 All right. Well, we may as well get started because we seem to be running. So hello, everybody. Apologize for the slightly confused start. We've had a bit of a major mishap here, where I lost internet contact, had to drive recklessly through the city to my office. Getting there discovered I did not have the key. And it's all a result of moving. I mean, moving a whole house of four people from one place to another all weekend. And everything is mixed up and lost. So I apologize for the slow start. But it looks like we're all on. And I have a little bit of a battery left. So we'll get started and welcome everybody to Learn Moodle. This is the first time we've ever held this kind of event. It's first for us. And we have many thousands of people showing some interest, which is really cool. And I'm looking forward to the next four weeks. Let me just put up some information. So, Matt, just to make sure we've selected that, we do have a hashtag, hash learn Moodle. And that's the one you should be using to do any tweeting or Facebooking or whatever to keep in touch. We'll be asking questions there later, or actually asking for you to ask us questions and having a bit of QA session. But to start with, I was going to talk a little bit about pedagogy and Moodle and things like that. And then hand over to Mary Cooch, who's the lead facilitator of the course to talk about the whole course in general and how things are working. So let me start off here. So welcome. First of all, Moodle is the mission of Moodle, at least. A bit of background here is that it's a learning platform that's following goals. And these are the ones that have mostly been there since the start of Moodle, which was over 10 years ago, actually 11 years ago, the first release. And our mission has continued and really developed. And it's really amazing for me to see how over that time so many people have come on board and we have a community which drives the development of Moodle now. And it's really an incredible thing. Moodle's a learning platform to support teachers with their teaching primarily. We love teachers. Moodle is a platform that is not trying to do away with teachers but really to help them and support them. And that is one of the big purposes of this Learn Moodle event over the next month. Moodle is here to support learners with their learning. And of course, Moodle is here to integrate everything needed for a course. The internet contains so many tools and so many amazing things that are out there that we can put together into a course. But the idea with Moodle is that you integrate that into a course structure. Moodle is very open in every way but sites can be very private. So it's open source, we have open development and we're open in many ways. Moodle's easily used for free from any device. That's our goal. The mobile part of Moodle, if you're on mobile now, looking at Moodle, you'll find it works pretty well but we're working hard on that, making it better and better. Moodle's very flexible, it has lots of plug-ins and mods and it can be adjusted to almost any kind of scenario. It can scale up to very large platforms with millions of users and will scale down to even one student and it's often used in a homeschool situation. Lastly, Moodle's a global project because it's open, it's international. Anybody can contribute by building things on top of Moodle platform, can build plug-ins, can build content and can help each other learn how to teach online and that's really why it's stuff so exciting to us in my world as well. So let me go a little bit back to the basics of Moodle and take you back to about 10, 13 years ago when starting Moodle. The basic concept of Moodle is that you have people using software tools and when you put them together you're able to create a facilitated community, a community of people with a facilitator who's kind of leading and guiding the activities. This community is teaching the individuals and the community is also improving the software tools. This works on two levels, it works on the level of a course, an individual course with a teacher and students, the actual course itself can grow and it also works for the Moodle project in general as well. I'm going to go into some theories because someone has to do it at some point here and I'm going to talk about the background of Moodle and why it was started in the first place and these are some of the terms of the philosophy behind it. The first one, constructivism is about people actively constructing their knowledge so if you come with that framework you really have the idea that people are building knowledge in their own heads and that you as a teacher or facilitator can only facilitate that. You aren't giving people information, you're giving them the tools for them to construct that information and it's an important distinction. Secondly, constructionism is more about that you learn better when you're constructing things for others. So this picture here, this guy's made a poster and we're not getting much from it. So as a teaching tool, not so great. However, as a learning tool for that guy, amazing, the process of constructing that was a learning experience that's beyond anything else. So brains are for action and you have to be doing things to be really learning deeply and not just in a surface way. Thirdly, social constructivism is about if you're producing things or constructing things in a social setting then you are learning very strongly when you're creating things for other people. It's a very powerful place to be learning rather than just making things for yourself and the things you make contain some sort of capture knowledge in a way, like a shape. So software has a shape. Software will guide certain activities and we try to do that in more. This other one, Ways of Knowing, is about particular research, Belenki, but it's about the process of being self-aware in a metacognitive sense. So the learners should be aware that they are somewhere on the scale, they are acting in a connected way, in an empathic way, or they're acting in separate ways. So they're arguing with others and trying to prove points with each other. All of us need to have those modes at different times and when you're interacting in an online space, in the internet, you will often shift between these ways and the awareness that you're doing is also very powerful for learning, especially in a group setting, such as a forum for example, where we have discussions. So from that, Loodle has five design references if you like, five design things that we look at when we need to make decisions. So the first one is just the recognition that all of us are potential teachers as well as learners and a really collaborative environment, now both. If you have that in your head as a teacher, if you're creating experiences where the learners, the ones who you are trying to get to learn are given the opportunity to teach each other and to teach yourself, then that's where you have these philosophical references that start to really take hold. We learn particularly well when we're creating something, as I said before. So you need to be getting your students to make things, not only to communicate with each other, but to create things for each other. It could be forum posts, the simplest example, but it could be all sorts of higher order, bigger things and sharing them with others. We use culture as a very strong influence on our lives and people will take on a lot around them. And so one of your tasks as an educator is to create a class culture, a particular style of interacting that you model. And once people are doing that, they're learning almost by osmosis about the subject and about how to learn online. Fourthly, by understanding the context of each other, you can teach in a more transformational way. So you need to understand each other and that's where profiles become important and we have a lot of analytics that are being developed in Moodle coming up and a lot of that is about understanding each other within the online learning environment. And lastly, things need to be very flexible. You need to have an environment that you can change and a course shouldn't be something that is designed once and then used for the whole year. It needs to be something that you're allowed to modify as you learn about the people in the course. And the students can be given opportunities to vote on directions. They can show simply by their results on some activities what they might need more work on or what they're more interested in. And Moodle is designed to make it quite quickly to just change direction and really help those people. So that's the summary of those reference and Moodle is really trying to do those things at least as the developers of Moodle are trying to make tools that allow teachers to do those things. However, we probably find that most teachers don't necessarily do these things and that's really the reason for Moodle is to try and show you some of this to try and enable you to be part of an environment that's going like that so that you can replicate that in your own classrooms and hopefully enjoy them more and become effective online teachers. We find that there's a sort of progression that goes through where when people are starting to publish online, the first thing everyone wants to do is to publish content and that can be PDFs and pages and scorns and videos and so on. It's very obvious use of the internet but the internet is not just the publishing platform as I've been saying. You have forums, we Moodle have quizzes and assignments. You have facilitated discussions which are another whole beast again from just a passive forum. We have collaborative tools, wikis, glossaries, databases where people can help write things together. You can combine activities into sequences which means that they become like meta activities with lots of connections. You can bring in things from around the internet into your course and everyone in the course can do that. We have survey tools to study what's going on and reflecting. You can let the students peer grade each other and even influence the structure of the course. Finally, some of the teachers in the Moodle community are examples of going to the full length which is where they start writing code and modifying Moodle to do what they want. They're actually building the tool and extending the tools to do amazing things and sharing that with others. That's really where I think you can go. I'm going to stop sharing this. There we are. Thanks all. Just a brief intro there. I'd like to just introduce the team actually behind this site. We have, I think it's seven of us who have been working hard on building this low Moodle site for the past few weeks for you. We've got a very quick intro video here that's actually, Matt can just start streaming just to say hello so you can see the faces behind the website. Is that a streaming match? Hello, I'm Martin from Moodle. Maybe you want to meet some of the Learn Moodle team. Get around Moodle HQ. Hello, my name is Opera Banerjee. I'm a developer on the Moodle HQ sites team and I've been working on making Learn Moodle function look, feel, or something for you. Hi, I'm Barbara. I'm the web designer and I was responsible for the Learn Moodle team. Hi, I'm Matt. I'm the C7 and I'm responsible for the underlying cluster architecture of learning Learn Moodle. Hi, I'm Max. I'm working on the market for Learn Moodle and maintaining a social media accounts for Moodle. That's everyone in person. Let's go to the EU. I was going to ask a lot of people in the next video who will all be doing this course. Hello, my name is Belgium. Why have we worked on Learn Moodle and been helping Mary with the course, helping the admin side of stuff and doing a bit of testing, trying not to rank anything? Hello, I'm Mary Cooch in the UK and I've been working on the learning activities for the course and I'm looking forward to supporting people in the forums. Cool. Look, that was a very quick video and I take full responsibility for the quality of that. It was a first take basically, so pretty good for that. Thank you all. I'll hand you on to Mary Cooch, the lead facilitator to introduce herself and the rest of the course. To you, Mary. Hello. Hello. I'm assuming that you can hear me. Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning, wherever you are. What I'm going to do if you can bear with me for one moment is I'm going to share my screen and show you a few slides explaining about the course. So, here we go. Start screen share. All this modern technology, I don't know. And I hope in a moment, it's just a black for now, I hope shortly you should be able to see the course summary that's been around for a few weeks now. Teaching with Moodle and introduction. So, what I'm going to do is talk to you for about 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes about the course and how you can make the most of it. And I aim to answer these five questions basically. So, what is the course and how does it work? Up until now, all we've had is our introductory forum where people have been getting to know each other. That's been great. But the activities haven't yet been displayed. So, I'm going to take you through those. And then, whether you're a beginner, completely new to Moodle, or whether you're an experienced Moodler and you've just come along to see what's going on like everyone else has, then I'll explain to you what you can do in the course. And then finally, I'm going to talk a bit about badges which is exciting, a lot of people and how they relate to the teaching with Moodle course. So, if we take them one question at a time then, what is this course? I think the key is, and I'm moving on to another slide, the key is in the words which I've highlighted here in yellow. This is an introduction to Moodle. This will cover the basic features of Moodle for people who haven't used it before or who have very little experience of it. But because we're using Moodle and because this is a MOOC, a massive online course, if you take a look further down, we have, I've highlighted, engage, connect, collaborate and share. And Moodle has these activities where you can communicate, collaborate, join in and talk to each other and discuss your learning as you go along sharing your experiences. And so, what I'll do then is I'll move on connecting that with how does it work, how does the course work then? This is a course for beginners. You might have seen that we published the schedule and so it works in four weeks. There are four weekly sections. I'm going to move on to another slide. Here's this quick screenshot of week one, for example. And each week has a certain number of activities and you can identify them by the different icons they have. So each activity in Moodle has a different icon. If I quickly show you week two, you can see there are some others there. And so one of the things that we'd like you to do is to work your way through the activities in each week, click on them, do them, participate in them, read them, whatever they require that you do. Now, in terms of working your way through, if you're a beginner, you might find that it's better if you actually work along with us week one, week two and so on. You'll see at the top here there is a live tutorial every Sunday where I'll take you through the learning focus of that particular week and all those tutorials live will be, the recording link will be put on the course afterwards. So don't worry if it's a bad time for you and your time zone. So as a newcomer, you might find it better if you follow us week by week. But there isn't anything really stopping you if you prefer to just dip in, mix and match here and there and work through the course at your own pace. For the most part, that's fine, although there are a few hidden group activities which are timed. And so you couldn't, for example, at the end of our launch go to the course if you're an experienced mood or this would be. And in 30 minutes, run through, do everything, get your badges and never be seen again because there are some things that you need to hang around for a couple of weeks for. But for the most part, yet you can work at your own pace. One thing that I would like to point out though over on the right here is we have boxes. And these boxes, these form a kind of a checklist and they show which activities you've completed or not. Some of them will, you will see a tick or a check mark in them. Some of them will appear automatically when you've done certain things. Others, you will have to click the box, click into the box yourself manually once you're satisfied that you've done that activity you think you've done it well enough. You'll be able to tell because you can either hover your cursor over them and they will say or else there are different boxes, a dotted line box as whether they're automatic or manual. So that's something to bear in mind. So if you're a beginner then, let's take that next question. That's what the course looks like. So as a total beginner, where do you start? I'm going to answer that question next. And I think the first thing is find in the course the block that says practice course and click the green button which says request now. There you're going to be asking for a course. We'll send you a link to a course where you are a teacher. In other words, you can add, modify and play around with the activities there. You can change the name of the course once you've got started but I would suggest that you try and think of a sensible relevant name to you as you make your course and likewise as you create the activities in the course. Try and think of how you would use it in the real world in your school, college establishment. Rather than, you know, Mary's practice course, test, Moodle course, Sandbox and so on. Try and all the time, try and think of putting it right into where you're going to use it later. Because of course you can at the end if you want, you can take the course away with you. So one way you might like to work in the next month is by just going in and trying things out in your course and if you get stuck going to the question and answer forum we have and asking you a question and getting some help there. Now some people like working that way, you know, some people just like just go straight in there and have a play but if you're the kind of person who prefers more guided instruction then I would suggest, first of all, don't forget that every week we're going to have a live tutorial and also if you take a look here we have what Moodle calls books and I'm going to move on to the next slide and here's a couple of examples in week one of a Moodle book and each week has these books and these contain the teaching materials if you like the learning content where the focus is for that week and so if we just open up these books you can see that they have pages or links that take you through each of the various steps of building up your course and adding content now a book in Moodle, yes it has text and so if you like reading instructions there's some simple text with links to documentation that you can read but if you're the kind of learner who prefers instead to watch screencasts and see things in action then I'm moving on to another slide for each of these pages in each of these books there are videos, they only last a few minutes very very short to the point where they will explain to you the different features and activities that you might then want to go into your course and try and every video has captions or subtitles in English so if you find my northern English accent difficult to understand you can switch on the subtitles and also thanks to our Moodle partners being really great, many of the videos also have different languages captions in different languages so you might find that your first language has subtitles in there for you as well to help you so if we just summarize then if you're a beginner to Moodle and you need to know how to get started just join in the activities in week one make sure you've requested a practice course and then be patient as we send you out that link and then for this week the three things that we'd like you to look at is decide how you want your course to be set out different sections and so on, different formats and then to explore the blocks, now Moodle courses can have many different appearances or themes but most of them or many of them will have a larger section into which you'll add your actual learning content activities, resources and so on we're going to take a look at that in weeks two and three but for week one if you have a look at the blocks which appear on the side and see if there are some which you feel would be useful to you and then finally have a look at how you can get learners into your course enrollments now obviously if you are an experienced Moodle and let's go on to my next question then I know Moodle what do I do you may or you may not want to have a course you might already know how to do all of that so what could you do in the course well there is nothing stopping you requesting a course and then trying out other things and we have I've noticed in the forums quite a few people who have used an earlier version of Moodle or who aren't quite up to date with this latest version so feel free to try those things out we would especially like it if you could go to the question and answer forum and give support to the people who are new to Moodle and answering their questions at a basic level similarly we're going to have a space where we'd like experienced Moodleers to give examples of good ways in which they've used Moodle's basic features to give some inspiration and ideas to the newcomers so that's a way of sharing good practice if you like how you've used features in your establishment so that others can get ideas from you and I am putting the emphasis on basic there so for instance here's a great question I need help with drag and drop in the Q&A forum so if you could go and answer questions like that it would be super on the other hand this kind of question really and similar admin technical developer high level type questions would be better off suited in the forums of Moodle.org I've put the link down at the bottom there or if indeed if this is your question then another place that you could go to is the documentation which is very comprehensive too that way we can keep our forums for the questions for the newcomers and they won't be overwhelmed by this I'm going to now take a look at the final question which is badges what about badges? Badges is something that you're excited about and I know some people have only joined the course because of badges or you've no idea what they are or what the relevance are so just a few words about badges then I'm not a gamer maybe I'm too old maybe I'm too female I don't know but I have understood that badges is they started off in online games and you would you'd row your boat down a river through a cave and kill a few aliens and get a badge for it well they've kind of moved now into education and it's really good in that they are a great motivator for people as they go through stages in learning new skills and I've seen badges used very successfully in Moodle in the last few months and they are a great motivator we've got a couple of badges you can earn on the teaching with Moodle course so they are digital badges you'll get them in your profile there's nothing stopping you downloading them, printing them off putting them on your wall even having them as a real badge if you want and also if you look at the link at the bottom you can push them, upload them, send them to Mozilla open badges Mozilla has what they call an open badge is a backpack and you can collect your digital badges you can get your Moodle ones put them there and then take them around the internet with you showing them off and being proud of them now of course you don't need to earn the badges you don't need to get badges to learn Moodle and to work your way through the site but if you are interested in getting the badges then I would point you I move on to another slide I would point you to the check boxes completion tracking activity completion we call it which appear against each activity and you'll need to make sure that these are complete if you're going to have a chance of getting badges okay that's a very very brief overview then so if we go back to the questions I simply explained the aim of the course and how it works and the different ways in which you can approach it and how you could benefit either as a beginner or as an experienced advanced Moodle user and then I finally have mentioned briefly about badges so I'm going to stop sharing my screen shortly and in a few moments it would be great if you'd then like to go to the course and get started and we can meet you over there okay assuming that you all heard that I'm going to pass on to XY I think who has been spending a lot of time marketing this tweeting, facebooking, google plusing and so on just to talk a bit about the learn Moodle hashtag hi can everyone hear me sorry yeah I'll just share the live twitter feed right now yep so if anyone has any questions for live Moodle sorry if you want to tweet them through right now Mary would take any questions and Helen would also answer any questions you might have about learn Moodle so we've got the live twitter stream happening so if you just tweet using the learn Moodle hashtag they'll be able to answer any questions you have hi there assuming you can hear me I've seen one tweet already can we get a feel for the level of learners using a poll maybe well the answer is yes it's nice also to see people who are offering to be contacted in the question and answer forum because they've used Moodle for a while that's nice to see so I'm just scrolling down right now just to see tweets from before there aren't any there isn't very many questions as it seems I think we could session into the Q&A forum on live Moodle itself so are we happy to do that now yeah I think so also we can go to Twitter and I've seen a few questions or comments that I'd like to answer and I think unless anyone has anything burning to say I know Martin's battery ran out halfway through there but at least he managed to say his part which was great I think we could wrap it up here and fortunately because we are broadcasting to YouTube we're going to have the link the recording and we can put this in the course so that some people who weren't able to be here today or whose time zone is wrong they'll be able to see it as well okay so shall we end it we'll say goodbye from here and we'll see you shortly back in the course I'll be here again with Helen next week and we're going to be doing a live tutorial again at 1500 UTC where we will be taking you through the activities for week 2 so good luck everyone and thanks for watching thanks for watching me