 Well, hello, it's 1645, but I don't want to be falling asleep because we have Benjamin and apologies. We I tried to pronounce the name and hopefully I'm not too bad. I have to say I'm big. Thank you. So I'm really big fan of H5P. As I said, I think we can enable us to produce very high end stuff with a fairly low ability if I can do it. I think anybody can. So really looking forward to this exposition. So away you go, Benjamin. And don't forget to keep the chat going and I'll field questions afterwards. Perfect. Thank you for the introduction and welcome to my talk. Today, I want to talk about the use of open source software as part of open educational practice and teacher education, specifically, especially about H5P, but also a tiny bit about Moodle. During the first month of distance learning in schools, I stumbled upon a discussion within the German teacher Twitter community or call it a bubble, the so-called Twitter Lerotzimo based on the observation that many K 12 teachers had to move their teaching online to learning management systems such as Moodle. One user shared a somewhat frustrated yet ambiguous rhetorical question. How the hell should I build effective online courses if I have never heard anything about instructional design or e-learning in my training? The question stuck with me, especially after the original poster and Microsoft certified trainer clarified that, of course, teachers do not need to know anything about instructional design if they just use the right system, meaning something collaborative, cooperative, likely Microsoft teams, I guess, which is everything else but Moodle. Well, apart from the obvious criticism that Moodle alone is a terrible solution for synchronous communication and collaboration, I disagree wholeheartedly with the bit about the instructional design skills. I think that a basic and practical knowledge of instructional design principles does not only help teachers to navigate through more or less intuitive learning platforms, but they also empower aspiring teachers to shape the digital education of the future. In my talk, I want to share some insights to a project-based university course in teacher education that I gave together with Gunhel Berg and René Barth in the winter semester of 1920. The explicit objectives of the course has been to introduce students to a playful creation of learning settings, be it through means of gamification, serious games, or game-based approach towards course design. The course was heavily project-based, as you can see here in the outline of the course. And it's just a short theoretical reading session at the beginning and two hands-on workshops in the second stage where students had to come up with their own project ideas. At the end of the semester, all six groups needed to present the somewhat game-based or gamified learning object to an external jury of teachers. The final product ranged from a classical board game about Faust's adventures, a gamified Moodle course about pp-long stockings, to two adaptive branching scenarios with H5P. Well, during the course, and especially during the elaborating of their projects, the students familiarized with different concepts of game-full learning design as well as creative approaches to learning and instructional design. At the same time, there were some kind of hidden implicit learning objectives that I want to talk about today. At the same time, they learned on a more implicit level what it means to work with free and open software and content for content creation and content sharing. During the course, we guided the students through the different stages of instructional design while putting the main focus on the design and development process. Open source technologies like H5P and Moodle played a crucial role in rendering the technological solutions for their project ideas as concrete and as feasible as possible. When it came to the choice of suitable technologies, we let our students decide freely, of course. There have also been projects with Microsoft PowerPoint. It's surprisingly flexible or Minecraft, but we offer them some more thorough insights into the use of open source educational technologies that would be overlooked otherwise. One reason for this push to use a free and open source technology for the creation of learning content is the frustrating experience that marked a lot of the efforts done in the early 2000s with easily accessible technologies such as Flash Player, you might remember. A technology that is now mainly known for its plainful bogginess and eventual total obsolescence in the end of 2020 last year, based on a huge set of advantages of HTML5, the open source project H5P offers some great promises with what regards with regards that revolutionized a low threshold creation of open interactive content by following the most crucial aspects of open educational practice. It is easily reusable and remixable. It has a clear set of metadata for the transparency of the used materials and furthermore, it can be easily embedded in many other environments. Enough said about the technical details, I'd love to share now some insights into the development process of two of these projects in order to illustrate the role open source technology and public hosting played in their creation. The first project was the most elaborate one, and I don't want to spare you having a closer look at it for yourself. You can find the final product of the student's team openly accessible through the link posted in the chat. The group initially started off with the vague idea of making something like animal crossings, but with fairy tales for German classes. It took some thorough rephrasing of their expectations and affordances and some deeper insights into the technological possibilities. Eventually, they ended up using the choose your own adventure like content type branching scenario of H5P to develop their idea. The project was developed on a community-based hosting project for open educational resources by the Zentrale Verunterlichtsmedien. This community oriented service was particular precious when the group ran into some technological trouble at a certain point. Close to finishing their product, they could not access their project anymore. An email to the admins of the platform helped to quickly identify and solve the problem. Apparently, as it turned out, the creativity and productivity of the group had just gotten a little bit out of hand. They ended up with a huge decision tree that you can see here from the editing interface of H5P. They ended up with this huge decision tree that exceeded the data cache of the database behind it. Once the cache limit was removed, however, it went perfectly fine again. From there, the students were more than happy to have the data cache removed. They were more than happy to have their own project back in their own hands. To have this insight at this stage of their work was particularly fascinating because we realized that the software we were suggesting did not only work for their scenario, but that they literally pushed the technology to its physical limits. The second group had a pretty straightforward idea from the get-go. They wanted to accompany the reading process of a K-12 class through the book, Pippi Longstockings, by something like a map. And this map should allow them to include some minigames and have the learners unlock level by level as they progress in the book. The easiest way to implement this mindfully crafted scaffolding, as others would call it, of reading exercise was to let them create a plain old-fashioned Moodle course. Since the University of Hollywood and Berg uses a different LMS than most schools in the area are using, I had to improvise a bit and set up a privately-hosted Moodle in the newest version. This offered us and the students all the flexibility to experiment with different plugins and newer features like the included H5P content. This complex setting allowed our students to get an insight into how both the adaptability of learning systems and the interoperability of open content between different platforms work. My personal conclusion of these examples was clearly that pushing the limits of what is possible with free and open tools is so crucial for the students, creative, and critical engagement, both with technology and the instructional settings they want to enable. Let me conclude with a few remarks on the potential of all of this for helping our students navigate through an increasingly networked and commodified educational system. First of all, these circumstances make it again and again so important to empower aspiring teachers through the creation of their own learning material, both as active creators and as members of a bigger community. Secondly, creativity was, is, and will be the driving factor of education. At the same time, helping students to familiarize with creative methods and tools for instructional design with open educational resources has never been as accessible as it is today. This is a huge game changer for interactive content. If we compare a tool like H5P with the licensing fees for professional authoring tools like Adobe Captivate that basically did the same thing as a couple of years ago. Lastly, it can be very frustrating to see how both strict licensing matters of learning content and proprietary platforms actively prevent teachers from pushing these limits of the creative ideas they want to develop for their classes. Using open source technology, especially in open educational practices during the training of aspiring teachers is one way of fostering a more critical engagement with learning environments at an early stage. But there is certainly still a long way ahead of us, both for them and for us. I'm curious now about any suggestions of how to embed all those aspects more thoroughly in our teaching practice or how to explicitly encourage our students to exploit the full potential of free and open educational technologies. And then curious about your questions and remarks. Awesome. Thank you ever so much. Thanks, Benjamin. I'm not sure what happened to Tom. Tom, can you hear us? Neither am I. I can see his little face on there, but there he is. Apologies, apologies. I was trying to find a button to press on everything there like that. So a couple of really good points there. And I think as I said, certainly the implications for teacher education are certainly good. I like a comment here from Sonia Christie. I like the idea of the explicit slash implicit learning objectives. And I think that kind of caught my eye as well because we're so used to writing the explicit learning objectives and articulating them. So do you want to just maybe just... Oh, there's Sonia's there. Do you want to just expand a little bit on that? Yeah, there was interesting consolation of the whole course because there was like three educators involved and my part was to support them with kind of the educational technologies perspective on it. So there were kind of different perspectives on the whole goals and to have this implicit agenda involved by what kind of things you do support and how you support them. Also reflected a lot I think on all the projects that evolved from it in the end. Good. Patricia comments there. Like, you see there, I love how you use the ADDI model to teach students. I would say it's normally used for learning design. So that's, I suppose the ADDI model is a fairly well-worn track, isn't it? So... The interesting thing is that I think it's fairly unknown in teacher education in Germany because there's a whole different tradition about the whole didactics behind it. So it's quite interesting to see how those other models, more traditional models of instructional design help to somehow put it more concretely what happens when you add digital technology to the whole game. Yeah, it's interesting that you said like, yeah, because I suppose like in this part of Europe we sort of somehow think that that's how we do stuff where as I said, for us the ADDI will be a fairly established model, but for you and particularly then for teacher education, but it certainly has its limits when it comes to the iterative design which we thought about quite carefully during the course since our students had to represent their whole ideas and their progress various times we could give them some feedback so they could adjust, make some adjustments and not see it as this straightforward one-directional process. Yeah, linear, you're right. They're like that. Yeah, I think that's an interesting piece. I'm sitting there from Patricia again, I believe it's great approach to learning technology. I use something similar by making my students create web quests to teach their majors to other people, they're like that. And I think as I said, in terms of the technological expectations, because I know myself, I'm involved in a number of teaching and a number of other courses, is there a danger where mastering the technology, if you don't set it up correctly, is mastering the technology becoming more important than what you're trying to, you're trying to make these people teachers, not instruction design. I don't know if I'm explaining what I'm trying to get across. I hear that response a lot of times and I think it's not about making them do this all the time or evoke the feeling in them that this is what they need to do the whole time where once they will be teachers but to familiarize them with the processes that are also behind other content and other platforms, they are most certainly going to use in the future. And I think in order to fully understand how you can use them, you need also to understand how they are produced and what kind of functional logic stands behind it. Yeah, yeah. And I think as I said, like a teacher education is certainly gonna have to change. And I mean, I know we keep talking about, and you said it in your abstract about the pandemic, there's opportunities and there is challenges, but I think there's no putting the genie back into the bottom. I think in terms of technology there. If there are ways to contain the genie, I hope so. So, okay, if you were in charge now of teacher education and you're given a magic wand, wherever it is, what's the one or two big things that you would like to see done and taking what you've learned from this, what would you like to see? I don't know, that's throwing you on the spot there, little bit there, this is... I think to have like this openness to fail, to go through a frustrating process of using some kind of technology that you probably will not use after in such an intensive way, but to use it nevertheless during your whole training. So you can figure out where your limits are and what kind of potential you can see in these things. And the same thing goes for the limits of the different softwares that are used. I think there is a lot of the public discussions, especially here in Germany, about what's the right tool to use, what's the right platform to use concerning privacy and other issues that is standing so much in a way of actually using the whole potential behind it. Also in terms of content creation, I think. Yeah, I think sometimes, and is there a fear that privacy becomes so overriding that it just, we end up, if I do nothing, I can do nothing wrong and that type of innovation. And not every issue you can have with contemporary media industry has to do with privacy only, but there's also a lot of other things going wrong with it. And I think the whole switch to surveillance technology in teaching and learning in different areas has put a whole different perspective on that in the last two years, I think, that was many people were not aware of before. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, we're gonna draw it to a conclusion there. Our time is very, very much almost. Oh, listen, a round of applause, just our acknowledgement from our audience here. I'll certainly be directing a couple of friends of mine to this video because I think, to be honest with you, I think anybody involved in teacher education, I'll certainly have a few friends who I'll be certainly directing it to. I think you really recognize it. So there's a good audience acknowledgement for your work. So thank you very much, Benjamin. Thank you very much for having me. Bye. Om nom nom.