 Good, good stuff. Go VET. Okay, that's fantastic. I'm hoping that this will be beneficial to other RTOs and basically it's a summary of our journey over the past two years using Moodle and how we've built an online learning community. Okay Upskilled has been a private RTO since 2010 and we have delivered training in both business and IT to over 12,000 students we have issued in excess of 7,000 certificates so pretty proud of that. I'm here representing the business faculty and what we've done within the business faculty on Moodle. Okay so we've been using Moodle since 2011. Traditionally we did classroom 100% classroom training and Moodle acted as our repository for our assessments where students could download the assessment upload the assessment getting a few nods yeah and manage our pre-course requirements with all the the ASQA requirements compliance requirements and it did that very well and it also helped us become a paperless office so that was fantastic especially from the world of all those boxes which we're all familiar with. So from there the market shifted about two two and a half years ago as we all know and classroom trainings has waned considerably and the market due to market demand we've moved to a hundred percent nearly a hundred percent online learning so that's been our journey and our change over the past two years. So because we moved to online learning we wanted to replicate what we were doing in the classroom in Moodle so create that virtual community classroom atmosphere. The way we started was we did our research and I attended and Upskilled sent me to a course from UNE if anyone from giving you a free plug here guys because this is a fantastic course graduate certificate in e-learning where everything that I learned in that course I then implemented into the Moodle it was very practically based and it gave me you know the leading research and information about building online learning communities and I highly recommend it and it was all of course 100 online. I've read some information from these authors Paloth and Pratt building online learning communities I think I googled them I think UNE sent me to them and then I found this other one on Amazon creating a sense of presence in online teaching both really good practical books that you know you can read in a day but then you can take away a lot of practical tips and tricks so part of the course required me to design the vision what was my vision for Moodle and of course in my head it was very colorful and it was like a website and it was dynamic and it was going to cater to all the different learning styles you'd go to one button and enter this fantastic room where you would do your orientation and your pre-course requirements and all those compliance requirements steps in that section you then would go off and cater to your visual learning needs and watch videos youtube linda.com we use as an online resource library and screencast I use a lot of screencast as well and videos that we made ourselves or you could go into the auditory section where you would read our recommended texts blogs web links and any e-text that we had you'd come back out of there and then you would go into the interact and learn section where you're going to interact via discussion forums and weekly webinars and chat rooms and I just had this vision of this wonderful website that was going to be so fantastic and of course being vet you had to then go and show us what you'd learned in this assessment area and thinking all of that that was great that was our vision but then UNE taught me about the e-learning 2.0 principles and I actually caught up with what Moodle already knows and that is that learning has to be not criss-crossed and it has to be linear and not vertical and the information has to be presented sequentially so the vision had some good ideas but it sort of changed and became more practically based using Moodle and following the e-learning 2.0 principles and they are that the student is your focus it has to be student focused they are a knowledge builder you're helping them build their knowledge the trainer is more of their critical friend and a co-learner and I love all of these concepts as a trainer for 20 years you know you don't know everything you learn it I've learned the most by being a trainer and being an educator so I love that concept and I love the structure that it's not self-paced and that wasn't content-driven so it wasn't just visual next visual next visual next do an assessment so that was all leaning to where I wanted to be but just maybe in a more structured format but that suited these e-learning 2.0 principles anyway so what we did we created created the courses and what we learnt was that to build an online learning community you have to build your trainer presence and your student presence online their social presence online we all do that on Facebook already naturally we put our photos up we tell people our friends about ourselves so we get our students to do that to do that first up I had to get the trainers to do it first and there was some reticence on their behalf because a lot of them don't like Facebook or for whatever reason didn't want their their picture up so encouraged both trainers and students to build their social presence tell us about yourself tell us your hobbies tell us what are you afraid of you know what's scaring you the most about this journey and surprisingly they're not backward in telling you that in the first couple of forums and we created a Facebook study group for each course and that really that was that it's just been so fantastic it's been a community a supportive community not necessarily an education community but is there somewhere where the students can go to ask questions when the trainers are not available and they do do that and they do come in and help each other by answering each other's questions and what they do do because we have managed it well is they advocate for us so if we get someone complaining or flaming the students come in and protect us when we're not watching which is a really nice place to be at this stage anyway um okay so then what else have we learned that we had to front load the student support yeah obviously we're all talked about you know you've got to catch them early in the first six weeks so we front load that we have a great student support team and they ring the student welcome them come on board dubskill welcome to our family we maintain their original enthusiasm the trainer has to ring them and the trainer is more of a mentor and they have to ring them within seven days of them enrolling in the course that first session is a mentoring session where a mentoring plan is conducted and the trainers because we use contract trainers which i think is quite important for you to know um the trainers set the parameters up for when they're going to be available for contact and so that's all set up the students are really super keen at that beginning process so then we get them started we need needed assessment due dates we started without due dates and that was just a nightmare because people think they've got forever so you know that made rolling enrollments a problem so the beauty of rolling enrollments is people can start whenever they enroll so it suits that whole sales marketing approach but it's a nightmare for trying to get people to progress through the course so i would recommend that you use a set start date which is what we've moved to away from rolling enrollments um and then set due dates we then send email reminders when assessments are due from and with all our email correspondence we personalize it so it's not automated so it's not a matter of just getting a system to send out an email we personalize the correspondence so they feel like they're part of the upskilled community um we use asynchronous discussion forums and what that discovered was that the trainers were very reluctant to write anything in the forums because it's such a new domain and i often got well what am i going to say and i said well what would you say in a classroom so how would you promote discussion in a classroom you you ask open-ended questions so it's no different you know and what would you do if a student asked you a question in a classroom would you just ignore them of course you wouldn't okay so if a student posts in a discussion forum we must reply otherwise it's dead air so getting and that's been a long journey to get trainers comfortable in that environment um which has been understandable so a change management process has been undertaken with training um encouragement support monitoring um we've made discussion forum participation compulsory encouraging trainers and we need to further develop them so that they're more open-ended with their questioning to create further discussion um and we trained our trainers in how to promote further online facilitation discussion facilitation and that's an ongoing journey um we chase disengaged students early so a student for us is disengaged if they have not logged on for 30 days so as soon as they hit 30 days every monday we're running a report and we are then communicating with those students individually now we do that with our student support team but we also do that with the trainers we get the trainers during them but i also have a full-time mentor who is chasing potentially disengaged students to find out what's gone on why haven't he logged on and we're here to help you know let's go back to your mentoring plan what did you agree to do back on day one you know you agreed to study tuesday nights friday nights two hours each night have you been keeping to that plan what's the problem what's getting in the way so it's very much a mentoring process and we use the engagement analytics in moodle to monitor that which is very effective i don't know if anyone's using that but that's been very helpful to monitor poor engagement we oh wow okay we introduced weekly webinars and we trained our trainers up in soft skills and it was all about mentoring skills so not only did we train our trainers in how to be effective mentors but we've trained our student support team and we've also trained our sales staff because it is all about mentoring and trying to work out the psychology of online learners so remember this is 100% online why does somebody sign up for a course and then not do anything like if only we knew why does someone sign up for jenny craig and not stick to the diet who like one of my trainers gave me that analogy and i thought exactly so basically we've got to find out what their problem is so part of the mentoring skills was we came across this prashashka's stages of change and learned how to pronounce it which was good prashashkas and you know basically this is the journey of change so your students before they even come to us they're pre-contemplating with their google search i want to do this that the other thing i'll search for a diploma then the sales team get them and they might lapse you know before they contemplate joining up and then they might join up and start getting prepared but then they might lapse again and think oh this is not really a good idea so you really need good sales people supporting them and we call our sales team career well education managers and they've been trained up in career coaching so to make sure the student is being enrolled into the right course and they're not lapsing through these stages then we get them into the course they're doing a course they complete a unit and even then they can still lapse and fall away and then we want to get them into maintenance where they're continuing on to the next unit the students they might fall away after they've done one unit so i thought i had it all sorted out i just had to get them through the first unit but the damn thing's a circle and it just goes around and around and never ends and these students never stop needing support and love and nurturing and mentoring because they go back to this pre-contemplation do i really want to be doing this course i don't have time even if they've done a unit so that's their journey they progress and they lapse they progress and they lapse again so our job is to regress these students dependent on the amount of support we offer to them through these lapse periods and this lapse periods vary for student to student but the mentoring certainly helps and so what's next what comes next um webinars we're going to further build our webinars guest speakers industry specialists the trainers are going to use the webinars for weekly engagements or whatever they want to do to get students talking to one another we're going to use moodle badges to gamify our learning link that to linked in we're going to build collaborative assessments and better online discussion forum post questions to promote online community talking and thinking and interacting and we're going to continue building our knowledge i just recently read something about e-learning 3.0 and good god um web semantics and horticogy or something i still can't pronounce and but i think it we're going to look at something called second life avatars virtual learning that that's interest you know of interest to me i don't know if that's what it i've got some groans over there um but that was my first response to second life oh seriously do we have to do this but apparently that's where it's going to be at so i'm going to explore that i'm going to follow a woman who i admire greatly and who going to introduce me to through her readings through her blogs her name is professor jillian saman you don't know who she is she's follow her she's switched on she's all about the five stage model of using e-tivities and trainers becoming e moderators so that's we're looking into all of that as well and we're going to stay passionate because we love our jobs and love that so that's it cool