sort of upskilling for staff to Moodle 4-1, what would you suggest? So obviously Moodle 4.0 really focuses a lot on the UI changes. And thankfully a lot of them are very intuitive. In fact, the response that we got from our survey after the pod games was overwhelmingly positive about those UI changes. One thing that we kind of ran up against was the new reporting features that are available on Moodle 4.0. A lot of the staff maybe had some preconceived notions about how robust or built out those new features were. And so that was a lot of interesting feedback that we got was that they had really lofty hopes. And we actually wrote really lofty requirements that was probably the biggest challenge for our pods to reach with the reporting requirements. So those were our two kind of big feedback points. Yeah, great question. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay. Hi, I'm Marcus from Elidia in Germany. And you've talked about using this approach in with Moodle US with your own teams. Are there any plans to use this approach maybe with customers as well to help them understand Moodle 4.0 in the future? Well, I love that idea. I do love that idea. No immediate plans, but like you just got my wheels turning man. So I might have to develop something. Thank you. I quite like that idea of the pods and especially the gaming. In universities we use gamification a tiny bit, but not that much obviously. Do you foresee a scenario where that can be used with students outside? Let's make it like that more clear because it's used quite a lot by the student union and in extracurricular activities, but in the curricular activity, do you see a scenario for that? I know. I can make a game appropriate to any situation. So absolutely yes, please. Yeah, and connect with me because one of my absolute favorite things to do is to envision ways to bring game and play to adults. We so often get detached from it. I mean, we're on our Xboxes, we're on our gaming systems, but we kind of forget that games are everywhere you want them to be. You just have to prioritize play. Yeah, I definitely do. Hi, thank you. And for the inspiring words and like waking us up a bit. So thanks for that. Just a question because I love the idea that the most prestigious university organization, by the way, I'm Ilana from UNESCO. So serious stuff, prestigious stuff, yes. And we've had this idea of like we work with Moodle and we have the teaching stuff and we always try to like upskill them whenever we have an upgrade, like really try to bring them in, but we're talking about people who go in the field, they're always on missions, limited time, and convincing them, convincing the organization to take this type of training is not the priority. If you add the, demifying it, I think it would be less a priority than it already is. And for us is also time working for the learning, as a learning experience designer there. So I'm thinking, first of all, is the methodology like an open resource that we can replicate and adapt very easily to our staff? One question is that, not necessarily for you to make the game, but for us to have access maybe to things that we can like open source really easily like adapt and change and train our staff. And by experience, if you have like some tips on how to like maybe convince stakeholders or like if you have like a scenario where this would be more challenging to implement. And last one, and I'm done, is because when we want to use this to prove like training our staff or anything, we need to kind of like assess and show that people actually met the outcome we were like looking for. If that was part of the pods that there was like some sort of assessment or like proof of, yeah. Okay, so first of all, get my QR code and reach out to me because I'm happy to share all of our pod games resources with you as a model for how you might implement this. Everything we did, I mean, I was using Canva to make the slides and Google Docs is how we shared and disseminated information across our organization. So that's one. Let's see, where were we going next? Next question, how do we get buy-in from people? Well, how I do it is I am a tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm. And so I just smash up against my boss with all of that energy and enthusiasm. And she doesn't have like a whole lot of recourse. You know, if a tidal wave is coming, it's coming. So I've had great success with that. And remind me of the assessment. Oh yes, okay, so the presentations that we were doing each pod presented to the whole group, we had a rubric, and so myself and my boss, Michelle, who's in the back of the room, hello, and other leaders were grading rubric as the group presentation was happening to get a sense as to who rose above the rest of the pods. Let me just say, every single pod surprised us. Every single pod went beyond our expectations for each of the assignment tasks that we had given them. And I think the most exciting thing for me is that we planted red herring tasks into the assignment, things that we didn't think were possible, but our pods taught us that they were, which was super exciting for us, so, yeah.