 Okay, thank you very much for coming. My name is Nicholas Bowie. So today I'm going to be showing you a Moodle course which we customized initially in the spring of 2020, right as the pandemic was ramping up in Japan. But, which since we've been, we're back to face to face now of course, but it has become this ongoing, never finishing project, not unlike the Sagrada Familia. Okay, so first a little bit of background. So we have about 5,000 students enrolled in language courses. We offer six languages, English, Chinese, Korean, French, German and Japanese for the exchange students. We don't have an English major, but English is compulsory for the first two years for all students. And we have about 200 language teachers, but of these about 175 are part time or what we might call adjunct in the West. That's important because that means a large number of our teachers only have about, you know, one to four classes or courses a week, which means they're not particularly invested in one specific university because they teach at several different institutions. And they teach about 700 language courses total. So right when it was clear that we were going to be going online, which is about February and the semester starts in April, we did not really have a good platform at a university for managing language courses, but we did have Moodle. You know, and I could have just said, all right, well, I'll make 700 Moodle courses and figure it out, but many of our teachers are not very technologically inclined. And as I said, there might not be too invested in one's single platform or one university. So these are the kinds of things I wanted in, so we decided to customize a course and these are the kinds of things I wanted. The third one, the ability to display everything on a single screen without the need to download files was important because we have so much homework that we give our students every week. And the last one, it has to be as simple as possible to use. So the solution that I hastily decided on was to have a single course containing all 700 groups, 700 classes. And the general format of it is it all revolves around Q&A forums. That's it. And one announcements forum. So we have six sets of Q&A forums which are labeled A to F, and each set of forums contains 14 separate forums, one for each of the 14 weeks in our semester. And these are labeled Task A1, A2 through A14, B1, B2, and so forth. And each forum contains 700 separate discussions, one for each group. And in the course, there's a single announcements forum to which teachers post their weekly class assignments. And then within those assignments, they can just type Task A1, Task A2, and that makes use of the Moodle auto-linking feature to take students and teachers to that forum. So for example, we might allocate our forum something like that, or Task A is for vocabulary, Task B is for speaking, and so forth. Okay, so let's jump into the live demo. Hopefully the internet is going to work here. If you have any questions in the meantime, yeah. And Andrew, if you could use the mic. So we do have Microsoft Teams, that's what we have. And that was an option to just say, okay, everybody use Microsoft Teams. But again, it's complicated. So how did you compete with that and what was the benefit of going this way? The benefit was that we could customize it to our liking and simplify it greatly so that all 200 of our teachers could actually use it. If we had just thrown them Microsoft Teams, most of them would have just floundered and would, I don't know, it would have been a disaster. Okay, so provided it's sort of more structured. Oh yeah, and also so that we could have administrative oversight, I can look at everybody's course, I can troubleshoot and so forth. In an ideal world, that's probably what we would have done because we already have Microsoft Teams. Oh, you hate it. Actually, I hate it as well. I don't like it at all, but since we already had it, it would have been easier on our end since we wouldn't have had to customize anything. But it's really cool. I want to show you. I had a question to keep you busy while you're waiting. I've done something similar with an internet governance course that's now up to 23 African countries and 54 groupings and a few hundred groups. There must be a limit. I'm worried about performance of the server. Is it any different to have multiple courses with multiple groups and groupings or to take this approach of having it all in the one course? I haven't found there to be any impact on the performance at all. So yeah, I was worried at first as well. You've got more users than us, so you're sending us in the right direction. We haven't found the upper limit yet. It works fine. And I'll add that it seemed like a really complicated way of doing things, but other people have now had to pick up the course and manage it. And they do find it a lot easier having one giant course and getting their head around groups and groupings, which I was concerned that they wouldn't be able to do. But they have pleasantly surprised me and it's highly effective. Hi, so I also have a question. I'm Diana Andona, coming from Romania. So we have had a similar situation in the pandemic when we tried to train pre-university teachers from all over Romania in different skills, and we built it up like category of courses with mini short courses inside. The main reason was that we couldn't figure out with the forums how to insert the synchronous meetings, which were either Zoom's or Microsoft Teams. Did you have any synchronous meetings? I mean, yeah, video conferences, meetings simultaneously. You didn't use that at all. We had Zoom, but it wasn't integrated. It wasn't integrated. Because that was the biggest challenge, how to integrate also that feature in courses. Thank you. Basically, if you go into a forum, there's what we call a forum sidebar, which lists all of the students in the course, and at the top it lists the students who have posted something into the forum, and below that it lists students who have not yet posted anything. Oh, hey, look, maybe working. It allows teachers to scroll through the forum and look at everything the students have posted in the forum without downloading any files. Okay. Okay, so logging in with a demo student account. And you know what? At the end, I'll show you my email address, and if you want to try out these demo accounts, you can do it on your own time, or you can find me at the conference, or send me an email, and I can do another demo for you. Because maybe this isn't going to work either. All right, so, okay. So, when students... Okay, here. All right, how do I scroll down? Okay, so, you know, here they would see several courses, but the first one here is the customized course. And all the students see is a big red button for assignments. This is the announcements forum, and here is a button to the grade book, and email my teacher, and when they look at it on their smartphone, these things will jump up to the top of the screen to make it easier for them to find. All right, so let's go into assignments, and here they select their course. Let's go into class one, and here's just a sample lesson, and the teacher typed in task A1, and it automatically turns into a link. That's not us, but it's just part of Moodle. All right, and the students come here, they click the orange button. The student has already posted something, but when they click the orange button, they will get your typical screen. We have it set to the advanced editor as default. And if the internet were a bit faster, you would see the bar here. We're using the Poodle plugin for audio and video recording. So the buttons for audio and video are there, and the rest of the buttons are there. Now, at the top of the forum, you'll notice this icon here is people with a slash through it. That means that this is not a typical forum, the visibility is hidden, which means students can see their own post and the teachers reply to their post, but they can't see other students' posts, and teachers have the ability to toggle the type of forum it is, and right here there's a label for what kind of forum it is, and the teacher can set these as well. Let me just quickly log in as a teacher. All right, so here I am, logged in as a teacher, and again, the teacher sees the big red button with a few extra buttons. They see info for teachers, and they can access all of the forum sets down here. Now let's go into the same class one, and when a teacher goes to a forum, oh, sorry, this is because the previous page wasn't loaded yet. Let's go back. On the right-hand side, hold on, loading, so it automatically skips this screen and goes directly to the forum, and yeah, okay. So the top post here in the Q&A forum, these are all generated in advance. It's just kind of a blank header post, and there is a little tab here, and when you click that, you get the forum sidebar. So the sidebar on the right, it shows you the students have posted. Down the bottom, students have not posted. There's different functions here. For example, you can set the deadline. So let's set the deadline for, when did I post these? September, let's set it for September 5th. Now you can see in the sidebar, they all turn pink, which means they are all late. If I set it for September 7th, you can see that this Moodle student E has one late submission. You can see some other stats here. You can display all posts that have a reply, posts that were late, or posts that are unrated. And these icons show you how many have not posted, what percentage have posted at least one, and this makes the attached images larger. But you can actually enlarge the images by clicking them. And often students will post these sideways or upside down, and there's a rotate function in there. So there's no need to download any files locally. And the best way to use it is to just step through them one by one when you're checking, because if there's a large number of images in the forum, it takes a long time to load, but there's a lazy load function built into it so that the next post in this list is loading in the background. And there's some other things like rate all the posts, a certain grade, for example, if it's just for attendance. We have preferences here, open sidebar, when patient loads. Privacy mode is good. If you want to show this on the projector, actually I'm not going to do it now, because maybe the internet's slow, but it will X out the names. If you want to just show the whole class everything on the forum, but you want to keep the student's identity private. Okay, so that is the forum sidebar. So let me now go to the grade book, which is the other big customization. So the grade book looks like this, where you have the students on the left and each of the sets of forums here. Now, for example, say I'm only using task A and task B in this course. I can hide all of the ones I don't need by deselecting them like so. Has posted just means they have posted something on that day. Okay. And how do I scroll back here? Okay, I don't know how to scroll back left, but anyway. So assign means something has been posted that hasn't been rated yet. And you can see that the rated posts are color coded. There's a bunch of options here. Search by name. You can set the grade breakdown that will allow you to set what percentage each one is for the entire semester. Set task labels. This is the label that I showed you at the top of the forum. You can set, this is the teacher's label. This is what you see as the teacher. And this is what the student sees. So if you want to use their native language, you can type the labels for the forums here. Or if you want to set default labels for all of your courses, for example, if task A forums, you're using it for vocabulary in all of your courses, you can just set the default here and set it once and be done with it. Exclude assignments. These are the items you don't want in your total grade. You can see it grays it out like so. And let's see. Restrict post visibility. This is for toggling whether it's a social or non-social forum. Okay. Can you help me scroll to the left? Sorry. Oh, here's a scroll bar. I see. Thank you. In many parts of the site, you will see these little arrows next to students' names in the forum as well and in the sidebar. So what that does is, did I click it? It takes you directly to the message screen for that student. So if you want to send a message to that student, all you have to do is click the arrow. And at the top, it tells you which groups, which courses they're enrolled in and their student ID number, which is handy. How am I doing? Okay. Maybe I'll end with this. The student view looks like this. Actually, this was a bad one to show you. Let me show you student A. When anybody replies to a student post in a forum, they show up here at the top in the student view. Okay. And so they can see who's replied to their post in the forum. And if they go in there, it jumps directly to their post and they click Mark Red, then it will disappear from their grades screen. Okay. Can I just show you one more thing maybe? I'm probably skipping a lot of stuff here, but this is just a little sneak preview of one thing we're working on, which should go live, supposed to go live tomorrow, but I don't think it's going to. It's a note-taking system. And all the teachers have an icon here. There's three icons here. The left one we can ignore. The middle one is just for displaying the QR code for the whatever page you're on within Moodle. So for example, if you have a quiz and you don't want to put the link in Moodle, you can just project this on the screen, which is pretty handy. And this one here, once it stops loading. Okay. Okay. So this is going to be a note-taking system. You can select a class. This is an actual class I have this semester. And you can take notes on each individual student, for example, by year. If you click year, these are notes for the entire year, for example, like a student has a physical disability or something like that you need to be aware of. If you click semester one, these are notes just for semester one, semester two, notes just for semester two. And these are the classes over the semester. So say you're in class five and you want to take a note, student's dog, Aida's homework or whatever, you take the note there. So I think this will be a useful addition as well. So I think I'll wrap it up there in five minutes for questions. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the technical difficulties. And if you actually, let me go back to my slides. How do I do that? I sit down here. And here is my email address at the bottom. Oh, or maybe not. Oh, there it is. Yeah, so if you want to demo this for yourself, I have some demo counts ready. Just take a photo of that, I guess, and send me an email or through the app or whatever. And I'd be happy to send those to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. We did have some questions, but we still have a couple of minutes for other questions if you'd like. If you can wait until the mic comes to you, I think there's one over here and one there. Yeah, I'm just curious what exactly is the plugins that you used for that language course or the customizations? So the customizations that you use for the language course, like that little bar on the side when you had the forum that could do all those different things. Is that a customized setting? What's that a customized setting or is that a plugin? Everything I showed you was a, or is it a developer? This developer, so I should mention that now. We have a teacher on our staff. We luckily have a developer on our staff who teaches language, but he's also a developer. So we hired him and we paid him to do this. So if anyone's interested in doing something like this at their university, I mean I recommend this guy, but I'm sure there are others. But if you can find somebody who knows about education, then it's much easier to work with them because they know what's needed, but yeah, if you're interested in hearing more about that, send me an email and I can give you more details about that, yes. Okay, we've got time for one more while we ask Linda, is it to come up and sort hers? One more? Oh yeah. So a more conventional approach using Moodle would have probably multiple courses, assignment activities, that kind of thing. What do you think the limitations were in Moodle that forced you down a less conventional route? Yeah, I think this is a little bit hard for people maybe in the West to imagine that so many people would not be very technologically proficient, but if I were to, we only had two months before these classes started and 200 teachers and I mean am I crazy to say, look, if I just threw them Moodle or even Office 365, they would have zero idea about how to go about doing it. There's just too many options, too many tools, obviously there's assignment submission already built into Moodle, there's a great book already existing in Moodle and there are teachers who, very few, who opted not to use our system and use their own Moodle courses, that's an option, but our teachers would just not have been able to handle it or they're just not inclined to handle it because they are not that invested in just our university. Some of these teachers teach at four or five different institutions around the city and they don't all have Moodle and they don't all have Office 365 even. So having them ramp up to that level, it just, it wouldn't have worked. It would have been a disaster. Yeah, easier for me, but it wouldn't have worked.