 As you know I come from Australia There's two Australians here today. I've got Brent Park in here also. He's just joined Moodle this year So you'll hear a bit of Aussie accents around and that's that's what Australia looks like out in the middle and it's Something I've always loved to do and Brent will back me up on this is I love fires. I love making fires I have a fireplace at home. I've always loved making fires especially out in the bush under the stars and You know the thing about making fires is that you need to build them slowly and they usually start very small You start with some kindling You add some larger bits of wood You get bare grills to help you throw a few more pieces of wood on top It gets a little larger And if you're if you work at it and put enough fuel into this you can really make something that a lot of people Can get around All of you here are working on a some sort of fire You all have an institution An LMS in the middle of a situation where you're trying to build a lot of energy You're trying to get teaching and learning happening effectively And as best as you can and as you know it's a it's a process of building It doesn't you can't just throw in a piece of software and expect it to work You need people to come on board you need the training you need everybody to come together and then and the content and the Technology all to start working together So the Moodle fire I started has now started a lot of other little fires all around the world and we have Been growing consistently over the last 15 years Across the globe We have about 81,000 registered sites at this point The US is still the single country that has the most registered sites Although the Concentration is higher outside the US These are just registered If you haven't registered your Moodle site, please do it in Europe for example Moodle's roughly two-thirds of Higher ed, but it's also throughout K-12 and workplace and other sectors as well This is a recent graph This is quite incomplete data, but the orange bar Gives you an idea of Moodle usage around Europe in Latin America in North America and Oceania, which Is Australia and all the things around it? And That leads to a lot of responsibility for this project Moodle is underlying Millions and millions of students experience so What's new in this project that we're all kind of we're all part of here Well, I want to talk about this is what's new. It's not that new The world right now is in a very interesting place. We have a lot of big problems going on There's massive increasing in inequality Going on. There's huge economic Strife happening around the world. There is food and water security these there's a refugee crisis We have 65 million people Just traveling without homes right now without countries we have climate change We have data privacy ownership of data and who controls our data who owns it Data is the new oil you hear some people say, right? Automation more and more jobs are being automated out of existence and people are struggling to live on the minimum wage I heard on the radio here in New Orleans discussing the minimum wage and these parts $7.20 currently something So what happens in a future when most of the the jobs we have now don't exist anymore Healthcare quality that's pretty topical Education quality obviously something we're all concerned with now or these are just some there's more These are some of the UN's sustainable Goals that the main issues they think need to be worked on and these are big big problems that we all need to work on Education I would argue is underneath all of them the education of the citizens who vote for politicians the education of the politicians the All of us we all need to contribute these problems are so large that there's no one government or one Company or one person who can really make a difference here It's something that we need to do as a species on the planet and we need to do that through education There's no other way just to take one of those Inequality Right now private wealth So the the people who have a lot of money the very many billions of dollars for a person or a family There their wealth is growing faster than the economy So think about that the economy which is all of us The percentage of it that is in the hands of a few people is getting bigger and bigger and bigger It's like a runaway train last year Something like a hundred and twenty people in the world their wealth was equal to the bottom fifty percent At the beginning of this year that was down to eight people Last month five people So this is a very interesting situation if you take that to its logical extreme We're basically all going to be working for one person in the future. It's kind of an interesting thought That ties in with how technology is done these days Silicon Valley model of technology look at all the excitement of the the apps the the stuff that gets built that we're using the and In education you often see new products They're proposed as the replacements to fix Education's woes because the teachers aren't cutting it. So here's a new app that's going to reach students better A lot of these are powered by venture capital and the venture capital if you trace where it comes from Eventually comes from the very very rich the the model that the money is given to these companies under and holds them under is This you know the infinite growth model right so maximizing profit It's all about profit you get the minimum number of people working to do that job To get to the maximum number of people and maximize the profits There's a situation though with that model right now just for example the US has 5% of the population But with a profit based model is using 30% of the world's resources Has 25% of the world's wealth. So it's very well to say. Oh, this is you know the the how things should work It's very successful But the whole world simply cannot do the same thing because there's not enough world to go around There's not enough resources in the world to have the same kind of Funding models for companies for technology, right? So that in general that kind of model has caused some of those big problems. That's you know, you got big companies like Monsanto or whatever Just using huge portions of Africa. Oh, you know, they're spreading around the world and making profits off it and The language of the companies that have that kind of funding have that kind of model They're talking about disruption. They're talking about replacing what exists about competing. They say Educators can't do the job. They're not doing very well. So we're going to replace them and That doesn't work for me. I don't think it works for anyone here It doesn't work for the whole BB world conference either In that sense, you know, we're in the same the same ballpark because The LMS is the education providers that we are we're about supporting what exists. We're about nurturing Education, we're about improving what's there and so that's a very Core thing to the Moodle project and we share that with all of the other open initiatives that are around The word open is a beautiful one and you'll see there's so many People are working on open education resources open knowledge open research open standards Open business open governments Open data all these things So we are now Moodle is part of that with being open source. We're a very open transparent project We are moving as you'll see to be more involved with this whole movement And that's really one big direction for us. And so I come back to educators and these are Some things that I really strongly believe in the kind of guiding decisions that we're making in the Moodle project is that if That ideally I think we would all want the very best school for our children to be the one down the road Right ideally if the one that was near you was the best school for your kids Wouldn't that be great? They could walk to school Perfect. That's kind of pretty simple way of looking at it But that's the sort of thing they say in Finland. They just say let's make education so great everywhere But you don't have to send your kids across the country to get a good education That comes if you respect teaching as a profession if teaching is not a low paid Job that you have to work on weekends where you have to buy your own pencils to give to students Where all that sort of rubbish? If teaching was on a level of doctors and lawyers and scientists as It is in some countries and you can see how it works when it is Then if teachers have the resources the respect then the education works if they have the the ability to use Decades of experience I know it's very we can't compare education systems directly but in Australia It's kind of unusual to have teachers who stick with it for 10 20 30 years They have to be really committed right because they're not being paid much. They're being mistreated and usually you know Most teachers are quite young They come out of school They do it for a few years and then they find some better opportunity somewhere else and they become ex-teachers Maybe many of you are that who here is an ex teacher actually we've got okay about a third of you maybe So I mean it better be great if the person teaching my children and your children had been there for 20 30 years Was really experienced knew how to do their job like and you know and and lastly If you've got the time to be and the resources to be a good teacher You're able to think about cross-cultural collaboration about communities about these bigger problems You know, what am I raising this generation for? What what are the problems this generation has to face to fix all the problems that our generation created for them While we've been fixing our previous generations problems So there's my there's my dump on you of ideology, but That all leads to what is the mission of Moodle and the mission of Moodle is to empower Educators to improve our world and that's what's on these t-shirts Very very focused on empowering educators. We are not about replacing educators. We're about empowering them the vision to what we strive for is do we want to make Moodle the best most effective platform for learning and We're not there yet. We will never get there. We will always be improving towards that goal but It's already we have a very good base to work from that's for sure and the values of Well to start with Moodle HQ So the company at the middle of Moodle, but for the whole project we hope and anybody who's using it that we have these values of Education we value we treat education as a value. We treat every interaction as education and Try and look at things that way Openness we try and be open obviously and we that means open to People who are having difficulty using technology. So accessibility open to other cultures other languages Etc. Things are doing a lot of beeping right now Respect so we you want you won't find people from Moodle Talking about competition with other platforms We don't bag competitors or do things like that. That's just there's no point right if what I care about is do their Does the mission of the other groups aligned with ours? If so great? We're all on the same page, right? Doesn't matter if we're working on different projects Integrity being ethical and innovation we We have a lot of room for innovation as an open source project a lot of people are building things a lot of you are Building things on top of Moodle and innovating and doing great stuff What I want to focus on how we get a lot more of that innovation working together so that we are pushing forward faster So let me tell you what we're doing and this is some new stuff One of the things we're doing we're based in Perth, Australia Western Australia, which is right on the edge of the internet We're moving a bit more to where the action is we actually have Some people working for Moodle HQ in Barcelona already, but we're going to make that more formal as a proper office And get a lot more people there So there'll be a base in Europe. Europe is a very interesting place for Moodle there's huge support for Moodle there and a lot of people doing really interesting things and we want to get closer with that So we're also launching a Moodle foundation. This will be a non-profit that's based in Europe probably in Brussels and The purpose of those two things is so we get more involvement with some of the initiatives that are happening in e-learning in Europe They are spending Billions of euros on innovation research projects a lot of people are getting these grants and they use Moodle for these things and Those projects Happen for a while and then they kind of disappear and it's such a waste of public money. So What I see our role is getting much more involved in these larger grants these larger research initiatives that are going on and making sure that we work on things that go into Moodle core that everyone can benefit And just getting us all working together So the job of the foundation will be to link together all these people and get us all working together on those things so a lot of research partnerships and business development networking with other open initiatives and projects And lastly we're building a lot of new products and platforms as well and that's what I want to go through now some of those So there's seven I want to talk about Now you probably know some of these already if you've been around Moodle for a while But I want to tell you where we're going with them and what the plans are Some of them are brand new So firstly Moodle itself Moodle core I want to rename this to be Moodle server and I'll explain why later, but So the Moodle that you download the piece of software that runs and is your website It is this Piece of software that sits among these things. It's joining together Administration users groups roles departments courses competencies and has API's So programming interfaces to join with other things Is anybody here not using Moodle yet doesn't use Moodle. It's kind of new to you anybody One person all right welcome So that's what Moodle does basically So it's a core platform that has plug-ins the plug-ins connect to other systems and then that whole thing you access via Clients So you might use desktop or a laptop you might use a mobile device or a tablet in the future You'll be using VR and AR glasses and voice Interfaces we've actually already started building some interesting voice interfaces to Moodle It doesn't really matter how you're accessing it and it doesn't really matter But the back ends that that back end is not going to change It doesn't need to change In in what it does basically because the things it does are so generic They just if you're going to have a learning organization if you're going to have a school or a university and and call it a learning Organization and if it's going to have courses of some kind then it's going to have these kind of structures and do those sorts of things It's all about how you link with other stuff and how you access it so individual courses are just sequences of activities or resources That that would be the same if the year was 2040 and you've put on your AR glasses And you had some something you had to learn some journey You know you're going to get there via a series of of experiences So that's not going to change But bringing the focus back down to current what's what we're currently doing very new stuff. So very recent and and Focused to today we have Moodle 3.3 just released some of the things we added are these There was a big focus on the office integrations there's been a lot of different Integrations written in the past we've tried to learn from all those and bring it down to a standard integration in Moodle that works with Google apps that works with Microsoft Office that will soon work with open-source solutions like next cloud and others but So the idea is there's a few parts to it one is you can now log into Moodle using OAuth 2 It's built in it's didn't have to you don't need any extra plugins now. It's built in it This is this site is configured for Google and Microsoft to log in with those accounts But you can use anything you can set up if you have an authentication source on your institution You can now very easily make OAuth 2 using that standard Make that the authentication source for your moodle And once you're in then those documents can be embedded Inside Moodle in different places students can submit them as assignments and When they do Moodle takes ownership of that file and it controls the access to the file using the moodle workflow So once it's if a student is submitted a document into an assignment Once the due date has passed you don't want the student changing that anymore, right? So it takes away right access from the student now this teacher has right access the teacher can scribble all over it if they want to and Do their grading and then hand it back and no matter what the workflow if you have multiple markers in In assignment it all that is handled So the the point of the integration is to make the alignment between Moodle's workflow And the back end of documents very close Now it does depend on the plugin writers Handling this but they can do it at least in a common way and this can work across Google across Microsoft across the next cloud Etc. So That was a big step forward for us. We're still fleshing this out with more and more detail, but the overall Principles quite quite clear and it works quite well already The second big thing in 3.3 was the new dashboard Which is the first thing you see on the When you log in you see a block and this is showing your Things that are coming up for you in your courses is bringing together that information onto one page We had some things course overview before which was pretty lame and most people did other things that was always meant to just be a First attempt and we were hoping a lot of people would make new dashboards and a lot of people did but We never got anything it's a core until now. So now we have thanks to the Moodle users association who Defined and funded that we now have one in core what I just showed you there. It's not actually a screenshot This is another view of the same dashboard These are actually mock-ups which look almost exactly like the final screens and that's an approach We're taking now in core development. They were actually getting user experience design happening first We go through a lot of testing and you might start seeing on moodle.org a lot more requests for involvement of user Testing and research and we're trying to get interfaces designed first so everyone agrees. Yeah, okay That's what we're building and then we give it to developers now. That's what that's how most software should be built That's not how moodle used to be built Usually it was developers just get started and you have quite cranky-looking interfaces and There's a session at the end of the day talking about user experience, which I hope you can come to We'll talk a lot more about all of that stuff But this dashboard is a really good step forward. It's already had improvements since 3.3 in 3.31 and 3.32 so it's it's really taking a good step forward and And The last sort of highlight I want to point out from the last release was this one project inspire which is Actually now being included into moodle 3.4 as a core feature and in core we just it's just called analytics. So this is moodle's native analytics solution Now this slide is a little complex, but What we've tried to build here, and there's a session what time is your session about this? Two o'clock this afternoon if you want to find out more about this What we've tried to build those are a platform for analytics There's there's so many different things you can do there's so many different ways to analyze what's going on and draw inspiration from that Which is why it's called project inspire We've tried to build a generic framework where you can come up with different models and That researchers can build new ways of looking at the data and distribute them as plugins and Configuration and then other people can use that in their moodles so we're trying to build a bed of Innovation and research where we can all be experimenting with with analytics and Building and building the system up and up further and further It's Got in there a little artificial intelligence brain so machine learning and It's all about training that brain So one aspect that's quite current is we are asking people to donate their data sets Entire moodle data sets if you've been running moodle for ten years. We would love to have the lot Because we're gonna we're putting this data through this training of the machine learning heart of this so that it starts becoming aware of How certain actions result relate to results So when the students fail for example is an obvious one, but there are lots more subtle things we can do as well so If you're interested, please come to Elizabeth's talk to You you guys at the back there are chairs around I think So feel free to come on through if you want to sit down sit down the front here. There's some I won't mind 3.4 is what we're working on now. We're very busy on this and We have made a decision to not do any new features Just focus on usability and we might even do this again for 3.5 As you probably know in moodle often these new features come out and they sound great And they get implemented for one module or a couple and they don't sort of make it to the other ones So there's a bit of technical debt we need to do to just improve usability across the board There's also some areas of moodle that have needed some work for a long time and some of them are for example the calendar So adding drag and drop things like that on the calendar Combining a participants page with the enrollments page Which is probably the worst most horrible part of moodle and I just curse every time I see it like for the last five years It's a finely making effort to get that fixed And there's a number of other small areas getting shortlisted And we're working on this over the next few months For example, there's some little things like you know forum emails when if they have attachments make sure the attachments in the images In the post appear in the post of the email that you get, you know, it's little things Little things that annoy you and me for a long time Usability is really our main focus moodle has so many features moodle has more features than anything else out there We're not lacking for features. It's really the usability of them and making them discoverable and making them consistent So Simplifying the use of moodle is a big focus. I hope after this afternoon session that we get a good We get your opinion actually on things that you think we should be focusing on More standards better integrations Cleaning up legacy code. That's more for developers. So when developers come to moodle, they're not can confronted with a lot of different strata of Aged software. Well, finally aged software But they come and find a quite clean API to work with which makes it easier for them to write new program new plugins and things like that One important feature is a moodle site copy So the ability to copy from a moodle one moodle site to another one like a whole site Just so you can go I want to send this over there Currently, that's really hard to do. It's a long process of people are nodding here because you probably did it recently but For example, it would be good if you're if you've got a little site and you want to push it to moodle cloud You could just go boop Now it's your moodle cloud or you start on moodle cloud and it gets too big So you go, oh, I want to now move it to a moodle partner. You go boop just transfer it over there So just copying whole moodle sites around Sector it might it may or may not do the boop noise. I can't guarantee the noise the Sector-specific improvements. We're working on you know really focusing on things for k-12 for universities for Workplaces and there are specific things Analytics driven user assistance already talked about that's the focus as we go forwards and and lastly VR and AR while You know, we're not going to be spending a lot of resources on it now because we have a lot of basic things to do but in a couple of years Something like this sized Connected to a smartphone is going to be pretty common You know, and I would love it In three four years, maybe if I could say okay Everyone just put your glasses on now because I'm going to do some magic stuff here and start conjuring digital objects on the stage Which we can all see right always start interacting with and That's you know, if you've who here has Played with VR Some way okay about half of you who here's played with VR with controllers Where you had your hands in there? Okay fewer now if you the rest of you I really recommend you get your hands on like an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift with controllers but once you get your hands in there you really see the potential because you're literally picking up and Objects and you're moving around in a big space and you're doing stuff and when you throw multi-user Apps into the mix where you're up. You're working with other people and you're both manipulating things That way that's when it gets amazing. It's really very close But I do not see Moodle as a big 3d object in this space What Moodle needs to do is interact with these apps So as a teacher, you'll probably say you'll you're having an activity for a class I might say it all of you. Okay. I want you all to go through this simulation and You have to fire up this app So you may be in Moodle there you press a button that launches the app. You're now in the space doing the simulation Maybe you're I don't know fixing a broken nuclear power plant, you know something you can't do in the real world Then the app probably has some results there'll be assessment some automatic Something's going to happen in that app. Where does the assessment go to? It's going to get back to Moodle, right? So the we need standards to push that stuff back into the grade book in Moodle and also the teacher when looking at all the students can say who did it who didn't do it and Click to see a recording of a student doing one of those experiences So then maybe you want to do further assessment to actually, you know You go click observe it appears in your glasses and now suddenly you're you're here You can see the student there you can see the the desk there You can see what they're doing and you can assess them and do further comments or feedback Into Moodle so Moodle is that kind of launching platform and the gathering of the results So, you know, I'm not saying we're all going to be lawnmower man in Moodle But I this you can see how this will work, right? It's just the extension of the content We have now with LTI and stuff like that Moodle mobile I'm going to speed up now If you haven't seen the Moodle mobile app lately, please take a look. It has come a long way in the last year it's Really a very attractive way to use Moodle now and this shows development over the past few releases since Moodle 2.4 As of Moodle 3.4 We will hit 100 percent of Moodle's core features all working in the Moodle mobile app So we just got the we've just got the workshop module to go And then and then we work on third-party plug-ins and things like that But the the core app now is is becoming very very capable the app can be skinned so you can provide a CSS file and skin the app how you want We also though we provide a service now we've started that since the beginning of this year branded Moodle mobile app So if you want to have an app in your in the app stores with your name on it and your logo your brand So that students just launch your brand and log straight into your site You can now get that it costs about three thousand bucks a year Chicken feed really We maintain it. We'll update it every two months. So it's always going to have the latest features and Please just come to Moodle.com and you can get one of those we already have quite a few already and We're getting into a good rhythm with it. So this is something that we can do Something that's a good value to you something that's not too hard for us to do and It does help fund the Moodle project. So There's three good reasons for you This is coming soon on the slide, but actually Moodle desktop is now released So we have a desktop version of the app designed for laptops and Desktop computers it's out on Windows the Mac and Linux versions are about to drop as well And so that has all the features of the app which are that it works offline You can download whole courses and have them offline And plus it has a the simplified interface. It's kind of nice and clean. It's good for very quickly accessing things And like I said a hundred percent compatibility. So Yeah That's it's also available Currently Moodle is Funded almost almost entirely by Moodle partners. We have 89 worldwide. We've got seven in the US and One of them is Blackboard and it's just why we've tried this baby world Moodle rooms Moodle moot here and They do the services now. This is not going to change we we we're working with all our partners But we are internally Trying to make that Better quality we always trying to improve the quality of partners and we're trying to make sure that Choosing Moodle partners is really the best solution for anyone who needs services if you need any consulting or training or support that you That Moodle partners is like a the obvious option Moodle cloud So we launched this just about two years ago We have 20 actually 22,000 active sites Moodle sites running there All over the world. It's extremely active There's a number of packages one of them is called Moodle for school That's an example of one of that's my test site on Moodle for school That's it has different themes than the standard ones out of the box Ninth grade beard curling is a very nice course if you want to take that As well as expert far-knockling. That's an Australian word. You'll have to Google that And and this is low-end commodity Moodle sites. So if you just need a Moodle site in a hurry You can get a free one just go click use your phone and you just get it So even just for testing if you want to play with the latest version of Moodle and test some stuff very welcome Come and get a free site go for it If you have very small needs For a class or two, then there's paid plans there as well But this is really helping us to learn about Moodle and how people are using it We've started to collect statistics for our user user research on what features are being used what features are not being used How they're being used and this is a way for us to learn about how people are using Moodle to We have plans to make it so even easier We have we're improved improving the onboarding. We're improving the integrations with other systems so you can add Features to your Moodle just click and you get it and And as I mentioned before with a site copy that you'll be able to upload your site into Moodle cloud or out of Moodle cloud We just sort of use it as a place to do things Now this one is new Moodle training we've always had Moodle training and most of the partners do Moodle training We have a MOOC that we run Every twice a year one just finished. It's usually in July and January The That's just a four week introduction. It's very small and however it is really well used You know most MOOCs when you see the statistics they start off with big numbers at the beginning and then by the end of the course You got three percent of people left, but this one's pretty consistent like people stay right through it It's really great to see that retention And that's at learn.moodle.net if you're interested in taking that or you've got teachers and you wanted to do a quick four week course We will always have these these MOOCs But what we're building now And we have a whole team of five people who are working on this our education team Led by Tom Murdoch who's sitting over there Who's joined Moodle this year again? Some of you may know Tom as the founder of Moodle rooms Some years ago and an all-round good guy Talk to him grab him if you're here. It's a good chance And you may want to ask him about this so that what the what the guys are building here is a full curriculum of Learning Moodle from the beginning to being very very advanced And it's not just here's a feature. There's a feature. It's about how to teach online Right the pedagogy the patterns the things that work the things that don't work So it's a bit like a degree. It's got a number of modules and you can build towards a certification If you want a certification, you can get one as well So that will replace the old M triple C certification that we had As soon as it's ready There are some sessions on this over the next two days So I encourage you if you're interested go to those and we're looking for more feedback In the early stages to improve that There are some universities who have already put their hand up and said when this is ready We want to make it part of our online education degrees so as part of a masters of education and So if you're interested in that too, you know, I think here we have a chance to build a Curriculum that really teaches people how to teach online Using an open source product. It's not not teaching you to use a commercial proprietary thing This is something that's used around the world. It's open source. So it makes a lot of sense to be a standard curriculum number six our Moodle Academy Now we've had a I Mentioned one MOOC. We have built a prototype of a system for running MOOCs in general It's still just a prototype We've been doing some testing with it. We're going to Spend some more time on it now We've learned some things but what this is is it's similar to course Sarah or future learn or Ed X or all those sorts of things but using moodle right so you can take your moodle course Copy it onto this platform and Use a more MOOC focused more large-scale focused format. So it's it's gonna be like a course hosting system But a moodle a moodle based one There's no I can't give you a timeline for when this will be more available But it's something with we're working on soon and it's one of our major projects going forward, but I'd be really excited to see this up and running and available to everybody that one one reason for it being an external system to your own is that You probably don't want to invite half a million students to come into your IT systems and get enrollments and accounts on your own University systems you want to get this is a sort of a marketing thing, right? You want to have it out there and say hey, we we offer good stuff. Here's a free course for you or a cheap course If you like it come enroll in our main institution from a student point of view They'll have courses from lots of institutions to look at and they get that kind of full catalog so Yeah, that's that's something we're really focused on right now and as well Now the last one. This is a big one. This is really really important to me is the moodle community and marketplace so Most of you know moodle you know moodle.org This is a moodle site. This is actually the Second moodle site actually sorry. It's the third moodle site in the world Which has been running continuously since 2001 and it's just been upgraded the whole time every time moodle gets an upgrade. It's been upgraded. So this is It is the oldest running moodle site the other two are no longer functional They were one was the one I was building prototyping moodle with and building it with real students at university And the second one was my PhD thesis which was a moodle site so can you imagine writing a thesis which is about software that you're That you're actually literally writing and is part of the thesis. I got distracted a lot when I was doing that you can imagine I was like oh If I had something to do a search and replace on text so you know my bibliography References could automatically link to something. It's a oh, yeah, I'll write a glossary module right? So then that's how the glossary module got started. It was to do my references in my thesis So this is the third site now. It's very big. It's very old It's been good to use moodle as the community site But I think we're getting past that stage. It's not effective so much anymore The courses on there are very large. We have moodle in English Which has every most things and then there's all there's about 20 or 30 other language based courses It's it's messy And you know, we're using a We're using moodle to do this It's not the perfect platform Another thing in the community that exists now is the moodle users association, which I encourage you to join and this is a Club really for members to contribute to buying new features in moodle moodle.net is our open education resources It started about six seven years ago and has had precious little attention since But it's there is a blocking module you may not have seen called the community block And it lets you publish your courses into here and you can download courses from here We've never really made it a big deal. So it never really got a lot of traction Only because we didn't we didn't really integrate it properly and we also have moodle plug-ins database which has 1300 plus plug-ins nearly 800 developers and These are there's a lot of action going on here. This is really moodle is really a learning operating system where you install Plug-ins of things on top. It's got a new interface recently. It's much easier to find things and write things and We have that but what I think we need to do is bring all of those last four things kind of together in a new system and and This would be a community site that is more a professional development space So if you're an educator And you're you can imagine you're looking at your empty course. You just started on an empty course. What do I do now? So assuming you You've maybe done some moodle training. How do you find that moodle training? Well On the side of your course is the moodle community. It's a little tab You can go straight into it from your course so in there That's where you find your moodle training so you can learn how to use moodle and even if you've done that you'll find people to be with so if you're teaching I Know American history in Spanish All right, somebody must be doing that. It's pretty niche You want to hang out with people who are doing the same thing in the same language, right? So You set on your profile your identity the sorts of things you're interested in and you you find that group And you now have a feed of people talking about that stuff. You also find Resources related to your particular subject. So this community site will be connected to a lot of OER Platforms and it's a one-stop shop to kind of start finding resources that you might need and then you drag and Drop them straight into your moodle site Right. So you once you hook in you have this professional development resource sitting on the side You learn how to use moodle how to teach with moodle you get all the resources and this is how we empower educators This is like directly on the mission But we need to work on this together and build this thing We have a number of Shortcuts to get their number of systems and things and resources and Initiatives talking with a lot of people right now One of them is about your reputation How do you know the reputation of people? If you look at LinkedIn, for example, you get asked to you know evaluate does this person know how to do that? Well, it's kind of very light You don't really you can lie a lot in LinkedIn if you look at my LinkedIn profile You find a big massive lie. I've put to read deliberately right in my profile Which a lot of people don't realize is a lie, but It says on the founder of LinkedIn There is ways around that and I'm talking with some people who are really involved in open badges looking at the next generation of open badges, which is A much more peer-to-peer system similar to that But actually wait to see have like a network of trust and you can actually start finding things that you can trust on the internet Which is a pretty big deal So it's about bringing all this stuff together into a system that's open to everybody And the the last bit I want to mention is about the marketplace angle Just because we believe in openness does not mean does not mean I believe in Everybody working for free far from it if you do work. You should be paid for it So in this is a model that we can build resources and pay educators to do it It's just like a Kickstarter kind of a thing crowdfunding where Imagine that group of resource of teachers I talked about before they go look there is no Content for this. There's no open Moodle course for this subject and someone says Well, I built one a couple of times I've done it before but I can't release it because it's at my school and you know It's it's owned by them But I'm very happy to build an open education an open one for everybody to share It's going to cost $10,000 because I'm going to work for weekends for the next three months and Right and they go this is this is what I'm going to do now you know from their reputation that they can do it and you know because of their interactions on the community that you can trust them so Everyone goes. Yes. I'll chip in a hundred bucks I'll put in $10 or whatever it is and they pay for it and when the things built everyone that has access to it and Then you can take it and you can tweak it make it your own You know fork it if you like and it's this process and we need to have I think this country of all countries understands that process of tipping and and Getting things done this way. I Think it's going to really work And I think we have the best chance with Moodle to make it work because this thing is going to be linked to every Moodle site in the world So That's the vision there now. This is coming. We we we we're working on it. I can't say when but I'd like to hear your thoughts on that so we have a lot to do to do those things and A lot of work a lot of plans. I must say I'm more excited about the Moodle project now than I've ever been like in 15 years I'm so into making these things happen right now But we do need help Here's how you can help incidentally So get a branded Moodle app I'm selling it now. I'm actually literally selling this thing right now. So get one just who has got one anyone here has got one Anyone right no one so look at that. Look how many new apps are coming down the next couple of weeks Join the Moodle users association So the Moodle users association Who's here? Who's in the MUA here? Michael, Kate, Tanya, Tonya, a couple of people there. I can say good great Marty. So This the association you pay memberships you can go from a hundred dollars up to ten thousand dollars That's Australian. So let's say $70 to $7,000 and And That money goes into a pot and there's a whole process for deciding and voting on work things to do And then the committee basically takes the top ones and the money and gives it to us and we build it in the next release so We've already had some projects coming through there. I would like love to see this to grow I would love to see more more coming through this Who here does research do we have any researchers here anybody working in research? I know you do Elizabeth Tanya. Yeah, okay a couple of people the usual suspects Even if you know researchers if they were doing work in online education Encourage them to use Moodle I've been lately going to a lot of non Moodle conferences for a change Which is a challenge because we have something like 17 Moodle MOOCs that we're involved with every year Around the world and there are many more other ones as well But I've been really making the effort to get out of the Moodle world and go to other things and I went to some research Conferences lately and there was one in Greece. It was an IEEE conference. It's like all the engineers 70% of the presentations were using Moodle in some way like they're saying we have a hypothesis that this new Technique will work. We implemented it in Moodle. We did the tests here are the results ended the paper. That's it I'm like You guys you've done all that work like just make it into a plug-in that we share it with us or talk with us So we know work with us. That's why we need a foundation to do get more involved here, but There's so much work being done in Moodle out there and it's it is really a platform where if you want to do research You can make something and share it and imagine the data you can collect from all those sites That are out there so we can really discover some truths about online education this way So lastly the analytics if you're interested in analytics take a look talk to Elizabeth and Please get involved. There is a site for all our research activities research.moodle.net and there you'll find Hundreds thousands millions of papers. What is it? Probably hundreds More than a thousand research papers in a In a database So there is a lot of a lot of interesting stuff there Do you need a Moodle site fast? Come to Moodle cloud Do you need consulting hosting services go to a Moodle partner? Actually, how many people here are using Moodle rooms as a solution actually quite interested about half or maybe a third of you okay I Just was thinking that because BB world I actually thought this would be all blackboard the customers here But it's not so That's cool But still using a Moodle partner where you can if you know, I'm not saying you have to but I'm saying if you have a choice Please you know use that because it does help our project If you've got any ideas good ideas about anything I've just talked about like just get in touch just think hey I'm going to get in touch now. It's it's not easy. I realize But I've got my contact details the end contact me I can at least shuttle it to the right person If you're involved in grants if you're best mates with Bill Gates or Something and there's a big grant using Moodle just you know Maybe contact us because maybe you could do it in a way that affects core rather than there's a side project Are you all your friends very wealthy and you you want to feel proud by investing your money in something that truly helps the world Then just call me direct. That's my actual phone number go for it You might not get through while I'm in the US because I have a different SIM card, but I'll get it eventually So back to campfires and fires so I know everyone's got a fire to build we're building the Moodle fire I think we need to work together get our fuel together and that's the only way we can really make some change in the world I'm not proposing. We burn down this beautiful green landscape. Just just make it a nice place to live So thank you very very much and please get in touch