 I'm really terrible anyway so we're going to start off with Dan who's part of our integrator team and he's going to talk to you about the development side of Moodle. Hi everyone. I'm on the integration team. It's a bit of a confusing name because people probably think it's like integrations with other services and things like that but what our team actually does is quality control for Moodle on the technical side so the Moodle development process has multiple stages of peer review. We've got like a peer review stage and then the final final stage deciding whether it gets into Moodle core or not is integration review so me and my team are reviewing things that come in and rejecting them and with the point of this is that Moodle is deployed on such a diverse range of situations and for a lot of developers they'll develop something really specifically for their needs so it might be schools or universities often and they're not necessarily thinking about other sectors and other use cases so that's that's that's where we sit. Right now at the moment Moodle 3.3 we just entered the code freeze last week. Code freeze is when we stop accepting new features and we just move on to stabilizing Moodle and just just accepting bug fixes for the new release and during this time we do quality assurance testing where we're trying to invite more people to test Moodle in different environments so one way that you can really help us at this time and every six months is download the Moodle beta release and actually run run the testing on your production environments and report bugs. If you report bugs at this time like they you know we get them fixed and we mean it means that we're you know solving those issues and you're not having to wait for it later. I realize that for a lot of organizations you're not deploying you won't be deploying Moodle 3.3 for a long time but it's really extremely valuable if you can just do a quick bit of testing on the latest release because you can identify those issues earlier and help us that way. In this this release particularly we have integration with Google Docs, better integration with Google Docs and Microsoft live services and there's like Facebook login and that's that's one area where particularly in your real use cases with your institutional deployments if you can do some testing testing out this new feature it will really help us because you know we don't we we don't know all your different environments so we've also got the quality assurance testing which the community get involved with and I think Mary's gonna talk about that. Well so we we have a set of quality assurance tests and the idea is that we get people from the community to go and test these this functionality out every release and we ask for volunteers and we have a testing site so even if you don't have a test environment you can participate with that and we find a lot of issues that way and we solve a lot of problems. Yeah so thank you very much Dan for that and it is something that that call for assistance and call for testing it is done through the Moodle.org forums and we will tweet out any of the links to all of that sort of information and any of those Docs page afterwards as well thank you. So Mary can you give us an update on the community side? Yes and I'll carry on from what Dan was saying I was going to ask you to put your hands up if you go on Moodle.org but the way the lights are I can only actually see Tim Hunt directly in front of me. I know he goes on Moodle.org so I'm not gonna ask you that but I am going to encourage you very much if you haven't or if you don't go there often please do go to Moodle.org first of all because that is the way to go to the forums and one of those there is a way in where you can you can go in the QA testing forum and and send a message to Helen Foster saying I want to be a tester can I can I have an account and then you can go and you can try out the new features in the manual QA tests we have that Dan mentioned and as Dan said we have a site a QA site which means that you can try all the new features and improvements for yourself even if you can't get your own development site and it's actually quite fun because it gives you an opportunity not only to try these things but also to help us if you find that something doesn't work for instance it's a great advantage. Also I'd like to encourage you on the other forums there because it's a great way of Moodle HQ connecting with regular Moodle users be the administrators teachers whatever so that we can find out what you like what annoys you what new improvements you would request. Some people have said yeah I don't go there very often because it's very very technical well that's not really true because there is a forum teaching with Moodle on Moodle.org which is looked after by me which is entirely just for discussing teaching with Moodle so it doesn't only have to be technical things and there are dedicated forums for different activities as well and as well as for administration and and installation and so on but the other thing about Moodle.org is that it is the main community site so on that front page also there's a link to the documentation and the documentation is supposed to be a wiki that everyone can collaborate in to help us to write and just as with the forums on Moodle.org it isn't only in English there are forums in different languages I try to join in the French and German ones for instance and there is documentation in different languages so just if it doesn't mean it doesn't matter if your native language isn't English you can still contribute to the forums and documentation of your language and I know Gavin said we have people from many different countries speaking different languages in in this particular mood and also to help out the community as you go into Moodle.org in the top band with the links you'll see a link to Moodle.net which is our sharing site now if you don't have a whole course that you're able to share there's still places there where you can upload for instance a competency framework that your organization might have made or you might have adapted that other people can use or a user tour these are the new things that you might have a user tour you've tried it works for you you could share that or another popular one quiz questions you can you might have made a quiz with some really cool questions you can export it from your site and share it through Moodle.net for the others and there's more you could even contribute to translating new plugins of Moodle from our translation site and finally one of my favorites you can either yourself or you can encourage people in your organization to join our learn Moodle MOOC and we run these twice a year and the next one starts on June the 19th and it's for anyone who wants to learn how to use the basics of teaching with Moodle it's not for it's not an administrative course although it is great when administrators come in because it gives them an aspect of Moodle that they might not normally see you know teaching actual teaching with Moodle rather than setting it up and tweaking the admin settings it's even good if you're an experienced Moodle because every time we do it every six months we use the latest version of Moodle so it's an opportunity for you to try out what's new in Moodle using this course so if you haven't been on it I don't know why you haven't but will you please join in June if you have spread the word so other people can try it okay so yeah so how many people have done learn Moodle MOOC okay so there's a big portion over there who's gonna do it in June yes and that group at the back I think there's a group over here as well yeah you're all gonna you all volunteered by not putting up your hand you realize that yes sorry about the MOOC as an experienced Moodle what it makes it quite interesting is the way it uses Moodle because actually it tries to use a lot of the kind of social learning features so if you're someone who kind of either is a developer or builds Moodle courses it's really interesting to actually experience Moodle yourself as a student even if it's a MOOC not a formal course so just seeing Moodle as a student and using some of the social tools makes it really quite interesting and it's not a big time commitment so yeah I recommend it yeah you know I think it is it is very good I mean how many years did you spend studying say as a student throughout your life so far not stopped out of years full-time by the time I did an undergraduate and PhD and then since then I've been doing OU courses on and off for about eight years but what about primary and secondary school that too yes so let's say 15 years yeah but so everyone usually spends 15 20 years learning as a student but actually online lots of teachers and lecturers and staff first thing they're doing is teaching not actually learning and so the learn MOOC it's free and it's an opportunity to experience the whole system as a student and then help them make good teaching decisions and know what that teaching decision is going to do to their students and I think that's one of the interesting things I find that invaluable on the learning Moodle and MOOC myself so Juan can you give us an update on the mobile area please well the first thing I would like to say is that as Mary said I invite you to join the Moodle.org forums we have this Moodle for mobile forum we like to read that forum and we are we really appreciate the feedback from teachers and administrators anyone or even students using the mobile app so if you have any suggestion feedback or any that please join the forum because there is an active community there and I think that one of the strength of Moodle is that we are an open source community and and I always love that idea so I really like to participate in forums to have this kind of discussions that helps always to improve the mobile app and regarding the mobile app features and this kind of thing so as I said yesterday or in my presentations in Moodle 3.3 will be supporting the 95% of functionality from a student preview or modules modules resources activities and in for Moodle 3.4 we will be supporting all in core modules from the student point of view right and we are also working in improving how teachers can use the mobile app right now teachers can participate in forums can create assignments and we are working in improving rating grading and this kind of thing that teachers find useful and we have also plans to improve the user interface update the framework we use to use these new modern patterns in mobile apps so we will be be very active developing the mobile app it's an ongoing project it's not going to end never we have a dedicated team so the plan is to improve improve at more functionality so I will recommend you to follow closely the Moodle for mobile forum announcements Moodle news where we announce the new release and stay tuned with the new features I think it is important to understand as well just because the new features are only are there with 3.3 the way it works is that there is a local there's a plug-in that you can install if you've an older version where you can then get those features on that and within the mobile app so I know an awful lot of people haven't gone full into mobile apps yet and that came clear in the panel however it is something you can try it try it out and pilot it and see what it's like I know some colleges which are just using it as a clicker instead and or a free clicker like using choices in in their classrooms for interactivity with their students shocking idea really actually getting students to participate in a classroom so what's your experience in communicating with the Moodle team and the rest of the Moodle community either on Moodle.org or on tracker as well where all the QA testing sort of is reported and recorded so did anyone like to give their thoughts on that like Tim did about learn Moodle come on don't be shy don't be shy or I'll just pick on somebody. Just a question because I was not familiar with the tracker. Sometime I had an issue and I did try to raise a ticket and the red bar was coming like have you checked all over the place where this is not being reported etc. I couldn't find the next step what I have to do. Well I think it's if you think about any sort of issue tracker there's a few sort of steps that you want to do so we don't have the same issue constantly being created by lots of different people so the first thing you do if you have ran into a problem I usually Google search it one because it goes across all the middle sites in one go but also then I was going to track her and I would search against that component so someone was talking to me today about a workshop issue that they had found and so going and searching there will rule out whether someone has already reported it maybe it's already been fixed or maybe it hasn't been reported at all so that's one thing you can actually check is already in tracker and that's important before you raise an issue. Another thing is you can check in by searching the forums and using Google search again it's quite a good way of digging deep into them you can see if anyone else has asked the same question as well and maybe it hasn't gone to tracker because it's just a configuration issue or something like that. The last place is docs so yes this is very much about self help and double checking because it will be quite terrible if we had seven or eight of the exact same issue in tracker because we just end up having to close the minutes so do look first to see is this an issue has it been reported has it been solved and maybe I mean I've seen sometimes with some minor bugs that someone then puts a patch hey I found this problem and here's the solution and ultimately that can end up with with TAN's team and get integrated into core because it's a bug face. I think I remember what it was and I don't think there was any reference to that is when you change say a record and you want to find out what was the previous version of the record and somehow I couldn't see that you get whatever the updated version was only probably later that somebody has changed something but I couldn't find any reference to that thing and it was quite I could say two three weeks later so I don't know if it was somebody else who reported that and not showing when that red bar was coming to me without me having the ability to see what's going on after that. One thing I would say is despite what Gavin says about searching for issues and doing all this kind of work it really helps us when you do that but don't feel intimidated from creating an issue I think we would much rather that you're reported the issue than it goes unfixed because you're overwhelmed by you know the because our development process is quite complex there's quite a lot of steps to it some of that's I mean it's just come over time we're a big project there's a lot of quality control things as I say but yeah just getting them in and actually posting on the forums is a good step as well because often someone will link to you but it does it does happen all the time that people create a bug and in or they report a bug and it's already been reported a hundred times I do it myself all the time and I can tell you to do it because I don't do the the job we have someone who triages all these issues and gets bit of all the due because but I don't do it so you go ahead and carry on somebody else's problem I like it but yeah don't be intimidated but it's something just again the forums is usually where a lot of those questions first start and then end up in track yeah I mean how to determine whether to post on the forum or on the tracker really the tracker isn't a place to ask questions it's to report a specific issue absolutely because actually it can be a plug-in that you've installed on your site or you never know unless you've tested it like that so that's a very good suggestion do test on one of the demo sites just to replicate it because when you get around to reporting it one of the steps is explain how to replicate that bug can I ask a question so there's people in this room like I can see Moodle partners and large organizations do any of you ever sort of get involved in the testing the testing of the current release like would any of you look at Moodle 3.3 right now when we're asking for it yeah and is anyone willing to tell us a reason why you'd not you wouldn't want to get involved in that process it's just because you're focused on other areas at the time or can we microphone behind you yeah we became a Moodle partner at Leo about year and a quarter ago and and our first year has really been focusing around the sales side of it and I think I've mentioned Gavin previously we need to sort of focus now a bit more on how the development team interacts with you guys and and I'd like for the teams to be able at least patch bugs and send those things back if not contribute code on a more formal basis but yeah the reason we haven't so far is simply other other priorities. Okay who are? Any other yeah basically said pretty much what I would say I mean we're not yet partners but we do I think mainly the issue is is time and funding for that sort of work so paid client work will always take priority over what we would really like to do to us to help with the development of the community but yeah it's always an aspiration it's never something that can quite be accommodated at any given point in time which is always a problem. I obviously completely understand like everyone's got their own priorities for it but I guess what I'm one of the things I was trying to get across is maybe it can help you stop you running into issues later down the line and then it was being slow to respond to because I think there is like an issue that we need to think about really in Moodle HQ of the fact that we you know we're very focused on like right at the moment we're very focused on Moodle 3.3 and getting it out and then by the time that people have deployed it and the encounter issues we're we're really focused on the next thing and there's you know 3.5 I mean a lot of people who are deploying this summer deploying 3.2 so we're already 3.3 will have just been released we'll be doing really focusing on solving any of those bugs which are found after release so I do think that what Dan's trying to say is if you spend a day of your resources now doing an upgrade 2.3.3 with your current site on a non-production site and helping test that's going to help you in the future you will save more time because any issues you find will get resolved in advance where they're the chance to respond it will take longer to deal with those issues so we would ask you to participate in the community as in unfortunately it is these times of years just after code freeze this is how we really need your help. I think we've got a comment over here around this area. This is really something I was going to comment on before but it ties into what's being said here now one way to maybe it was the Moodle the learn Moodle mooc that got me thinking is there any way that you could set up something similar to that for administrators and maybe even for developers who are relatively new to Moodle potentially or people who are coming in thinking there's this Moodle system how do I even start to begin to engage with that or and you know just to continue that engagement as well but if you had something like a mooc around some of these things as well you could you could use that mooc as part of your testing round and part of so it's both that it catches two things doesn't it it's both a learning experience for the people taking part but you're also getting some of that valuable information and testing that you maybe need and it's good for the community does that make sense yeah yeah and you know unfortunately that's one area which I mean people have asked about are we going to do a teacher mooc and it is unlikely that we're going to be doing the administrator side we do some developer tutorials that have been ongoing developed and they were improved last year and the dev docs are being being improved but that's basically what the Moodle partner network is for so organizations like Leo or Blackboard web anywhere they provide the training on that administrator level or developer level rather than us we're very limited in what we within Moodle HQ can do in that respect but I do think we could we maybe could do something around around this area about being able to pre-test and try and do some sort of community engagement might not be a mooc or some training but certainly think that that is a very good idea and whether it's a webinar driven thing around QA testing or something like that because at the moment it is very much volunteer do it yourself ask any questions and I think we need to do something there that's a very good idea thank you can I just put the challenge out of based on Gavin's comment there can I put the challenge out to any of the partners to develop that mooc that Maggie just suggested I think it'd be a good investment acknowledging the limitations that Gavin said I totally agree with the logic behind it but any Moodle partners in the room that wants to do that I know several people that would sign up yeah but well they sell the training that's the point and the training helps fund Moodle so it isn't about and that is a difference I think so hey other people with their experience oops almost missed it and occasionally I've done some peer reviews and in the past when I was doing a peer review on a piece of code that wasn't developed by a core Moodle developer it sometimes after I finished my peer review it got stuck because I never had the send to integration button and there didn't seem to be a clear way to go well my peer reviews done and that needs to go there there's a I've posted about an informal label somewhere about that but we can talk about it afterwards what I would say is just raise some noise about it join the developer chat and say I've peer reviewed this but it's not been sent to integration the Moodle developer chat I'm sure you can if you search for it you'll find it it's like telegram dot me slash Moodle dev I think but yeah I'll come and speak to me I've posted some slides on Twitter the link is in there as well but yeah just just feel free to raise some noise I mean the things like so the reason I'll explain we have like this permission system on the Moodle tracker so people sort of graduate from one level to a next to be able to do things and sort of the reason for that it's not because we don't we want to well we want to control we want to control it yeah so it's not helpful for anyone if someone who doesn't know anything about Moodle development just approves every single issue and then sends it to integration and then we have like a hundred poor issues and we have to you know we have to filter through it so yeah but just feel free to just use informal channels particularly with things like that yeah Tim's got a comment can we pass the microphone that's what I was trying to mention okay so who here uses what's up who uses telegram okay so all installed telegram telegrams are really nice app which works on your desktop works on tablets works on phones it's linked to your phone number in the same way and it's great I mean I use it for business all the time and sort of for me and one-on-one discussions but that's what's now used and by the developers and HQ user for its communication as well so it's very handy it's quite secure very secure so well please install and try you can just join that dev chat and you can watch what's going on and even if you're not developer you can see how they're interacting and it's it is very revealing and if you do have a question as a developer you can also ask in there too so I think it's really worthwhile but since only about three people put up their hands for having telegram more install it please well if if you're a developer yeah if you're not interested in tough people talking about gate and ternary operators then what exactly fascinating that chart on ternary operators sorry that chat was fascinating okay okay so anyone else want to contribute their their experience in in working with the community or being engaging with it either on track or forums just as a positive feedback we have contributed a couple of times where we found defects in some penetration testing that we worked with one of our clients on and just to say that we were really impressed with the way that these the issues were taken on evaluated and patches were available practically the next day for the issues so just as it's a you know it's a really positive experience that we've had and that that isn't just a little HQ it's been plug-in developers as well where we go theme developers where we've found some issues and that that process I'll just say a bit about the way that we deal with security issues in Moodle because it is different to so we we provide a new Moodle secure point release which is where we include the security fixes every three months I think or is it two months anyway two or three two and when when somebody reports a security issue to us we ask them to do that in in the tracker where it it secured and security issues are private by default so nobody else can read about that how how you could exploit it like you how you could cause a problem with Moodle we we we bunched the security fixes up to these these releases once every two months so that administrators have a kind of fixed timetable of when these security fixes are coming so it allows people to plan around the security releases so if you report a security issue to us we'll ask you to keep the details private we'll produce a fix it will be tested and then you know up to two months later the fix will be released along with a load of other security fixes if there needs to be and we we hold off for a week before disclosing more information about it it's called it's like an industry standard practice called responsible disclosure so we disclose I mean we treat security issues extremely seriously and part of this process is just to keep your Moodle site safe and respond quickly to them but sometimes it might because you said that there's a fix available the next day and I'm just trying to say you know you might report a security issue and it won't it won't you won't get it as fast as that and that's to help the whole community so that people can plan around it I think it's really important that in understanding that so we do release them those releases every two months now how many people here have their Moodle site registered okay it is really important for the rest of you to register your Moodle site you will get notifications for upcoming releases or as soon as the release happens and information about any other security issues that come up so where there was another one there that at least there was some noise in public about about it and it was a bit more misinformation because it was the people who are writing about it didn't quite fully understand some of the aspects so we then would send an extra message to those registered sites so those administrators would know what the truth was and send them to the correct information so if you haven't got your site registered it's really important to do so for that purpose however it's also important for a second purpose your site needs to be registered so if you use the mobile app notifications are possible okay because that registration is the first of two steps to be able to get access to our notification server so you need to register for that reason as well so if you haven't please go and register your site if you don't know if it's registered please go and check if it is registered and if you run into any problems just this email support at Moodle yeah it does sometimes happen that you try to register and you get some kind of error message send an email to support at Moodle.org and we will check it out for you and try to troubleshoot it for you support at Moodle.org in actual fact if you click the link in the documentation it tells you that same thing as well. So it is really important to let us know because it helps us understand how many sites are out there and then get you information which is important to you at the right time. Who else would like to contribute their thoughts? Montopi shy. Pardon? No? Okay then. Okay should we just finish off then? I think everyone's probably just a bit tired after the few days it has been pretty full on. And last night. What you what you mean last night Dan? I told it was this morning. Who was the latest by the way? I heard there was half three some people this morning? Anyone go past half three? Anyone admit to going past half three? Okay maybe not but anyway thank... pardon? They checked the bar they're still in there well I know some of them have already gone in there to top up so anyway thank you very much for coming along to the Moodle Moodle. Next year it is most likely gonna be going towards Glasgow but not totally finalised but we shall see. But in this year there's quite a lot of other Moodle Moodle all around the world so this Friday I'm over in Dubai as the Moodle Magelis there. Moodle isn't the word we use over there because Moodle means something else rather than a village gathering or in this case it sort of came from Lord of the Rings originally and further for this Moodle Moodle. And then we have one in New Orleans in July we and it's being ran in parallel to Blackboard World there working with Blackboard on Moodle rooms on that and we also have one in Miami in November. Who wants to go to Miami in November? Okay wanting to well submit some papers then and get some funding. Miami in November sounds really nice and then of course I think it's Sydney at the end of September as well. Haven't been in Sydney since 2003 when we watched Johnny Wilkinson score a drop goal. Pardon? In France in June yes absolutely sorry of course France in June I forgot. Where in France is it Leon? Is it Leon in France? Yeah so that should be cool or not cool in June but it'd be nice. So okay well thank you very much thank you very much Dan, Mary and Juan and thanks to the rest oh he needs a microphone come on just one more. Okay Tim you're none of my team in the netball games okay. Just while Gavin was thanking everyone else I think we need to thank Gavin and the rest of the team at Moodle HQ that made this moot happen so should we give them a big round of applause? Thank you but the rest of the team back in HQ of course we're asleep now so but we'll they'll see the video so thank you very much and then yeah so that's it go forth and enjoy yourself and see you next year.