 Yeah, I'm from the State Library of Queensland and I'm currently the coordinator of Public Library Services. So I'm going to talk about our Looking at 2.0 program today. But first of all, I think I'd like to know who is in the audience. So first of all, hands up, who is an instructional designer in the audience? So about 60 percent. Hands up, who is an administrator, doubling up. Hands up, who is a developer? I can see someone I know as a developer is not putting his hands up. Hands up, who's a librarian? All right, all alone, as usual. So our Looking at 2.0 course is a free online course for the general public. It was developed back in 2010 and we had a first iteration which was very text-based. I've got slides a little bit later, but the original purpose of the Looking at 2.0 program was to... Well, for us it was to increase access to library services because we have a network of public library services throughout Queensland. And if you think about the geographical area of Queensland, you've got... Well, Victoria can actually fit into Queensland about five or six times, I think. Our population is very dispersed across some really interesting geographical areas. And every time I go out and visit some of them, I usually have to pack for a variety of different weather situations so it could be raining or it could be 42 degrees. So they face a lot of challenges too. So we needed to develop a course that was accessible by pretty much anyone. And it's not facilitated at all. So we needed to create something that maybe had the look and feel of a website when you first got onto it. But it would take you through the basics of learning without you actually knowing it. It's kind of like the duck analogy. You've got the duck on the top of the water all smooth and then underneath his legs are doing this. Which is pretty much what we're doing back at State Library of Queensland underneath the course. We're doing all the stats collection. We're trying to analyse based on the information that we collect from people during the courses. So we don't actually have any interaction with them. So primarily that's why we chose to use Moodle in the first place back in 2010. That was before I joined with the State Library. So I don't have a lot of information about that program. But I do have a lot of interaction with the audience itself. So coming from a public library background, I think about 10, 15 years ago I first started as a public librarian. I had a lot of know-how in how the eventual users would interact with the system. So I'm not an instructional designer. I'm not a developer. For all of the iterations of looking at 2.0, we've hired people in to do that for us. Both of which are currently in the room and they were both excellent. Really awesome. Not just saying that because they're here. They actually did a lot of work with us in the background to help us achieve those goals of making the system not feel like it was learning. I don't know if you realise, but the federal government guesstimates that about 50% of the Australian population is digitally illiterate. So the kinds of people that public librarians have to deal with when they come into the library to do a course like this is someone who's never touched a mouse. Someone who has no idea what Facebook is. And I think for some people like us, that's a hard concept to actually understand what that means for people's lives. So they can't do online banking. They can't book holidays online. Some of them wouldn't even have an email address yet. And a part of when we were developing the site was realising that people wouldn't have had any interactions with online courses before. They wouldn't actually have an email address. So that was one of the first things that you have to do to actually get into the course. You've got a little side video which will teach you how to set up your own email address to be able to log in to the Looking at 2.0. So as you can see from the screens, the typical audiences were seniors, rural and remote, and funnily enough educators who had to deal with this stakeholder group who didn't have any digital skills but they need to give them the basics before they can move on to the actual courses that they need to do with the educators. And quite a lot of adults who are upskilling as well. So people who are returning to the workforce, people who have been working in manual labour jobs and need to, because they're getting too old to do them now, they need to move into something which is a bit less physical. So we found that a lot of these kinds of people were coming to do the course as well. So obviously why would we pick Moodle? Well because it's open source, the State Library of Queensland, we're not a government department or a statutory authority so we operate under slightly different rules. We don't get a lot of funding. So third point, it's free. That was one of the biggest selling points when we were trying to get the project off the ground. Instead of using something like WordPress or just a general website, we wanted something that would give us all that background underneath data that we needed to be able to improve the courses and to work with the public librarians who could possibly be helping people out in the communities as well. So it's scalable. We started off with a first iteration which I think looks like that. So that was our first iteration of looking at 2.0. As you can see it's really text heavy. But we did run a lot of competitions with it as well because it's non-facilitated. We don't know who we're dealing with out in the public. We had to give them some kind of incentive so we gave away free iPads. So if they completed the course they would be entered automatically into a competition and at the end of a particular phase of time we would give out the free iPad to just a randomly selected participant. So moving from that we went to that. And this was actually brilliant. A lot of the feedback we had from the earlier iteration was it's too text heavy. My screens are too small. I can't open it on an iPad. So we went with a really simplified version of what was already there. So it's not really new content. It's just been tweaked a little bit here and there to update it as technology grows over about two years I think. So this as soon as you log in it's immediately just visual. And that's how we worked through the majority of the rest of our courses as well. I don't think I can get into one right now. But actually any of you guys can sign up to get in to have a look at this. It's free to open to everyone so if you want to have a look at what we did just jump in and create yourself an account. But this is generally indication of how the rest of the courses go as well. So we've got things like searching the web, booking a holiday, learning online, using the cloud, those sorts of things. These are the topics that we're dealing with when we're working with people who are digitally illiterate. I can never say that one. Yeah so we basically had to keep it really basic. So the challenges that we face with a course like this is just skip to my notes. Don't have any notes on this one? I'll just add them. Privacy because it's not a traditional course so we don't have the option of enrolling cohorts that we already know. We don't have their data and technically we can't keep their data and we can't actually ask them to give us their data. So all we can get from them is an email address and possibly a name and a rough geological location. And that will tell us if they're in Queensland, whereabouts in Queensland they are, but it doesn't give us their actual e-dress address. And there's statutory reasons why we're not allowed to collect that which is, I don't understand why, but because we're a statutory authority I think. And we're dealing with expectations as well. So we don't know what people's expectations are when they get into a course like this. They could think it's just another website which is what we actually worked towards making them think. And we're not sure what they want to get out of it. So who are they? Are they TAFE students? Are they someone's grandparents who've never touched a mouse? So we had to cater for this huge group of people and we don't know what they want from us or from the course. And the other issue is copyright. I won't get into my librarian's spiel about copyright. You know it's good, right? Or bad depending on which end you're coming from. But with the State Library of Queensland, everything we create is under Creative Commons. And that's a license 2.0. So with this course we had to, A, create it under Creative Commons 2.0 and every media aspect that we use inside it also has to be created under Creative Commons 2.0. So we had a lot of work trying to find things that were relevant to help people learn, which was really available. So technically everything in there is information and images and media that people can find for themselves. But we have aggregated it all into the one place so that they don't have to. And that's actually one of the primary purposes of libraries. Anyway, is to draw everything in for you so that you don't have to do it yourself. Just when I first graduated, people would say, what do you do? They'd say, oh, I'm a knowledge detective. Now I just say, oh, I work for the government. So the final issue that we had with this kind of course because we did have completion tracking on and then we took it off and now we've turned it back on again. So we don't really know where people jump out of their courses if they're just going in and having a look and then you know, I don't want to look at this, this is not what I want. So we had to rely a lot on feedback. Actually, 100% we had to rely on feedback. So the way we offer these particular courses is through our public libraries. So we did some training with the public library staff themselves and it was surprising how many people of the public library staff actually needed to do the courses themselves. So they didn't know what cloud-based computing was. They'd never booked a holiday online. So we had a fair amount of background training with the people who could possibly be delivering the courses but maybe not. But that was a good thing for us to learn as a state library to figure out where the public libraries are themselves. So we learned a lot through this process and I probably didn't mention at the start but this was a pilot project and while technically it's been going for about five or six years now we're still calling it a pilot project because each time we redevelop it we're coming in with new statistics and new knowledge about the people that are using it and I'll talk a little bit later about a new partnership that we're just about to wrap up with new modules. Yeah, so... It probably all sounds a little bit vague but it's a kind of situation that we work with, unfortunately. So I just popped in a map so that you can see the kinds of areas that we're working with. This is a location map of where the libraries are and the libraries include Indigenous Knowledge Centres so you'll see up at the top we've got 16 which seem to be hovering off the coast. They are hovering off the coast. They're all on islands in the Torres Strait so there's 16 Indigenous Knowledge Centres up there. Sorry, I'm just getting out of the cold. So for the Indigenous Knowledge Centres themselves they're probably one of our primary core user groups for this course the majority of their clients are second language users. So their first language is not English possibly their second and third language isn't English either and they have the most dreadful internet connection you can imagine. I think for weeks at a time they don't even have the internet so that was another thing we had to consider when we were developing the courses if we need to print it off as a PDF and post it to them how much work is that going to make for us? So make them all interactive but at the lowest level possible. So the benefits. Well the benefits to us have actually been pretty big. You can see we've had participation from about half of the public libraries around Queensland and by that I mean participation as in they chose to deliver these courses as a program through their library where they would get people in and run it like a normal class. So about half of them across Queensland participated that way voluntarily which was great once they'd had the training and realised how cool it was. And there's wide dispersal of users so we had I think in the first three months about 6,000 Queensland users enrolled and that's just members of the public finding it by accident. And that didn't include the statistics from the public library classes that were run so that's additional. I'm not a statistics person so I didn't put any up. So we had interstate users as well which wasn't a huge number but it started to slowly grow as the project became more well known because we would talk about it to other state libraries of course. And we even had some internationals so people who randomly found it on the internet I think that might be due to our ICT department being really good at Google search putting in all the metadata. But yeah so we were quite pleased and surprised by the diversity of countries that well say that in a different way we were surprised by where people enrolled from and how they found them especially because it's an English language course and we had people enrolling from Abu Dhabi some people in the states we had people from India people from the UK people from Paris I think we had someone from Norway and we also had one guy who was working on one of the science research stations on an island somewhere down near Antarctica and we thought that he was some kind of bot so we actually sent an email and said hey are you real? He's like yeah I'm totally real I just don't know anything about cloud computing so he jumped on and did the course which was great and he actually gave us some really good feedback coming from a science perspective and someone who actually hadn't had any human contact for about three months he actually gave us a call by satellite phone and it was terrible yeah but he gave us some really great feedback so I think I'm really ahead of time aren't I? Oh that's great questions are good well I'll tell you about the future I think if I go back to this one so it's pretty exciting we've been working in partnership with Tate Queensland they saw the site and decided this kind of presentation would be perfect for their low literacy learners so they have courses that they run with I think they're about level three language skills I'm not sure if anyone here knows what that means there's some nods in the CSS so there could be recent migrants there could be people who are upskilling from having a manual job that they've had all their life and they haven't had to change jobs before there could be people who actually have really low literacy even though they are Australian born so they wanted to create a set of four modules around job searching and they created the content for us which is great and they had to do a lot of adjustment because previously they haven't delivered courses online through this kind of interface so it was a really learning experience for them too but we had a lot of trial and error we had a great developer who came up with some really great ideas for how to present content with that kind of audience so there's a lot of things you need to consider when you're working with people with low literacy skills because they might also have low digital literacy skills but for them the majority of them are actually going to have a facilitator so they'll be doing it in class and the benefit to us then comes because they'll know the interface and then they'll be able to go and do the other three sets of courses so we're getting a really made additional stakeholder group which was great so one point I probably forgot to mention was that this particular course was I'm just going to blow our own horn here the first publicly available digital literacy course in Australia you're supposed to clap then thank you and considering our statistics I think we did pretty well so if anyone has any questions you should probably ask them now yeah we tried to stay away from contextualizing it specifically to a Queensland or Australian group so you're free to use it with whoever you want if you think it's relevant as I said everything's under creative commons so yeah use it please please do steal it, redesign it in your own way that's fine we love it when people do that yep you mentioned that you weren't sure about who your audience were and what they wanted and that you were blind blind a little bit have you since or and you weren't sure where they engaged with the course have you since discovered the Moodle reports and do you then are you now able to look at where students or where people are jumping in and jumping out yeah we did start using the Moodle reports unfortunately the first two or three months we had an issue with our server wasn't allowing the reports to be run I think that's because we're hosting it ourselves in our cloud we have our own cloud servers they just weren't talking to each other yeah so we had to guesstimate for the first three months after the launch of the site about who they were and what they were doing but we did a lot of talking to different people and then when we got the reports we were able to refine what we thought about them as well you talked about the different groups that you had were you finding you were getting different feedback from each of those different groups or were you getting the same parts of feedback the same type of feedback look and feel and getting out of it reach the groups well anytime you have voluntary feedback you're always going to get 60% of people saying it's great I love it and then nothing else after that so you have to keep questioning people on and on and on so once we got our hooks into a particular group of people then we would just keep coming back and saying what do you think of this what do you think of that do you like that did that work so we had to work quite hard for our feedback as well but luckily we had the public libraries who were able to do that for us with their community too but overall there was a lot of feedback which was similar so it pointed out a few things that we had to change which we did pretty easily and I'm just waiting for the new modules to come out and we'll start getting feedback of a different kind which will be good yep I've just actually gone in and I'm looking at now that is the question we've each of them got beginners in the intermediate and advanced so when a learner is going through do they get something to test their knowledge or have you got anything built from there to do that to make it a no, there's no quizzes or anything included we did have those in the first iteration and the feedback that we got from that is that not many people actually did it voluntarily and those that did said oh what was the point of that so it's quite different working with this group than it is working with students who have that kind of compliance attitude and they're like, I know I need to do this and I need to do this well because a lot of the people we work with for this is seniors or adults returning to the workforce they're like, well I'm not going to do your quiz but we are looking towards that in the future iterations it would be nice to get something at the end because there's something to say if they're done with the quiz yep, yep we had that with the original one and we turned it off for this one based on some of the feedback that we got but with the partnership with TAFE there's some compliance involved around that and for future iterations we're looking at gradually introducing it in different ways and how to do it in an inconspicuous way so at the moment doing it through the TAFE so are you putting through students at low levels through this? they will be yep, we're hosting it we developed it and we'll host it on our site and they will take them through as part of their classes specific groups see how it goes thank you very much everybody please