 Yn amlwyddoedd yma'n cyhoedd ym mhotoise yng nghyd-wyd yn sio'r cerdd i'w Llanghorff Cymru Hyggeithredig i'w Llanghorff. Mae'r awr yn nhw dweud i'w Llanghorff Cymru ar Ym Mhotoise, yn mhotoise yng Nghymru. Ieithio o mherwydd 10 ym mhotoise, s Надiriaeth 1 o'r mhotoise yng nghymru. Mae ganes eu cyd-aeth a ddechrau'r rhag Posibol adshig o'r byddai Llanghorff. Nid yw'r awr yn y obi ddo, mae'n adeg y tiynau wnaeth ychwaneg i gychwyn hefyd a'r ysgolwch ar y 10 ymlaen. Ond, mae'n gweithio, fel mae'r ysgolwch ar y dyfodol, mae'r cyfnod ar y 20 apryd yn ymwybod yn y Ucau yn ymdillog yng Nghymru o'r ysgolwch ar y OU byros MacKenzie, rwy'n meddwl i'r ysgolwch ar y OU o'r ysgolwch ar y 10 ymlaen. Felly, mae'n gweithio i'r ysgolwch ar y gweithio'r ysgolwch ar y OU. Yr hynny'n gweithio'r ysgolwch ar y 10 ymlaen, es i'n defnyddio'r projekty oherwydd ddiwediad nhw i ddweud o'r wlad o'r gweithio'r wlad mewn liston a'r ysgolwch ar y dyfodol. Rydyn i'n ddim bod i'n nhw ymlaen Cyngor i'r ysgolwch ar y OU,onoeddogi i ddweud o ddweud o'i gweld, ac ddweud o'r ysgolwch ar y OU yn ymlaen gyfrifio'r system- oedd wnaed i gyfrifio'r log o'r cyfnod o wneud i ardeddypu'r ymlaen. ac yn ddiwedd, rwy'n rhaid i'n gweithio y fwy rhaid o'r leidio. Mae'r rhaid i'r holl yma ac rwy'n rhaid i'r holl y gwaith o'r bobl 10 yn ymddangos. Mae'r bobl efallai ymddangos i'r holl yma i'r holl ff overlooked, ac mae'n rhaid i'ch gweithio ac yn ymddangos i ymddangos i'r holl. Yr un ardal y cwylwydau yw ffordd 5 oed yn gweithio, sy'n amgylchedd yn ymdannu i chi'n rhaid. Ac mae'n rhaid i'r holl yw hynny. I will end by covering some of our hopes and plans for the future. Right now, let's pop into the Delorean and head back in time right to the very beginning. Back at the start of our days with Moodle, it was all about a direct replacement for print. We had a study calendar and our first Moodle module, which was called resource pages. This allowed us to hang PDF files and Word documents versions of printed course materials. In this way, we presented our first fully online courses in 2008. Back then, using Moodle in itself was seen as innovative and we were experimenting with core tools such as forum, blog and wiki. We did integrate a few tools of our own. We had an existing in-house Java-based question engine called OpenMark, which we still have today and still use for our most complex question types. Of course, our definition of complex has changed over the years. So, where we've seen question types come up again and again in OpenMark, we've turned those into question types in the Moodle quiz so that anyone can use them without the need for a Java programmer. Another early module was My Stuff. This is an e-portfolio system allowing users to create collections of work or learning materials, perhaps for a CV. It is still in use, but it is being switched off and decommissioned. Basically, we think there are other tools in the marketplace now which will serve the same use and indeed some of the other Moodle modules depending on the learning outcome that's required. So, 2006 was my personal start with Moodle with the launch of our OpenLine sites. These were funded by the Hewlett Foundation as part of their Open Content initiative. This introduced two new Moodle sites, Learning Space, the green one and Lab Space, the purple one. Learning Space is all around quality assured OU study materials and providing them for free as part of our widening participation remit whereas Lab Space allowed anyone to create open educational resources around the world. So, let's move us on in time just a little bit. We went through a period of significant scaling up. The structured content module which some of my colleagues presented earlier on was one of the key foundations of our ability to deliver more and more online. This screenshot shows how it works. Basically, users edit XML in a text editor or something like XML spy and then we render it into HTML or indeed into print formats. You can include rich assets like audio, video, interactive like flash and now HTML5 and also little short self-assessment questions like these ones shown here. That's much more usable and obviously much more flexible and is now the standard way that we deliver our course materials to students. Around this time we also wrote quite a lot of reports so that our staff could see the way that students were interacting with courses and get to understand exactly how they were using the different new tools and that along with some standard layout guidance and some workflows allowed us to roll out consistent courses to every single presentation. We started to connect up to lots and lots of other learning tools. We replaced first class with an OU written forum tool within module. Now there's a bit of an in-joke here particularly for the Trekkies. We called our tool ForumNG for next generation and the icon was a little green man or possibly a little red man. I'm not a Trekkie. The red men, red-shirted men are the ones that die so as was the other way around. I'm not sure which. We also integrated illuminator in replacement of our homegrown audio, video conferencing tool and piloted with Second Life. For both of those we used community modules in order to bridge to those systems. There was a research project called Buddy Space written by our Knowledge Media Institute which we initially launched in Lab Space. This allowed online presence and chat and we rolled that out into learning space a little while later but unfortunately as a research project when that project ended it's support for the tool rather dried up and so we never made it into core VLE and indeed we had to remove it from open learning in the end. Now the little shock horror face is one of the indications you'll see throughout these slides but things that we don't want to do ever again and version control in Lab Space it was the cause of some of my grey hairs. Initially we allowed people to just take a clone of a Moodle site did a backup and restored it so that they had their own personal version to editing but we wanted to roll that out to a much more collaborative experience and then we added on top of that tools that you would expect to see in something like SharePoint or Documentum so you could keep a record of who changed what, when and why and roll back if you wanted to. That along with comparison for example if you changed the page content or the structure of a forum or a wiki was a very very complex piece of code to write and indeed one of my developers nearly walked halfway through that project so that is something we definitely wouldn't do again. In the end we actually rolled that back so that now we don't have any of that extra version control but we allow people to collaboratively edit and expect them to sort out their own differences if they don't like what each other are doing in the site. That's not all. Around this time we started writing an audio recording tool we've had various versions of that now which allow students on language courses for example to share snippets of them speaking and we had a system called shared activities which allowed groups of users to form around a forum or a wiki and that would be a select group outside of a course context. That's something that we've just switched off recently and off the back of the success of OpenLearn we were asked to create moodles for other people as well. In this case this is a CPLD course for healthcare professionals providing training in personality disorders. So moving on in time again a little further to 2010 when Ross was standing here we had just conducted a review of whether Moodle was the right tool for the job before we moved across to Moodle too and I'll talk a little bit more about our experience with that migration later on. We took the opportunity though to uplift the graphic design so what you see here is a new version of the theme where course teams had a little bit of extra flexibility so they could change a colour from a small palette and they could control which image went up there at the top. Also around this time we added a significant amount of personalisation. You've got the completion check boxes there which allow either people to mark off for themselves how they're progressing or perhaps that's automated sometimes depending on the activity. In the bottom left hand corner of my slides you can see there a mock-up of a note making tool that again we've since retired but that allowed people to make notes directly in the study planner and the course homepage. This was also the time when we started to dabble in mobile so we created a desktop theme which is the big one you see but also one focused on phones and one focused on tablets and those offered just a limited functionality set. So I'll just take a quick detour from my timeline to talk about mobile because this is the time when we started logging all of the data about what systems people were using what devices they were using and one thing that we noticed and still notice is that OU students tend to be very Apple focused despite changes in market share over time. They have however followed typical market trends around using tablets coming to the fore in 2012 and decreasing rapidly recently which we assume is a result of people who now have the larger smartphone screens and are making a decision between laptop and phone rather than desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. The other thing that we have noticed has stayed common across the entire period is the kinds of activity people do on their mobile devices which tends to be very much that kind of small discreet actions like reading forum posts rather than in-depth study. So getting back to my timeline as well as moving mainly into Moodle 2 we actually split it into three separate sites. So one of them holds course presentation websites and then there's a second student facing system for non-course materials like study guides or the student union forums and there's a third for staff materials such as work spaces and staff training. This has its good and bad points. Multiple sites are much harder to keep in sync for example with student profiles and also it means three times the work when we want to upgrade anything. It's also quite confusing for students the navigation is relatively poor between them and my technical colleagues would tell me you just shouldn't do this ever again. But from a system administration point of view it's much easier to configure the roles and permissions across the three sites focusing on the different kinds of audiences for the materials so my business colleagues are much more on the fence. So Open Learn also had to move up to Moodle 2 and again took that opportunity for a rebrand and a redesign and as well as learning space being updated it merged with a Drupal site which holds smaller learning objects created around BBC broadcasts and that's the cause of my second lot of grey hairs and another developer threatening to leave. It was a horrible, horrible integration. It's very much two-way there are things that happen first in Moodle and then need to be pushed into Drupal and then there are other things that happen in Drupal first and have to be pulled back into Moodle so it's an absolute hairball to unpick. In the screenshot what you can see in the bottom left-hand corner is Moodle so that's a structured content document but it could be a quiz or a forum activity and the whole of the rest of the page the navigation, the user profiles the tags, the comments all of that's driven through Drupal. That's a bit of a mess really and certainly now we would do that and we're looking to moving that back into a pure Moodle site we've learnt over the years that you can do small learning objects within Moodle as well as the bigger courses. Moving on in time again things settle down quite a bit and our focus turned towards syndicating our content out. We talked earlier in other presentations about structured content and our use of the transformation engine to provide course materials in a range of different formats according to either the student choice or perhaps to be sold on to other organisations through our business development unit so we create for example word or PDF score, MyMS content packaging and of course EPUB and Kindles for people to consume on their mobile devices. Another approach to syndicating out our content is by bringing in cohorts of students into our v-early on their own branded experience so in this case we have a partnership with the NHS leadership academy to provide staff training to nurses and they're actually in the same environment as everybody else but they see a different header and footer and we've done that for a number of different courses now a number of different programmes. At this kind of time period around 2013 also represents our first experience with LTI learning tools interoperability which we used to bring vital source in providing access to set books online as well for the first time. At the same time as we did all of our work to move to Moodle 2 we kicked off a thing called the Roadmap Acceleration Program to deliver a wide range of innovations and they took a few years to come to fruition so this is the period when all of those went live note the branding, they're all OU something or other I nearly called this slide OU everything actually the idea was that we could change the technology underneath without having to confuse students by changing the names of the tools but that's something that we're moving away from again now going back to calling a spade a spade rather than say OU digging. So just to skim through these OU annotate is the bottom right hand corner that's a web annotation tool which allows you to do with online materials what you would normally do in a printed text with post-it notes or with a highlighter pen bottom left hand corner is OU Anywhere that's our mobile app for reading course content we have Blackboard Collaborate which is branded as OU Live we integrated stack for maths assessment and we've used open badges for both open learn and some staff informal certification and we have Nitune's U channel or at least that's to say we did because that's closed down recently and annotate which I know some of you have asked me about before that's not in active promotion or development at the moment because it's had quite low take up with students and we also started leveraging that shiny new Moodle 2 environment to create a few extra Moodle installations for other audiences the open science lab allows free access to a range of different science experiments that was funded by the Warferson Foundation and is still ongoing whereas Vital which was funded by the Department of Education is basically open learn for teachers providing teacher training and sharing of resources turned out to be less than vital and has now closed this is also the time when there were some changes in higher education funding bringing in student loans which were very much focused on qualification registration and so we created our QOLS online site to provide students with a home when they were between courses and also to provide them with information general information around the subject that they're studying rather than specific to the course that's still running and we're thinking of new and better ways to provide them with that kind of experience which may or may not be in Moodle in future we just don't know but it'll certainly integrate with it and that brings us almost up to date some of my colleagues earlier on were presenting on our online student experience programme OSEP which has gone through that review of the VLE and Moodle as our platform of choice again for the next few years and we've taken the opportunity to have a third redesign so here now we see our most recent uplifted theme this is a responsive design so we don't have to maintain the phone and the tablet versions anymore it's a much less cluttered user interface and the colour choice has gone you can have it in blue or blue but you do still get to control the image at the top last year we also worked on accessibility for activities allowing people to create much more flexible pathways through course materials based on combinations of criteria whether that's grade in a quiz group membership, date, whatever for a more personalised experience based on their interest or their ability and through OSEP we've been looking at rationalising our toolset that's basically about not flogging a dead horse and I've touched on some of those things that we've switched off as I've gone along but our aim is to streamline our tools on a few more distinct options so that we can provide better support to our users and make those smaller set of tools of higher quality and our choice is on which ones to keep and which ones to focus our attention on driven through activity levels and analytics we have however introduced one new module and that's the Open Design Studio this was a standalone project used in a small number of course teams and has now been rewritten as a Moodle module it's basically Pinterest for learning it reflects, mimics, bricks and mortar design studio where you can show off your work comment on other people's and basically get critical feedback and lots of course teams are showing interest in this and some of which come quite a long way away from its origins as a photography or a technology course with financial courses for example wanting to share even spreadsheets and we clearly didn't have enough Moodles yet so we brought in two more our offender learning site is a walled garden for prisoners where they have basically exactly the same experience as in the main student facing VLE but with additional authentication where each student has a unique pin number that is only known to the prison staff and also there is limited collaboration limited ability to contact others so that they can't organise their breakout by Moodle messaging and the online exam system is still in pilot the theory behind that is that it allows students to type their exams in the Moodle quiz using a locked down browser rather than having to hand write everything we've done a lot of work on local storage of answers in case of Wi-Fi disruption at the exam venue for example with that so that's brought us up to date to talk about how we've achieved all of that and despite the fact that I interviewed someone earlier this week who claimed to be a magician in his spare time you don't need a magic wand it's actually fairly obvious and fairly simple and if you've been on any business change programmes or any change management courses you'll have heard them talk about people, process and technology and so that's what I'm going to talk about now Back at the start our development team was very small half of us are in the room I think we had about six developers rising to a dozen over the first few years along with one or two testers and we now have around 20 developers plus a supporting cast of project managers, business analysts and systems architects we had lots and still do have lots of what we now call online services staff, the people who use the Moodle course editing permissions to set up sites but right from the beginning and still now we see the Moodle community as very important in fact some of the key things that we wanted right at the start were done by funding other people who were much more experienced than us either catalyst or Moodle HQ directly so for example the Moodle 1.7 roles and permissions changes were our fault the accessibility improvements and we also investigated whether we could run on Microsoft SQL server and you'll find that we're very active in the developer forums and in the chat and we give a lot back to the community as well these days so Tim Hunt is the core maintainer for the quiz engine and Sam Marshall looks after the conditional activities and completion over the years we've seen that almost half of our developers have committed code into Moodle core and about half a dozen of them do every single year now I wonder how many people here were at any of the Moodle moots that we ran in Milton Keynes we hosted two actually in these early days before the community got too big to fit into our lecture halls and meeting rooms over time a fourth role came into prominence that of an evangelist in 2010 Ross stood here and said that you have to keep selling and that still holds true there's a definite need to evangelise to course teams and to students about the tools that we've created and to aid their adoption and he also said that people keep coming up with good ideas and that holds true there are still new things that we want to try and so that evangelist role has grown over the years and we now have a large technology enhanced learning team both shaping our learning tools and encouraging their adoption as well as the broad approach to our people remaining consistent across the 10 years most of our process is also consistent we deploy in quarterly releases in March, June, September and December and we spend several months in development then a month of acceptance testing before going live we have tried to change that pattern I'm not really sure how clearly this graph is showing for you but just get the general impression of busyness we were looking for quiet patches the vertical bars show where we have lots of courses opening and starting and the horizontal ones show where we have exam periods or other kinds of online assessment trying to find a quiet spot in all of that proved to be nigh on impossible and so we've ended up going back to sticking with three or four releases a year one of the other things that's remained consistent across the time has been the way we've got our users courses and groups into the Moodle database and that's done through what we call data load or architecturally speaking you might hear it talked about as copy management or ETL, extract, transform and load and that's something that we have just bulk exported everything and dumped it in the database and continue to do so one thing has changed though it's the shock horror symbol again back in the early days we were always in a rush to get functionality before our users sounding a little bit like Freddie Mercury I want it all and I want it now we regularly went live with beta releases of Moodle even really complicated changes were back ported like the quiz engine in Moodle 1.9 into earlier versions that we were still running and this is definitely not a good idea it's a bit like I'm picking a hairball you can never work out every single thing that you need to copy back and so it's very error prone and something that we stopped doing as we moved to Moodle 2 so let's talk about our move to Moodle 2 in a little bit more detail by 2010 we had over 2000 changes to call Moodle some of them were huge, some of them were just one line and we knew that that approach was something that we couldn't continue with because it was very painful for us to be able to keep in line with Moodle releases so instead we decided to embrace the growing number of Moodle plugins that were available and so everything we did became a plugin now obviously that was a really significant piece of work for us so we drafted in some support in the form of extra contractors on campus and also by outsourcing some of our work to other Moodle development teams example catalyst converted some of our core modules for us and Luns did some of the more experimental new modules along the way we created a couple more environments in our route to live so we have a functional test space which allows us to ensure that requirements are met before going into the acceptance test period and that then can focus on hunting out any regressions and bugs that we've caused along the way and we created an upgrade test environment which not only gives us a quick route to live if we need to patch any bugs while we're testing one of those bigger deployments but also means that we can test the actual database upgrade goes through smoothly just before doing it on the live system and recently another of my colleagues here today was talking about a continuous integration system which is running every day now to make sure that all of our code is up to scratch so what did we end up with? Well, there are now only 20 core customisations roughly in our code base so that's a big success but we do have over 240 plugins and sub plugins about half of those reflect all those other moodles that I talked about earlier on so what we've done is encapsulate their unique functionality and their configuration inside a plugin so that we can enable it separately and switch them on and off and treat them differently without having to maintain multiple different code bases The graph on the left shows the way that our plugins have grown over time It's pretty steady state really with just a few new ones adding in each release and a few dropping out and the big peak around Moodle 2.4 was when we reported all of the open learn activity across The pie chart on the right shows all of the different plugin types that we've used I was sitting listening to Davo earlier on talking about all of the different plugin types and I think we might have one of everything The biggest ones are local plugins, modules, blocks question types and reports So if you look at our core student facing system we've got about 100 plugins running in that About a third of those are to do with automating things providing workflows, standardising stuff bulk loading everything so it's helping us to cope with the scale of the number of users that we have and then about a sixth are monitoring tools so for example we have one to integrate with Nagios to make sure that we've got a good availability and good performance in the site and about 10% of them help us connect to other learning tools that sit around VLA Do we have too many? Well perhaps that's something we can discuss over dinner later I'm sure everyone will have a view Personally I think that this just shows how amazingly flexible Moodle can be and if they come with automated tests there's really not that significant and overhead in maintaining all of them So that's people and process But when I look back over particularly the first five years of our experience with Moodle and I looked at the blogs and podcasts that we'd written the thing I noticed the most was the domination of our concerns with performance One of my colleagues colourfully described this period as performance whack-a-mole So every time we thought we'd fixed a problem we found another one It's a time when we rapidly learnt how to use JMeter to load test and we now have a bank of background activity scripts which allow us to roughly simulate an ordinary day on the VLE at any point in time so that we can test every release and make sure that it's performing reasonably well So when Ross stood here in 2010 he said he'd learnt that there was always another bottleneck I think what we say now is that things have settled down considerably and we can do sort of cost benefit analysis on whether we need to fix an issue or when performance is just good enough By the time we moved to Moodle 2 we had five web servers We were on Postgres database and one file store and we tend to find that it's the web servers that you need to keep adding and that's not changed over time Where are we now? Well these are some of our latest statistics of students and activities that we see either average or peak October is a peak period for when the majority of our course is open so that's when we always see the highest levels of traffic throughout the entire year And in order to achieve all of those big numbers we've just upgraded all of our web servers to Red Hat 7 and moved from 8 to 12 web servers Now that's just for the one Moodle that runs the course presentation websites Each of the other Moodles that we've talked about have maybe two, maybe four web servers each of their own depending on what kind of traffic levels they individually see So if I put a little box on that slide for every single web server we run there wouldn't have been any space left on the slide I did try And I should just say that we haven't switched our Moodle 1.9 site off yet either but we hope to real soon now Basically it's still there to provide access to old learning materials for some of our students And that really brings us to what comes next So this screenshot is about is from our direct authoring proof of concept I see Sam grinning at the back It's his work This is about allowing a quicker route to live for content so that we can make changes to course materials a lot easier Essentially you're still editing XML but in a whizzywig fashion inside the VLE which allows us still to connect to that transformation engine create all those lovely accessible and alternative formats that we've always rolled out In order to achieve that we're just offering quite a limited tag set at the moment though we hope to make it more complex over time We've got a tender out at the moment for the next generation of our collaboration tool Will we replace Blackboard collaborate? I don't know yet, we'll just have to see And we're also looking at using more of the core plugins rather than writing our own in future So we're piloting workshop and assignment with small course groups just to get some feedback on whether they work for them And we have a new media player that we're introducing across the entirety of the OU estate so you'll have the same look and feel the same experience whether you're on the course prospectus, in open learn in the library or on your course presentation site That's got some additional usability It's got some additional accessibility like synchronous transcripts in there and it supports a wide range of AV formats Looking a little further into the future You might be surprised to see some of these You'd think we'd have nailed search by now and single user profile But as it turns out things are a little bit not joined up and not terribly reliable so we'd really like to do those better And then there's a whole raft of requirements that have a definite MOOC influence to them So we'd like to do in-page discussions so we could have a forum alongside the learning materials We'd like to improve on the progress indicators so people can see how far they are through study materials And if you're playing buzzword bingo we'd like to bring in more learning analytics We see that as really key to guiding decision making on OU strategy as a whole So, for example, we've recently launched a SaaS based digital engagement dashboard for all of our tutors which takes in information from moodle logs and a load of other places so that tutors have a much better picture of where their students are in their courses and hopefully we can pick up the ones that are at risk of failing or dropping out and doing something about that a little bit sooner Now we often get asked to provide our course materials to other people and so that's what the VLE in a box is all about It's about wanting to spin up course sports or indeed instances of the VLEs for other people so that we can bring in that funding to the OU with as little outlay on our part as possible And finally when I was a student I got lots of books and I took notes on paper and I scribbled in the margins and all that stuff and nearly 20 years on my books are in the loft And our students even though their learning is online and it's collaborative they still want that experience they still want to keep their learning so the student archive is a way for us to explore what's the best way to achieve that for them And from a process and technology points of view well to quote one of my other favourite movies the world moves pretty fast and if you don't stop and look around once in a while you might miss out The pace of change is now so fast that we don't think we can wait another 5 years to review whether Moodle is the right tool or not and there's some due diligence around that probably every 2 years in future and there are a group of things we want to do around speeding up the student experience So there's a lot in the forums at the moment around PHP 7 and claiming some performance wins we'd like to check those out with our own system and decide when's the right time for us to move to PHP 7 Interestingly Rosted here 5 years ago and said we're going to look at cloud hosting but I really mean it this time we actually have a big project underway at the OU to move as many of our systems onto either platform or infrastructure as a service over the next year or so and it's possible that the VLE will be one of those that moves don't know yet We'd like to look at using CDNs more content delivery networks because our Moodle is now full of so many more rich assets documents, videos and such like and we want a better way of delivering those out to students so that they load really quickly at their end By continuous deployment, continuous delivery I don't mean that kind of Facebook like it changes on an almost daily basis underneath you because our students probably don't want that and certainly our support staff don't want to have to keep writing all of the materials up on a daily basis and roll out new guidance What I actually mean is deploying with less downtime so perhaps it's sometimes referred to as blue-green or AB deployment it's a way of keeping the system running keeping people able to contribute in forums while we update the database behind the scenes so if anybody else is interested in doing that I'd really love to hear from anyone who's working on it and finally we'd like to use some more integrations so we're looking at seeing Moodle as a spine a little bit more using LTI and other integration points to put best of breed or other learning tools around our system and elsewhere in the OU we're using SOA service oriented architecture a lot more to integrate our systems together so we'd like to finally move away from that copy management approach to getting information out of our student information systems and use SOA in order to get all that into our Moodle database and that would of course have the added advantage that if a student registers late they change their name, they move courses move tutor groups that they would have a much more instantaneous change as a result rather than having to wait for an overnight load so that brings me to the end I'll let people take questions but I would just say at this point I'm standing on the shoulders of giants up here I've just been one of the lead developers that have delivered all of this there's a whole bunch of people down the back there that know the detail of this stuff way better than I do so I might just kind of throw some of the questions at them or refer you to talk to them later on so where's the microphone? does anybody have any questions and again, as with all the other sessions if you can give your name and your institution just before you ask the question please they all want to go to dinner I'm Ann Tubman CVQO is our organisation it's quite a small organisation but my question is do you have any sort of guidelines on how you put together your distance learning courses that you could make available to other people? we do have guidelines that we use for internal staff that say, you know, a course should look like this it should have this kind of information it should be laid out like this, this and this we've not shared that before I'm kind of trying to catch the eyes of the people that do it up the back to get a thumbs up or a thumbs down I'll point them out to you later on so you can have more of a chat about that using Moodle on blended learning and distance learning and it'd be nicer if we had some sort of advice from you really about the guide I'll be happy to talk to you later it's a good sign, you are quite clear then question in the end here, hold on he's gone that side you just speak into it please meet your Sean Gilligan founder of web anywhere what's the collaboration shared practice and knowledge transfer between sort of future learn and the OU what's the relationship like there I was just sort of curious I left future learn out on purpose actually it's not a Moodle site and it's run by effectively a separate company a separate organisation funded by the OU so they've built their own environment in order to provide that we did provide them with information guidance and indeed the course materials and that XML way of editing feeds future learn as well but other than that they're purposefully quite separate in order to protect the student facing systems hi there, Dave Bolch from Oxford Uni I was wondering with you obviously doing a lot of work for running Moodles for other people so like the prisons ones and that sort of stuff how does that fit on a sort of hosting versus partnership sort of relationship so in most cases that's we're doing all of the hosting it's something that we're thinking about whether we could get other people to do some of that hosting for us maybe working for some of the Moodle partners not sure because actually it's quite a heavy load for us to keep all of those servers up to date but the main way we achieve it is through keeping the same code base across all of them so that it's sort of as little work as possible thanks Michael Hughes University it's not really a question more sort of observation I think everybody in this room is going to be affected by something the OU has done for Moodle and so it's been really nice going through that sort of timeline now but I think Moodle owes the OU an awful lot so thank you very much we use your tools and I think we wouldn't be able to do some of the stuff without some of the contributions you guys have made over the last 10 years so more thank you than a question Anybody else? I think that's a lovely note to end on thank you very much thank you very much everybody just again just take some time to appreciate any talk thank you very much