 Welcome. Thank you everybody for coming. It is really, really a pleasure to finally be here. We've had a moot annually in different places around Australia and it's just really good to actually be a bit more involved with the organizing of this one. And I'm really looking forward to the things over the next few days. I wanted to just reiterate the hashtag. If there's anything you want to say, use that hashtag. We'll be using it for lots of things and there'll be a lot of things coming up on there. But the first thing I would really say is thanks to Monash for this beautiful venue and I'm really loving this room. There's always this choice of whether you have a big room where a lot of people look spaced out or do you have a small room where everyone's packed in and they both have their benefits but I really love this space. The organization of this conference has been quite long and at every moot I've ever been to I always say I really appreciate how much the organizers have done but you really honestly have no idea until you're actually involved in organizing an event to know what it is. So I just want to thank really these key organizers who've been putting together. They're the ones who got together the program committee who've been working on the program and with the help of many other people from around the place who've helped out here and there. They got together these sponsors so really thanks to the sponsors who've helped and they'll have booths in the booth area which I haven't personally seen yet so I'm looking forward to seeing it myself. They also got together these invited speakers and I'm looking really forward to hearing them. We've got Adam Spencer coming from Sydney I think. Probably the furthest travel to be Don Hinkleman who's come all the way from Japan and very much looking forward to what he has to say. We've got Barbara here too, we've got Scott and Dan and Joyce of course and so lots of interesting talks coming up but the main presentations we've ended up with 512 people which is two to the power of nine which might make Adam Spencer happy perhaps. There's a hundred presentations all up which is far too many because I know I'm still not going to be able to see them all but I think there's going to be something for everyone and we've really tried to arrange them in streams of interest for different sectors. Of you, of us, the 512 people, this is how our roles break down. We've got quite a lot of people who would put themselves down as administrators of Moodle followed by teachers, then instructional designers, quite a lot of developers, quite a few decision makers, some researchers which is good to see and finally of course students are really good to see some students here and maybe over time these will be slightly more even columns even but this is really the case of a Moodle conference and what makes it a little different is we have such a range of people, so many different types of us coming together and talking about the same things and sector-wise we made a concerted effort to try and broaden the sectors because there was a lot of people in non-university sectors who were saying Moodle moots were hard to get to or whatever and we've really had quite a good result. A lot of people here from secondary schools, from workplaces as well and from the TAFE sector, but still 38% from universities. I'm interested in the other. Who's in an other? Who put down an other for this? There are a few people. Anyone want to yell out what other is? What's other? Someone, come on, a webcasting platform, okay, cool, anyone else? Right, okay, teaching parents and friends are so great. I think the other cases are the most interesting. Hopefully we'll see some of them in presentations this week. But we're all here to discuss this thing, this Moodle thing. What is it? And why have we got such a range of people who it affects? Well, Moodle is sort of the thing, it's Moodle in the middle. It's the thing in between things like students and teachers, obviously. Someone's teaching or facilitating and someone's learning and Moodle's right there in the middle. It's also the thing in between the teachers and the techies. Got the IT people at an institution to say or in a location and the teachers and Moodle's this thing in the middle they have to negotiate on and work on. Moodle's also the thing between the devices that we have and the servers. And so Moodle does cop a lot of the blame if the internet's down. Moodle's down. But it could be, as IT people know, it could be 50 things in between. But it's negotiating between the servers and the devices and the servers and the technology of the internet is always changing and evolving and so are the devices. These will look very probably trite in 10 years' time. And Moodle's the thing between organizations and their communities. We use it at Moodle.org, for example, to have forums for the communities to interact there. But even a workplace would use Moodle and it would be the way it can interact with the outside world or the interior world of the company. Developers, of course. Moodle's kind of between them and basically everybody. So when we're developing software, I have to try and take all these things into account and it makes it quite a complex scenario of how Moodle should develop and where it should be. What Moodle should probably do is disappear. It shouldn't really be thinking about Moodle that you're using Moodle. It should be so easy to use and so intuitive and so well-tuned to the environment that it's in that it basically disappears. And you actually think less about I'm using Moodle and you think more of all these people that you're dealing with and you get on with doing what it is we're all here to do. So just like a person learns through feedback and we all learn through feedback. I spent a lot of other keynotes this year talking about feedback in more detail and I might later this week. But feedback is to me is like a universal law of education. It's the most techniques or strategies you use in learning are really ways to improve the type and the amount of feedback that you get. So you're always interacting with other people and if they're giving you feedback that's helping you learn. You're interacting with your environment, you're making things, you're doing things in the environment and you're getting solid feedback on what works and what doesn't. This is social constructionism. And there's reflection obviously in your own head you're giving yourself feedback all the time on how you're doing and that's modifying your learning journey. Well just like we learn through feedback, Moodle has to learn through feedback in the same way. Except it's a piece of software that's interacting with the environment, the server environment, the device environment, the incident environment, the environment of other education software, the environment of education policy and all of these things. It's also interacting with people, our users, everybody using it and its reflective mode if you like is sort of our testing. Internally we do testing, there's usability testing but also code testing and performance testing and all kinds of testing that goes on that helps the software evolve kind of by itself. And so what we have to do around Moodle to make it this tool that becomes invisible is to give it lots of feedback and have really good feedback loops. The problem is that the way we are doing things now or the way we have been doing things is that we do have a lot of mechanisms for feedback and I guess a lot of you have seen the tracker and have seen the forums. But most of our time as core developers is about maintaining core. We're keeping up with the environments out there. We're looking after the community systems that we run and we're doing all that kind of work. So despite the opportunities for feedback, I can walk, I realized. Despite the opportunities for feedback, you probably feel pretty small compared to where Moodle's going, you probably feel frustrated that the thing you need it to do is happening fast enough. And you're not really part of the roadmap. And so on a talk like this in the past, I would get up and I would say what the roadmap is and that would be based on the feedback I'd gathered. But I'm just one person. I can only see so much. I can only listen to so much. And so the roadmap is, you know, it was going forward. It was things were happening, but maybe not as effectively as it could have been. There's a huge list of improvements that we all want to see. So how do we make, how do we improve that? What we need to do is we need to have more full-time core developers. Moodle is a complex piece of software. As some of you would know, it's a couple of million lines of code. To have a developer know how to work on that efficiently and to make new stuff, it takes them a few months to learn. They need to work in teams. And so we need people who are full-time committed to that, who are core developers, and that's all they do. And it's much more efficient than having 100 developers who work part-time. Maybe they're in their institutions or whatever, and they do a little bit of programming on the side or in the evenings. But it's less efficient to get all that development in. Because when it comes in, we always have to review it and change it. And it's hard. It's better to have a core team doing it. And we need the feedback from the community to be organized. We need it to be coming to us in larger chunks. I want you to say, we want this, this, this, this, and this in that order. And we would just do it. That would be perfect for us. And it would be perfect for Moodle as a project. So we need your investment in time. Also investment in funds, we need to pay people to work on Moodle. And so we need that to be a better scenario than the way it is now. So there's two big new things that we are working on to improve that. The first one is we're at one, the Moodle Moots. We decided to get involved much more in the Moodle Moots to make them a place where you have a more direct connection with the developers. And you saw a lot of our developers all up here dancing before. You'll see them all around the conference. We're all looking a bit tired because a lot of us flew in late last night or stayed up late last night. So forgive us if we're a bit slow. But we're all here and we really want to talk with you. And there's a lot of things here geared around development. We're also running directly another Moot in the US in a few weeks in Minneapolis. So that's been fun trying to organize two big conferences almost at the same time. And we have this concept now of a new thing, a Moodle official conference, an official Moodle Moot. And the official Moodle Moots will have these kinds of the same sort of structure. And they'll have this very big focus on practical affectation of the Moodle roadmap. So here's some things you can do at this conference. Grab a Moodle HQ staff member, get in their ear, tell them something you care about. We need to hear individually, we need to hear from you. We need to hear those stories and need to hear your voices to understand really what's going on because sometimes a tracker and an issue in the tracker with a few words doesn't really cut it. We'll be recording these sessions. They'll be online at MoodleMood.org. So it's to share and get more feedback from people outside. But also, it makes it kind of like a year round Moodle Moot going on with like a TED Talk-like stream of presentations that you can tune into and just regularly get presentations whether you add a Moot or not. Use this group to get your own feedback. Many of you are presenting. This is a good chance for you to try those crazy ideas and get feedback from others about what you're doing. And lastly, the wishing tree, Joyce mentioned it. There is a tree out there. Take the time, put your wish on there. We will read them. I think we'll have a dedicated session maybe at the Moot, but otherwise later when we get back to the office where we're going to go through all those. The other big thing that's happening here is the working groups and the working groups are starting today. Even if you're not necessarily in them, be aware of them because there's going to be some sessions through the next few days as we refine the ideas. And these groups are working on two particular topics this time. Every Moot will have different ones. And these came out of a survey that Michael Durart, our research director, did. And the first one is on course archiving and rollover. So what happens at the end of a year or end of a semester? What should happen? What's the perfect thing that could happen? And then let's build that. The second one is about assessment analytics. And analytics and performance of students and learners is a huge topic as well. So these will be happening starting off today and going through the next few days. The second big thing we're doing, probably a lot of you have already heard that we are launching a Moodle Association. This is a user association. It's a nonprofit organization. It's separate to Moodle HQ. We're setting it up. We're going to put a committee in and then it's going to be autonomous. The Moodle Association is an organization that will work on collecting fees, like associations do, then deciding what Moodle should do next, deciding on the roadmap, and then basically paying for it. There's, I think I've got some slides here. No, I haven't. With the process of deciding will be a kind of a, will be a voting system, sort of it's a democratic system. The people on big memberships have more votes. The people on smaller memberships have less votes, but everyone has a vote. And there's a quite rigorous six month process, which means at the end of every six months, there will be a deterministic result. There will be a result. This should be developed, this should be developed, and then that should be developed. There'll be a new committee every year at the moment to get things off the ground. We're going to nominate a committee. It needs to be about six or so organizations at least. If you're interested, get in touch. I will talk a lot more about the association at the last session on the last day, so we can have more of a QA. This is not very interactive, this space. But we can have a more, a discussion about it, because I really want to see this thing take off. And I really want to see it be the thing that drives a lot of the Moodle road map, so that you're telling us what to work on. I did say there were two new things, but there's one more thing. Now, I should probably have a black skivvy at this point. There's one more thing. There's a bit of a gap in the Moodle ecosystem. If you're an institution, a lot of us here at institutions, you have IT people who work there, who can run a Moodle site. Or you go to a Moodle partner, and Moodle partners provide services support, consulting. They do all those sorts of things to help institutions with their sites. But if you are a lone teacher, just one person or a very small organization, where do you go? How do you use Moodle? You don't have the IT experience. You can't download Moodle and run it on a server, because even with all the help in the world and documentation, that can be quite tricky. And it's just not how things work these days. You don't go and compile code on your phone to install on a new app. You just press a button and it comes. So we have been working for the last few months and developing something to fill this hole, and it's called Moodle Cloud. So this is a new thing we've been working on. Let me show you. I think it's better to show you. If we go to Moodle.com, it's a new website. Anyone who needs help with Moodle, we're still saying go to Moodle partners. We want you to go see Moodle partners. But we're also running this Moodle Cloud. Cheers. Moodle Cloud is the way you can get your own Moodle site in minutes. So let me create the first Moodle Cloud site live for you right now, because no one's seen this before. We'll get a Moodle Cloud site right now. All right. I guess you could play along at home if you're on a device. So I'm just going to call it Martin, because I'm going to grab Martin. It's available. Where these sites can be hosted in three different locations. U.S. or Ireland or Australia. Am I a robot? No. Get my site. This is where I type in all my secret information. I wasn't going to use my real phone for this, so I have another phone here to use. Now, apparently I think I'm in Sydney. It's close. Melbourne. When you pick a time zone, it's important to pick your own time zone, because when we do upgrades and things, we time it so they happen three o'clock in the morning on your morning, say. So it doesn't affect your general use of the site. There's some terms of service. Basically says, don't break stuff. Don't do illegal stuff. Don't act like an idiot. And there is a more legal version. Now, I just got a text. Hello from Moodle Cloud to finish the setup process. Use this verification code. All right, I will. Someone out in there, your audience has probably already beaten me to this, haven't you? Don't tell anybody. Okay. And now I set myself a password. So it's weak but too bad. So I have a Moodle site. So in that time, we have created the Moodle site. We used a phone authentication, not because we really want your phone number and we really don't care about phone numbers, but if you use a phone, you prevent a whole lot of spammers straight away. Email addresses are very quick to generate. It's not so easy to generate lots of phone numbers. And this is actually going to be costing us something. So we want to keep things efficient. We want to keep it doing the job that we want it to do. We don't want to be spending a lot of time coping with spammers or troublemakers. So now I'm logging in. It redirects. And I get my new Moodle site. I'm already logged in. It's already got my face. It's got that from Gravatar. I'm already in as an admin. And we have a little sort of a template here that sort of gives you a basic appearance. But you can go into the theme settings and change the backgrounds, change the headers of course, change the colors. You can do all of that on the normal Moodle user interface. This is a vanilla Moodle pretty much. It's got a couple of things switched off that are more to do with the back to server side of things. We don't want you messing around with the server side, of course. But it's a vanilla Moodle site pretty much. And we included a little course here just to get you started. It's not a very good example of a course, but it's there. So this is for people who've never seen Moodle before. They can get a bit of an idea. Only the admin can see this sticky note. Only the admin can see this course. So they can go straight ahead, turn editing on, start creating new courses, and off they go. It's very fast. It's very easy. Hope to see lots and lots of Moodle sites for people who need them. So if you just need a Moodle site for testing, you're welcome to use it. If you are, particularly if you're the sort of person who couldn't afford to pay for a server, we hope you use this for and do some teaching with it. So that's how Moodle Cloud looks. I'm going to give you a few more details. Thanks. It's something new for us, but we are doing this, A, to help some people. Secondly, it's to get us closer to end users so that we can see what people are struggling with, perhaps, and we can understand how Moodle gets used. We can understand how Moodle works at scale. We can improve performance. We can improve all the things that need to be done for everybody. But we have now really our own large set of Moodle sites to work with. It's free. It's pretty instant, like I showed you. It's a full Moodle version. It's always current. So we're going to be automatically upgrading these to the latest Moodle point release. Every time we do a release and you don't have to do anything. You're not going to be putting a university on this any time soon. It's hard to, because we're maintaining the configuration, it's under control. We don't have to deal with third-party plugins so much. We don't have to deal with hacks and changes like that. So, you know, we'll be keeping it quite smooth. Your database size is unlimited. No limits on forum posts, content that you put into Moodle through Moodle tools. It's unlimited there. It is limited to 50 users until we get a handle of how this all works. 50 users is a good limit. That's enough to do a class and enough to do trials and have to set up little groups of communities and so on. So we felt that was a good limit. There's a 200 megabyte disk space limit. So I would not expect you to go and upload your desktop into there. It's not Dropbox. It's not Google Drive. It's not any of those things. Use those and link them into Moodle. That's what they're for. The last thing that makes it a bit different is that we have something special added to each of these Moodle sites. And its big blue button is integrated for free on every Moodle cloud site. Big blue button is a... Thanks. It's open source video conferencing, white boarding, but I think it might be better if to talk about big blue button if I got the CEO of big blue button. Fred Dixon, are you here? Are you here? Did he come? He flew in this morning about two hours ago and he said he was going to make it. Did he make it? Fred? He didn't make it. Anyway, he said if he couldn't make it that I was to talk for him so I will. So big blue button, they're really good friends of ours because they're a fully open source project as well. They really believe in open source. They're based in Canada. They've been working for years and years on refining the technologies behind big blue button. It's getting really good. Now, a few views a few years ago, try it again because it's getting really slick. It's particularly, and I've had a bit of a preview of their upcoming mobile apps for accessing this conferencing, it's really good. It's as good as anything else out there. So I'm really pleased that this is integrated into Moodle and we've got it integrated in a very seamless way so that you just add an activity to your course and that becomes a new big blue button session. On these sites, they're limited to six users. Again, to, you know, keep something, keep a bit of a lid on the costs of things but we'll see how it goes. I think it's going to be a really nice tool to just have a quick study group or to get a few people together to talk live about something and to play with big blue button in that context inside Moodle. So it's a shame Fred's not here because I was really looking forward to hearing what he had to say. Maybe you can get him to say something later because he will be here. Finally, I really want to say enjoy the conference, have fun. I am looking forward to it myself. I think I really want to talk with as many of you as I can. I already met some old friends already this morning but come and grab me. I'm here to talk and so all of us here at HQ so thank you very much. Thank you.