 Okay, so we've had a presentation about research that was done on a development in house. We've had sort of a literature review on MOOCs and how that's driving, you know, decision making. And now I'm going to talk about a survey that we did of plug-ins that are used by the community. So lots of different forms of research going on. I've introduced myself previously, so I'll just say that my name is Michael. I'm from Australia. My role is the research director, and part of that is doing research within the Moodle community and encouraging that. Why did we do a survey of plug-ins? Well, firstly, there's a lot of development that goes on both at HQ and within the community. If we want to have a clear picture of how to direct and prioritise that development, we need to be informed. We do have some information from the plug-ins directory and from a few other sources about what plug-ins are being used, but most of that relates to additional plug-ins, and it doesn't tell us necessarily if someone downloads something, if they're actually using it. So we wanted a clear picture of both core and additional plug-ins, so the stuff that comes in the standard package and the things that you can add. We want to obviously inform the whole community about what things are out there because people like to know what other people are doing, what is popular, what are other people doing so I can give it a go. And also, we have a lot of different sectors, educational sectors using Moodle. Is there a difference in that? And that was some interesting research questions in that. So we did this survey on dev.moodle.org, it was one of our own sites. It was not anonymous, so we asked the respondents to log in. So it was an honest response and they basically had their name attached to it. So that was it. We asked people with certain demographic questions, I'll tell you how the results for that went. We had people primarily from higher ed, and you can imagine if that sort of proportion were responding from higher ed, that's going to dominate the results, so keep that in mind. But we also had responses from schools and from workplace education and a few people who said other. And there's a bit of a crossover between some of those as well. The respondents came from different roles and again, so someone could have multiple roles, but there was a lot of admins that responded to this because quite often they're the ones that actually understand and know about what plugins are being used on a system. But they're not necessarily, they're just looking at a higher level, they're not necessarily the ones actually doing the use. So keep that in mind as well in relation to the responses as we look through them. But there were teachers, instructional designers, decision makers, trainers, the same sort of mix that's actually here at the Moodle Moot were responding to the plugins survey. Most of the people said, the majority of the people were saying that they had used Moodle for five years or more, and most of the people that responded were not relatively new, they were involved in the community. Responses came from quite a wide range of countries across the world, not much from Central Asia there, but certainly from Europe, the Americas, Australia, and so on. Now, we covered both core and additional plugins in this survey, so the stuff that comes in the standard package and the stuff that you can download and use, we kind of merged them together because we weren't sure whether people would understand that difference when they were filling in the survey. We didn't cover all of the possible plugins that people could use because it's a very long list, and we didn't cover all the types as well, just the ones that we felt were the most relevant, were involved in the tracker, I think people talk about on the tracker the most, and the ones that are popular on the plugins directory. For the additional plugins, we chose the top 10 most downloaded plugins for the previous year before running the survey. Okay, so now the results are a lot of data, I'm going to try and visualise that for you, but I've pre-empted any question and say that this report is available to you, anyone is free to see it, it's quite lengthy so you can get all the details, I'm just going to go through some of the more interesting stuff in detail and then a bit more quickly through the less fun stuff. So, you can see here, and there's a lot of small stuff, so I try to make it bigger on the left, the most popular ones are quiz assignment, forum, pretty standard activities, but I've also included the resources in there, they come under activity modules in a coding sense as well, so these are all the standard ones there. There's not much that you can distinguish there between the different sectors, but I will try and draw out a few things. In terms of additional plugins, these are the ones that are highlighted in green down the bottom, so then 19, okay, 20 was, questionnaire was 19, certificate was 21, hot pot, checklist and so on, so they're certainly not used as widely as the core plugins, which makes sense because people have to do a bit of effort to go and make use of these things, but it's good to see that people, 45% of responders said that they were using questionnaire, which is quite significant when you think about the effort that people have to go to. In terms of some differences that could be pulled out of this between sectors, imagine the sort of teaching that goes on in the workplace and you can see why perhaps certificate would be a relevant thing there, it's about certification quite often and things like that. In schools, the game activity was being used, is anyone here using the game activity? It's a bit horrific, but yeah, okay, I wish someone would really improve that because the code quality is awful. Okay, this is being recorded too, isn't it? I didn't say that. In terms of blocks, let's move on to blocks, which is probably the second most widely used sort of plugin type. Again, it was all dominated by the standard things, but the interesting thing here was that the most used blocks aren't necessarily the ones that are set up in a course by default. Okay, so this was good because it showed us that maybe we should reconsider what the default blocks are when you get a moodle course out of the box. So calendar was used, but it's not a standard one. A lot of people are using the HTML block, obviously they're doing things like showing tutor details or things like that, so I don't know if you'd make that standard, but it's widely used. Activities was one that used to be standard, but sort of got demoted, I guess, and things like that. So yeah, the ones that are contributed, I was happy to see because it's my contribution that the progress bar was quite widely used. Configurable reports is also, well, it gets categorized as a block, but even though it's sort of reporting. Quickmail is used in a lot of places as well, so that's interesting. Between sectors, there's some that are used in workplace. So course completion, the block, the progress bar and configure reports are used in workplace. Again, that sort of reflects the sort of teaching that goes on there, I think, and badges were more used in schools than in other sectors. So we haven't heard much about badges. Someone tweeted that earlier. Maybe that's because we're not hearing enough from people who are using it in schools, but it is being used. Course formats, there's a much smaller set here, so maybe you can make all that out. But one of the interesting things here was the default course format, if you install Moodle is weekly, okay? But by far the most popular choice for formats was the topics format. So we are considering having a change. I don't know how significant that would be for you, but yeah, that would be interesting. I did talk to the developer of the collapse topics format. He's a very active maintainer and he's very happy to see that continue in the plugins directory. He doesn't want to see it come into core, but yeah, definitely topics is a popular thing there. There was a list of question types that were examined and a lot of people suggested that they were using the regular ones, but they were also using some of the OU ones. Now this was prior to a change. These three that were actually suggested are now in core. So before I actually published the results, the solution had already been made. Very handy. Text filters, I don't know how interested you are in text filters. You can see that these numbers are becoming less, so fewer people are using text filters or reporting that they're using it, that's 50% and less there. That's a much lower usage rate. Poodle is the only one that comes up in that list and it's used a bit more in schools than elsewhere. Some plugins are dominated by the simple ones. You still got a lot of Moodle out there is small scale, so it's not necessarily relying on a big student integration system or an LDAP system, but yeah, so manual enrolments and self-enrolments are very important still. Authentication methods still, manual is way up there, so a lot of those small sites coming in and showing that these are important. But LDAP came in there and email-based self-registration. Reports, reports now you can see that there's a bit more wide usage here and higher numbers of usage. So people are using the logs, obviously they're keen to see what's going on there there, the activity report, activity completion, more logs and so on. So those reports are, they're all going, they're staying, they're well used. Higher education tends to use reports more than in other sectors. I guess they've got the time to actually reflect a bit more in higher education or the need to. Repositories, certainly file uploads is popular and then other forms of files. Some of the, there's ones down the bottom there that are very lowly in the numbers there and I even wonder if someone, if there's a small amount of error associated with surveys like this, maybe that's prone to that. I doubt if someone said, oh, we've got a very important alfresco bug to fix, it's going to get much attention with this in mind. Portfolios, these are very, the highest we're talking about is 18%. So people aren't using portfolios very much in general compared to other plug-in types. We did ask people at the end too, because obviously we did list all of the plug-ins for people to check off what are the plug-ins that they were using that weren't on the list. Attendance got a bit of a run-in. Turn it in is there and we've met, people have mentioned it here. Group choice and a few others there. That's the ones that were sort of mentioned more than 10 times. All right, so what can we gain from all of this information? Well, certainly in terms of when we're looking as developers at where we can focus our efforts, the ones that are obviously in use more should probably get a bit more time. So assignment, quiz and forum are very important to people. All of the resources, the standard resources are very important as well. The calendar block is something that we want to promote and maybe it also needs some work. The topics format is something that has been considered as a default topic, it's a default course format. The standard sort of question types are there and they're obviously getting a lot of attention still. And manual enrolments should not be neglected amongst the noise from different levels of education. Sorry. The highest use additional plug-ins if you're looking to see what really popular things that you might want to try on top of your standard Moodle questionnaire is out there. There is an amalgamation of a number of features of the various surveying tools in the ever still to come survey pro, so you might want to consider that as well. Certificate, the person who maintains that is actually a HQ developer. He sort of adopted it and hasn't done much with it, but now there's a bit of a resurgence. It's being redeveloped and hopefully in the coming months there will be a new version of certificate and that may be something that might make it into core in future. The progress bar is my own, I encourage you to try it out. It will never be part of core Moodle. There might be other instances of progress bars, but not that particular one. Collapse topics won't be part of core, but you're welcome to try it out. And the OU question types have already got the tick there because they're in. All right. So higher education obviously dominated the results of this. So it was hard to distinguish that, their use from other sectors. But workplace, the self-paced nature and the certification obviously has an influence on what goes on there. Schools are a bit more exploratory. They tend to use more plugins and different plugins to the other sectors. General advice, grab the report. I've linked to it from my description of this presentation. Or if you just search for Moodle Plugins Report 2015, you should probably come across it. And Dev's final piece of advice that sort of people offered in the survey was try and keep your plugins up to date. One of the main reasons they choose or don't choose a plugin is if they can see whether it's being maintained or not. All right. Maybe one question is all I have time for. You mentioned the progress bar won't go into core, but are you aware it's the top voted story for the Moodle User Association so far? I would say that if the Moodle User Association wants a progress bar, that should be something that is developed from a different approach. The progress bar that I developed was 1.8, 1.9. When there was no mechanism for drawing plugins together, there are better ways of approaching that now in more efficient ways. The concept is good. A lot of people want a time management tool, they want to see progress, but I don't think that that might bug it. It's a dirty hack in some regards, and it doesn't fit in core yet. Later in my closing keynote, you'll see an example of how progress bars can be implemented in Moodle. I think it's key. Everyone uses a progress bar for different reasons, which use case is actually being requested in the MUA forum, because it hasn't been explained yet.