 Hello everyone I'm Abby Frye from Moodle HQ. Today I have with me Marie Ashua who is our global head of products and has just presented on Moodle's product vision. Marie it's lovely to have you here. Hi Abby thanks. Marie I really enjoyed your presentation. One of the things I noticed very early on was that you talked about the product vision of Moodle, not just being Moodle's product vision, but actually the vision of the community. Can you talk to that a little bit? Yeah absolutely. Well we don't build Moodle on our own. Moodle is built by our Moodle HQ developers and UX designers but it's also created by thousands of people out there in the world that contribute to Moodle regularly. Every one of our release includes at least 30 different new improvements and features and sometimes that number can go up to a hundred. We haven't developed ourselves that people have contributed to Moodle because they believe in the project and they want to see it improved and those community members also are instrumental in all sorts of other things like doing our QA testing or translating Moodle in the hundreds of languages in which it's available. So this vision for the product is designed to really unite us all along some key development things that we can all focus on to drive Moodle forward in the direction that we think it needs to go to stay relevant and competitive and useful in our market for decades to come. That's lovely and it is really the power of open source technology of course. So what is this vision? What is your manifesto that you explain to the audience? So the vision is three key development themes but it's premised so the decisions that we've made in terms of what those development themes are and what key features and enhancements we want to focus on are. They're all based on our manifesto and our manifesto we created it as part of the vision really because we wanted to ensure that we were clear on our why, our purpose and our raison d'etre and it's really very much about ensuring that education is available not as a privilege but as a right for everyone and that no matter your location or financial situation or circumstance you can have access to quality education and access to the best experience Moodle can provide and a lot of the vision at the moment is thinking about how do we unlock the potential of Moodle and make sure it gets in the hands of more people because so many people can do amazing things with Moodle but unless you have the technical acumen to or access to resources to help you do that you just you get not as good value as Moodle as you should so how can we make a product where everybody can benefit from its full potential that's at the crux of our vision. Wonderful and of course that's very closely aligned to our mission of course. Exactly. And I noticed that you talked about creativity I think is one of your themes and how nice is that because we're talking about technology and it's really nice to connect that to the concept of creativity. Yeah. So our first theme is called unlocking creativity and we really want to ensure that if you are a learning designer or a teacher or learning and development manager and you have content, learning content that you want to make available out to the world Moodle is the best tool to do that and it facilitates easy content creation, easy content sharing has a good look and feel is easy to use and all of those things getting those things right allow people to create on Moodle. They have to spend a lot less time trying to understand how to do things and just can spend a lot more time making beautiful things in Moodle and useful things in Moodle. And there's this story that really kind of inspires a lot of this theme from a teacher in Germany who created she's one of those people who know how to do magic in Moodle. She created a course in a few days for schoolchildren who were fleeing war in the Ukraine. And it's this super simple course, but it's beautifully made. It's really easy, embedded is translations from Ukrainian to German so they could learn how to say hello and thank you. And within a few days, because she's really great at what she does and so creative in Moodle, she was able to give all these little kids something to do when they went to school for the first time after fleeing their homes in Germany. And it's that kind of power that we want to unlock in everybody who's using Moodle. Absolutely. It's like a toolbox that they can build their own experience and really unlock their creativity as an educator or trainer. So that is really awesome. You use another humanist term in your themes, which is around collaboration or connection. Collaboration. Yeah. Yeah. And is that a technical collaboration? It's a little bit. Yeah. So that one's not as beautiful as creativity, but actually it's very important. So one of the magic pieces of Moodle is that you can plug it into anything. We have a database of over 2000 plugins that are contributed by the community and you add that plugin in and all of a sudden Moodle can do more than it does out of the box. But one of the challenges behind that is the connections that we build between those plugins in Moodle are not really stable. And if something changed within Moodle, then often the plugins have to change. And when you're an institution and you use a lot of plugins, new themes, extensions and customizations that can be quite challenging. So you want to keep up with the new versions of Moodle because it has new features and new developments and even things like security features that are really important. But the effort that it takes to continue up with our new versions that we release every six months can be quite heavy. So we want to try and simplify that and make that collaboration between the external technologies and Moodle Core itself easier to manage. So that's a key part of that. So in it is collaboration, but it's technical collaboration. Well, that makes sense because we want people on the latest version of Moodle. It's an important priority. Yeah. Finally, what's your last theme? Optimizing outcomes. And in that space, we are really talking about learning outcomes, right? So Moodle is there for a purpose for people to learn something on it, right? And so how can we make the learners have a better experience in Moodle in the sense that we give them tools that might help them save time, same effort, get better feedback faster or support when they need it most. How can we optimize outcomes for their teachers or their instructors or trainers where we are helping them save time, again, save effort, enable them to connect more directly to the students who actually need them. So have enough insights to know that student needs my help this week. I better get into that. So providing extra tools that allow them to do that. And then for our Moodle administrators, the people who operate and run Moodle, how do we make Moodle leaner, cheaper to run, easier to maintain, easier to administer. So optimizing their outcomes with that lens. And we're seeing a lot of ideas in that space that are emerging from the AI space, particularly those learner focus tools and teachers focus tools that can help them save time and effort. And that rapid feedback is really coming to the fruition with AI. And we've already seen in the conference, a lot of people present on real life examples of where they're doing that right now with Moodle. Because in that plugin ecosystem of 2000 plugins that I was telling you about earlier, there's already some great plugins that allow you to unlock the potential of AI with Moodle today. So I like the idea of connecting AI to actually allowing people to save time and effort so that they can engage more deeply and more socially and learning experiences. Exactly. So they can focus on learning and not the administration of learning. Yeah. So important community information. How can people become involved? Yes. So we've got two pretty good ways that you can actually hands on help shape the vision and actually help us execute to that vision. So hands on shaping the vision. We've launched very recently something that we call a product advisory group for our community members. After an embedding period that we're going to run exclusively with our Moodle user association members. We're going to open that up to everyone who wants to participate. And if you go on Moodle.org and do some searching, you'll probably find where you can do so. But you can send us a little note and say, Hey, I want to be part of the Moodle community PAG for our learning management, our LMS product, not workplace, just LMS. And in that product advisory group, you'll have the opportunity to actually shape our roadmap. Vote for the things that what you think we should be doing by we're going to do that through some card sorting exercises, which is always kind of fun, suggest new ideas. And those groups will be meeting every eight weeks or so, we're going to try and rotate them in terms of time zones and time. So everyone around the globe can participate. And I think we have something like about 80 to 100 people who've already signed up. So we've we're ready for it to scale the processes that sit behind it are there so that we can have more people. And it's a direct voice on the roadmap of Moodle, which is, you know, the vision, what we're actually doing. Word of warning, it takes a little work. So if you're going to be part of the PAG, expect that you will be doing some work, maybe a couple hours a month or something like that. So but we really do want people to come in who care and who want to have something to say about where Moodle's going. So that's probably that the shaping the vision. And then helping us execute on that vision is the Moodle product experience lab. So through the experience lab, you sign up. And when we're doing things like designing a new solution or trying to see if the way that we've designed something already works for you as somebody who uses Moodle or somebody who's never used Moodle. Actually, we'd love to have no Moodle users on there. And you might test a prototype with us. So the experience lab is the place that we go to first when we want to co design with our end users and ask them questions and do some user testing. So signing up for the experience lab a little bit less work than the PAG, but also a really great way to help shape the future of Moodle. Brilliant. Thank you so much. A very speedy summary of the product vision. Thank you. Thanks, Marie. Thanks. Thanks, everyone.