 Hello everyone! Thank you for joining us today. Today we're running a Moodle Academy webinar about designing for mobile and offline environments. I am Sandra Matz, Educational Events Coordinator here at Moodle HQ and with me I have Lauren Guzman, Learning Designer at Moodle in the US and Gianci Feng, Program Specialist at the UNESCO, Incited for Lifelong Learning. My colleague Anacasa from the Moodle Academy team is also joining me today and will help facilitate the webinar. In a partnership funded in a shared commitment to open inclusive education, the Moodle Learning Design Team at the US worked with the UNESCO's Incited for Lifelong Learning to build a digital competencies for literacy educators course that is being distributed to literacy educators around the world. In this session the speakers will demonstrate how they work together to build this course to reach the digital divide by using core Moodle tools such as lesson and database, as well as a mobile first design philosophy. The speakers will share some practical strategies used to design this Moodle course for low and low bandwidth environments. We will leave some time for questions after the presentation but please send your questions through the chat during the presentation so that they can be addressed afterwards. So with our further adieu I would like to hand over to Lauren and Gian. Thank you. Thank you Sandra. So yeah we are really thrilled to be here today. I'm Lauren, I'm a learning designer with Moodle US. I've been with Moodle for a year now but when this project started I was brand new to Moodle, not new to Moodle the platform but brand new to the organization and I am just thrilled that we have this chance to share the project with you today and then we are going to get into some really specific details about the design choices we made, the tools we used, how we made things happen because we know a lot of you come for those kind of like really practical tips. So we're really thrilled to be here and I'm going to hand things over to Gian to give you all the overview of the project and the context that we were working in with this project. Great. Thank you. Thank you Lauren. Yeah I'm Gian from UNESCO from the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg in Germany and we have a great experience working with Lauren and other colleagues from Moodle US and my role here today is really to provide the overall context of this project and some of the learner and learning environment assumptions or needs that we, well some assumptions we made about it and some things that we discovered as the project progressed. So perhaps just moving to the next slide I can introduce why this project came about. So the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning is the secretariat for this Global Alliance for Literacy and our main role is to act as a global platform to advocate for literacy and one of the main gaps that we realized from the pandemic was that adult literacy educators around the world were not really supported at all in terms of skills development nor infrastructure and other digital resources to continue their teaching and learning for their learners, adult learners around the world. So as part of this Global Alliance which comprises UIL UNESCO member states and associate members who are basically you know nonprofits, some private companies and other multilateral organizations we worked with 30 countries you know to implement projects that hope to improve a youth and adult literacy. So moving on to the next slide this project aimed to improve the digital competencies of literacy educators. Our target is 100,000 literacy educators trained in the effective use of technologies in literacy teaching and learning. We hope to achieve that by engaging with at least 10 countries within this alliance and the main objective is to improve quality literacy provision by improving the capacity of these literacy educators. I'm just going to put the link of our site for the Global Alliance for Literacy in the chat right here so that you can check it out when you have time. Next slide please. So we already knew of Moodle. I mean Moodle is a very well known LMS so we knew that Moodle was one of the main options for engaging with us on this project. We were going to develop and we have developed the content and we have sort of the androglogical expertise but what we don't have within UNESCO is really this knowledge of learning design and also the technical aspects of creating or yeah creating or using an LMS effectively that can meet you know the wide range of needs amongst our member states. So yeah why do we go with Moodle? I mean I think one of the key reasons is that it's open source philosophy really appealed to us. It aligns very well with UNESCO's principles. Obviously the Moodle community is very strong and we knew that we could rely on the expertise of its members and specifically Moodle US itself and we also had or have connections with Moodle through this UNESCO Global Education Coalition which you can Google as well. So that was what those were the main three key reasons why we went with Moodle. On to the next slide. I think yeah we had quite a few sort of assumptions or prior knowledge of the environments that we were going to work with. These are obviously countries that UNESCO works with countries that are generally quite challenging learning environments. We call them like developing countries so for example on the next slide you'll see that the learners will definitely have connectivity issues. They will not have access to the most modern of devices almost up-to-date systems. The locations really vary you know there's a huge urban rural divide specifically amongst our learners and language is also an issue you know although maybe the way the language that we do business in that we that we engage in is generally English or French. I mean the countries we work in have tens or hundreds of languages that need to be catered to ideally. They also have very diverse learning needs and also a very diverse range of prior experience with technology. So moving on to the next slide as well as the learners the delivery options themselves were what we did not want it to be prescriptive so we wanted to offer an option that could be adapted or modified according to the needs of the country itself. So that was also very important an important aspect of choosing Moodle as the LMS that we recommended to the countries and yeah if I could move on to the next slide then the last aspect was having sort of the ability to deal with issues of navigation deployment modification maintenance and distribution quite easily. Again I think what was very attractive to us was that Moodle is open source and that it based on our prior research and prior engagement with Moodle many partners Moodle partners and like local communities in the countries that we work with existed already as opposed to our fear that recommending a particular LMS would would not give the country the chance to maybe decide on who they wanted to engage with. So sort of that choice was very important to us we did not want to risk I guess appearing biased or not objective or not giving people the option to choose what LMS they wanted to use. So yeah those were some of the yeah really key considerations that we ran through in our discussions with Lauren and her team as we kicked off the project. So I'll hand it back over to Lauren to dive into the nitty gritty technical aspects of the courses. Yeah and we thanks John we wanted to include those three slides because I'm sure all of you out there who do instructional design or who are supporting folks in building courses when you see all of those conditions and requirements and all of the ways that this course is meant to be used you know you're starting just immediately thinking like how are we going to do this. So a big part of that initial process of working together was identifying all of these different variables because we needed to make sure that whatever we designed could function and fully function in multiple environments right and work for learners that had lots of different qualities and different access. So it really was you know it felt like quite an undertaking and we really kind of listed these out because as we made design choices we needed to make sure that they would function in all of these different environments. So it was a really exciting challenge and as I start sharing with you you know what we ultimately made you know I think what's really important to know is there was a lot of collaboration a lot of testing a lot of iteration a lot of research that went into making sure that what we chose to do could actually work for you know all of these needs in all of these environments. And the other thing just to know is you know we knew that this course could live in a Moodle site anywhere in the world and so really what we ended up doing was we were designing an mvz file right we we were designing a course to be backed up and then sent anywhere in the world so that it could then you know go into that Moodle environment and and be able to use fully. So all of you familiar with Moodle can immediately are thinking like oh okay so you have to you know no no plugins or like very few plugins right because you just didn't know what environment this course would be restored into and as the course is increasingly you know out there and shared we just wanted to make sure that no one needed to have anything sort of special or customized that this could really function in any environment. So just know that as we go through and you'll see we did we did use a couple of plugins but they're not fundamentally necessary. Okay so we can we can go through we can start going this is the Moodle part please feel free to ask questions if I see them pop up in the chat I'll I'll try to address them or we can just get to them afterwards in the Q&A. So first we'll look at the course in just in the LMS you know on a computer and I'm going to use screenshots to talk us through this. So yeah we can go into it. So here we are looking at the course from the outside you can see that we are using the one topic format. So this is a plugin and this is really one of the only plugins we're using but I'll show you in a moment that this isn't you know a fundamental plugin it will the course will be just fine if the course is in topics format but we did decide to use one topic for a couple of reasons one is that there's a lot of content in this course so you can see in the top tabs that there are there's a course overview and then there's three modules and then a quick link to the student portfolios and then within each module there's about six sessions for each module and we like the one topic format for this because it helped us kind of keep the page still compressed while still having a lot of content that the learners would be working through you know knowing that we have some folks who are brand new to online learning or a learning management system and so we didn't want to overwhelm folks with a really long scroll down the page we wanted to keep it kind of neat simple for them so that was a decision we made to use one topic format and for those reasons we also decided to use only core Moodle tools so this course functions entirely on lesson forum pages quizzes and database which is what we use to create the portfolio that mechanism in the course and I'll talk about you know I'll talk about all of those but we wanted to just use core Moodle tools we also wanted to use core Moodle tools that fully function here you know on a computer in the LMS and then also in the Moodle mobile app both online and offline so each of those tools I mentioned can be utilized fully offline in the Moodle mobile app because we knew we had some learners who you know might only have access to the internet if they were coming to a community center or something like that and then would need to go back to their homes and still be able to interact with the course and move through the course content offline in the mobile app we also chose to use activity completion settings set so that the student can manually mark activities as complete you know we really wanted to learners to feel empowered to do that as they moved through the course so we're not using any sort of auto activity completion because we knew people might need freedom to move for the course but we did want them to have that experience of being able to check something off when they're done because that always that just always feels good um we will see that we have some intentional redundancy in where we link to activities and resources and i'll show you more of that as we move through but the lesson provides the real fundamental structure for this course our lessons that is how students really end up moving through this course and i'll show you how that works but we also wanted to make sure that we have links to the activities so for example the discussion forum and then the portfolio activity prompt we wanted that to be readily available right on this section page so that learners who are completing this in a face-to-face environment you know with a course facilitator could easily jump to those activities so we have links to those activities inside the lesson where we're really pacing learners and helping them move through the content and out here and that was an intentional choice that we talked a lot about another choice that we talked a lot about and we had a lot of different iterations for had to do with naming conventions and you know maybe that seems like a small thing but those of you who are doing course design know how important naming conventions are right to arrive at something that is simple consistent and in our case we also wanted to use sort of short naming conventions because you when you're on the mobile app there's a lot of you know cutting off that happens naturally because you're on a much smaller screen so we decided to use module one module two session 1.1 right so that's module one session one session 1.2 and then we named from there so that was really important to our process and it took a lot of discussion and testing to see the different ways these naming conventions would display depending on what device the learner was using so that's that's what we arrived at okay so we can go on to our next our next slide here this is just a quick look at what the course would look like in topics format and this was again something we tested we we did you know we knew we wanted to use one topic we did develop an admin guide that goes along with the course that you know recommends installing the one-topic course format you know that that's the recommended course format but also again if someone just grabbed this backup file and restored it onto a site we wanted to make sure that everything would still be intact that it would still be fully functional and luckily it is so you know it drops into topics format and then you just sort of get the content scrolling down the page but absolutely still fully functional no loss there so just wanted to show that to make that point so our next view is this is a closer look inside a module and we and and and this is a module overview page they all look like this right so you're going to see a lot of consistency as we kind of go through these screenshots we were really trying to pair all of this down so that learners would learn how to use the course right that was really important in all of our design choices you can see that we're you know we have a sort of a time how long this will take learning objectives a lot of standard you know information that you provide to learners when they start on a module we we didn't want this course we didn't want the course file size to be very big right we were really trying to just conserve that space because again we don't know what kind of access learners have as they're downloading the actual mbz file and we really wanted it to be as compressed as possible so we intentionally chose to not use things like you know decorative images or very large image sizes all of the images in the course are you know essential to the course content so diagrams for example that show like the t-pack framework for technology adoption that's just you know an example um but what we what we did do to you know sort of try to break up a lot of text is we used font awesome icons so those icons that you see there you will see throughout these screenshots they are throughout the course um and we used you know the same icons to signal the same content throughout the course so um that is that was something that we again took a lot of discussion uh in testing but this is what we arrived at um and then finally you could see just at the bottom of this screenshot um another Moodle feature that we relied heavily on in this course in this course design is um activity name auto linking so you know the 1.1 introductions to technology and education that will link to the lesson for session 1.1 and um we needed to use auto linking uh because you know again this this course will be restored in a site anywhere and so we couldn't um have links within Moodle you know to a Moodle page on that site because that would just break if we were to back it up and use it in another Moodle site so we rely heavily on activity name auto linking and that also helps us to pace and structure learners through the course uh okay so we can go to our next look so here we are getting a closer look inside one of the lesson activities so you can see that um we took of again this is inside a lesson activity so this is just session 1.1 but very similar layout um similar icons here you know to that module overview page because again we just wanted folks to feel like they could recognize where they were and what they were looking at as they start moving through the course and then hoping that it will become easier over time as they really understand how this works and how to move through um so we have the the you know look inside the lesson we have the lesson menu over there on the left hand side so the learners um can kind of freely navigate through the lesson if they want to uh because you know again the purpose of this course is to prepare literacy educators so we wanted it to also be a resource for them to be able to go back to um once they're out and teaching in the field and you know having the lesson menu and having free navigation through the lesson is important if later you want to go back and review something or refer to something um we'll take a closer look at this but you'll notice in the lesson menu that we have um pages for the discussion forum so this discussion forum one also for the portfolio activity so the lesson is the core structure and way we're pacing students and the lesson menu uh or you know there's lesson pages that will actually represent and then link out to activities that learners are doing in the course um okay oh last uh last little piece on this page it's very subtle but we'll take a look at this too you'll see at the top of the page right above the the lesson title um it says export as pdf so one of the conditions and needs of this course is that learners be able to print it you know or facilitators be able to print it because there could be learners who don't have access to you know mobile devices and need a printed copy and we all know that that can be a challenge um you know and so one of the reasons that we arrived at lesson is because there is a plugin called export as pdf which allows you to export an entire lesson as a pdf so that you could then print it so that is a plugin that we're using in the course we have that in the admin guide and i'll show you a bit later you know what that looks like when you do print a lesson um but that was really important to us because you know we were that was a bit of a challenge we were like how are we going to print an online course um this is what we arrived at all right so uh here we are taking a closer look inside the lesson at one of those pages i mentioned that represents the discussion forum activity so you can see here there's again a lot of consistency with the design and the icons and the layout and um what happens here in the discussion forum activity is we give the basic instructions we tell users you know what this is what they're going to need to complete it and then we're using activity named auto linking to link the learner out to the actual discussion forum activity so they do leave the lesson to go to the discussion forum activity to participate in it in it there um so we can go to our next um slide um okay i uh maybe i don't have a screenshot for this but the last thing i'll say about the discussion forum activity is that once learners link out to that discussion forum we also use activity name auto linking to bring them back to the lesson so that was you know trying to make sure that learners don't sort of get lost in Moodle which i know like a lot of us have probably experienced with with some of our newer online learners so activity name auto linking brings them to the forum also brings them back to the lesson um this view here is uh again you know we didn't we the course is you know fully accessible so we were really aware of things like color contrast and the source material that we were working with um had very much of a like i would call it sort of a textbook feel you know with call out boxes that are you know different colors and things like that um and so we wanted to kind of maintain the integrity of that but make sure that it works in the online space uh and that it's fully accessible so what you're seeing here is um you know what that looks like inside a lesson page so this is a lesson content page and you can see that we have these um learn more online these kind of like call out boxes and we're just using some simple html to create that you know background color and shading and then the font awesome icons and then there's um you know reflective activities that are embedded in the lesson pages that are just sort of for the learners to think about something or you know fill out a chart on their own um so that's just you know wanted to show you that that we did try to maintain that kind of textbook feel um because we thought it was you know more comfortable for a lot of learners um while still making sure that this functions as a fully online course okay so the the next page here is a little peek into how we did this so we were not you know we couldn't use css or we didn't want to use css because again we didn't want to do anything that had to be done at the site level or we wanted to keep that to a minimum minimum we really wanted um this to be kind of a complete package so we used you know inline html um to make that happen and what i ended up doing uh as i built this course is working directly in this html editor a lot and i am like i am not that person i am a teacher i am a researcher i am not a coder or a web designer um but you know i think bootle makes it really easy so that if you learn some basics uh this becomes very helpful it will also help when you're doing a lot of copying and pasting from your source material so that was something i learned very quickly um i as i worked through this and as we arrived at all of these different kind of conventions uh we actually created a style guide for the course that shows all of the code that is used um to create these different elements and i could you know i could put a copy of a link to that in in the chat um it's just a google doc you know but it was really just to kind of keep track and to make sure that we maintain that consistency across all of these different elements all right uh we can look now at the next um piece here so this is our this is the portfolio activity um i think that you know the portfolio activities in this course were a really um interesting and fun kind of like evolution that happened as we worked with the uil team um you know it was so important to to the to the uil team that this um course which you know primarily serves adult learners um have you know opportunities for authentic assessments right and reflection and all of those elements that we know adult learners you know need to feel um that they can be successful with you know in a learning activity so these portfolio activities are meant for learners to do uh mostly sort of outside of Moodle you know they're interviewing someone um or they're reflecting on something or they're creating a lesson plan or you know lots of different of these sorts of activities that are um really actionable and practical and we of course needed a way to you know find a way to to sort of capture that in the platform um we wanted it to be something that could be fully used online and offline in the mobile app and we also wanted it to be so that learners could see each other's um you know materials if they wanted to and and if you know the um facilitator you know thought that was appropriate for this for the group we thought about you know using discussion forum like we went through a lot of different considerations uh but what we arrived at is actually using the database activity for this so if you look at the next this next uh slide here um this is a look at the the you know portfolio activity submission area that is you know what the learners know it as this is a Moodle database activity um those of you familiar with database are probably like wow that's like a pretty simplified database and that was the main challenge with this was to make it as easy as possible for the learners um and so we created buttons these two buttons to just add an entry or view portfolios we you know we we have that um for the main way that learners would use the portfolio to just make it as easy as possible for them so they're not seeing sort of like a row of buttons um when they come in so that is uh and database is really powerful database you know can be used um offline in in the mobile app and that was of course one of our main considerations there so we we had a lot of help um Sarah Ashley is one of my colleagues who is really amazing with database if you google her name and database activity you'll find sessions that she's done and and she helped a lot with you know how to really streamline this and make it work for our purposes which is to collect um learner portfolio activities that they complete and then also allow learners to see each other's um see each other's work okay so that sort of you know concludes the major pieces about the course and also what the course looks like on a computer um very quickly uh if we go to the next slide um you know i'll show you some you know these are just some screenshots of what the course looks like as you're using it on the Moodle mobile app with iOS um we tested this course in you know iOS on on iPhones of various um you know whatever various numbers of iPhones um and then also on Android devices um UIL had some really amazing um interns who participated in this project and did a lot of testing for us and that was really helpful because we had people of you know in all different areas and on different devices testing the course um we definitely took a mobile first design strategy with this course anytime we had sort of like an idea or you know could we do it this way we built a prototype you know a quick one and then tested it in on mobile on different devices and um also in different sort of conditions so when I was testing this course on my mobile device I would um you know completely turn off all connections um you know go into like airplane mode and and really just drop all of my wi-fi myself um and make sure that I could still continue to use the course so we would even test to see what would happen if you had a connection and then your connection drops as you're working through the course like as you're you know writing your discussion forum post so we did a lot of testing with with that um this next slide is one for you you can you can screenshot this if you want we you know we compress the URLs but we also have all of these resources available on the Moodle Academy page and these are just resources that I found really valuable um as I was building the course and as I was researching so some of these are uh blog posts with tips about you know mobile first design strategies for Moodle Moodle the screenshot you see there is from that very first resource which is the Moodle features for students and I love this document so much because you can see there's a column for mobile Moodle app and it will show you if a feature is available in the Moodle app and then it will also tell you if it's available offline in the Moodle app as just kind of like a quick way to check so I love this resource it was so helpful to me uh okay so then our the last uh piece here is just I mentioned that you know this course needed to be printed and who doesn't love an online course that we that we need to print so um the next slide is uh this is um a view of what it looks like when you use that export to PDF plug-in um for the lesson and so this is one of those lesson pages and this is what it looks like when it prints you know um it's it's it's not it's not perfect the formatting is not perfect it's not you know what you might get if you were using Microsoft Word or you know these you know highly designing um but it's clean it's simple and and it provides all of that content in the course um and we wanted you know folks to be able to print exactly what was in the lesson because we know that we have countries who will be translating this content and so once they're translating the content right there in Moodle they also they need to be able to print that translated content or that modified content as they modify lessons to meet you know their specific context okay last um last slide here in this section is um this okay what's what this is is um what I called uh offline are offline pages so what you're seeing here is um okay you you already kind of now have a sense of how this course works right and there are discussion forums with prompts we wanted to make sure that learners who are printing the course could still access what those discussion forum prompts were we didn't want that to be unavailable to them so the way that we um solved that problem was um in the lessons there are sort of like hidden pages that's what I think of them as they are pages in the lesson that do not have a jump to them so there is a jump to the next page right so this jump here is to the opportunities and challenges but there is this offline discussion forum page in the lesson itself that is jumped over so it doesn't appear in the lesson menu anyone who is using this on a computer or a mobile device never sees this page they never see this offline discussion forum page but if you print the lesson this will print um in you know in the right sequence in the lesson so that was how we solved that problem we didn't want to have redundancy or confusion for online learners about seeing the discussion forum questions twice but we wanted to make sure that someone printing could still have access to this so that's what you're seeing here is one of these lesson pages that is jumped over so that it can be printed um but not seen otherwise by learners okay so yeah I'm excited to see some of the questions in the chat um we just want to talk very briefly about you know the the testing and the feedback and all that iteration that went into arriving um at what you just saw and uh so this this first slide here but I'm gonna also just pass this back to John um is you know just to show you that we did so that the next slide Sandra if you don't mind um yeah so we we um after we had built out module one and a prototype of it um we got a lot of feedback from learners and they actually completed a survey and then we made changes and you know iterated based on that feedback so John I'll pass this back to you to you know take us through a little bit of that sure thank you thank you Laura and that was a fantastic um insight into the design process and and the the thought and the and the thinking behind all of the design that we you know you summarized it so uh succinctly even though it was like many months of discussions and back and forth um yeah I think I just want to address this question that Jack I see put in the chat I'm asking you know how did we decide to use the app rather than simply let people use a mobile browser I think the main um and whether or not downloading an app was a barrier to anyone that a browser would not be I think the main consideration for the browser thing was the lack of reliable uh internet connectivity which which the app kind of allows uh circumvents uh in that it's it's usable offline whereas I believe the mobile browser I mean it's not possible to continue the course once the internet drops off and it's not just about unreliable internet connectivity it's also um how do I call it like I mean it's unreliable not because of just the general infrastructure but also because of cost so yeah it we envisage the couple a lot of situations which Lauren mentioned earlier where a user or the educator would actually be in their center or institution where they have access to generally reliable and free wifi um and then they may have to step out or for whatever reason or head back home or anything and and they would still have access to the course so so that was uh really the major reason to to rely on um yeah so so we went through a lot of I mean we went through testing and feedback as Lauren mentioned um we we did do it internally with our interns and also with some of my colleagues but we also managed to tap on our network of literacy educators so so we had some from Bangladesh and Uganda who also kindly took their time to complete like a you know a survey and let us know any of the problems or hiccups they had with with with the module and and maybe one aspect that actually really brought out this could be the export to pdf function was that during the feedback um the users actually requested you know are there other alternative ways that we can make this accessible to to people so so I mean some options suggested were cds usb sticks uh and and also just being allowing it to be printed out um so you know you know that's kind of the yeah those are kind of the issues or thoughts or questions that came up during this process that um that are real and very significant uh in in you know in affecting this this project so um yeah maybe the next slide I just wanted to talk a bit about what happened after this design process and and it sort of hit first contact with users and countries um and this was one example from Egypt where we work with the adult education authority there and um you know one thing that we didn't take them into account throughout the entire process was actually uh how languages are not um they I mean you may not yeah languages do not only read from left to right and and Arabic uh it is a right to left language and um that was one uh key aspect that really uh had to be overcome when when we converted the course from the English version to the Arabic version when we contextualized it in Egypt so that the national technical team that we work with there was really good when I say technical team actually these are all education experts they're not necessarily uh technical technology experts but there was a wide range of stakeholders from government officials to literacy educators to um some IT uh experts or people who had experience with online learning and online course design who kind of came together in a group and and we spent a week working together to um contextualize the content but also figure out how the Moodle side of things would work in Egypt so um that was one thing uh we also took the opportunity to see how um the literacy educators and and the other participants in the workshop reacted or were able to use Moodle uh first off with basically no orientation and uh what we found out was maybe one third of the participants could log in and and you know access a discussion forum and answer question and post with no problems with no assistance one third needed a bit of assistance sometimes it was with the login sometimes it was just with um posting making a post and and one third of them um needed like quite significant one-on-one assistance so considering like the background of these people taping the workshops they're they're you know they're quite they're highly relatively highly educated they are um I think their economic background is generally maybe middle to upper rather than um covering the whole range uh and and so we were actually still quite shocked you know um that we were facing these problems in the workshop and it was taking up time and and needed assistance so uh the whole point of my recounting this experience is that yeah um in spite of what we all hope to achieve uh in you know the iteration and testing when it finally sort of hit the ground I mean a whole set of issues came up uh when it was deployed or tested the second point is was really significant as well as also related to our experience in the workshop where a huge range of devices were used and uh like I saw some android devices that I haven't seen personally in a lot really long while like like 10 years ago and I am pretty sure the systems they were using were also like older so in spite of what we assumed would be a wide like compatibility with a wide range of devices and and and things it didn't quite work out as we expected um and and so uh that is you know I don't think as far as I know Lauren I don't think we can tackle that because we've sort of stripped it down to as base as you know as basic as it could be and uh but but it was it was just quite an interesting observation of how in spite of all our uh precautions and anticipation you know it didn't quite work out so well and and the third point of course is the wide range of digital skills so I mean yeah when I say wide range obviously the ones that are more challenging are those who have not really done any online have zero online learning experience um and maybe they use their phones mainly for telephone calls maybe for the occasional facebook or social media access but not for learning so that was uh also something we could observe in our in our workshop group uh so yeah that that that is um that was our experience in Egypt and not just limited to Egypt we also have rolled it out in Nigeria Bangladesh and Cote d'Ivoire as well so that's a another set of like different culture different languages um yeah and a lot of learning a lot of learning a lot of observations from those experiences next slide please I lessons learned so I'll take this first Lauren yeah um so so maybe just to summarize uh three lessons or three observations that um I had and we had from the experience uh last year um yeah uh I think taking off immediately from what I just recounted it's really important to allow for space and time to observe first contact between users and when they engage with the course um and I would say we didn't have enough time so we didn't have enough time not for you know they were for external reasons like relating to the project implementation but we will work in a very tight timeline so I think um you know when when it goes into the field or when it goes into different cultures and then you know when it when the course will be in another language uh even during um contextualization so important to to have the space like a safe space open space and also allow enough time to observe and then to make changes to the course um I think the second point was uh really um good endorsement I guess of our initial approach which was to obtain inputs from a diverse range of stakeholders so typically when we engage with governments um sometimes they are quite uh uh you know there may be quite a silent way of thinking so they kind of just want to engage with their usual group and um we do try to engage encourage our uh focal points and the people who are working with us uh in these different countries to bring in people from the ministry of uh communications ministry of uh IT um bringing in you know a significant portion of the uh a good number of the literacy educators who are actually the target group into the discussion right from the start rather than sort of um have it have them come in later on um and uh also um non-profits or important uh non-governmental organizations are also really big uh implementing partners in uh adult literacy youth and adult literacy in in many countries it's not really actually a a government thing in in a lot of our member states so um it was so important to have uh and a private sector sorry I mean I definitely should have forgotten that private sector as well so um having these stakeholders in the room right from the start when we uh introduce this project and and give time for it to be contextualized is so important uh to the process and the third point is actually it's not so much a lesson learned but uh uh we we found that um yeah people appreciated the assumptions and the logic and the rationale behind the hybrid learning format which is kind of how which was how this course was designed uh on based on but uh we really also hope to develop like a self-paced learning version uh this year because um yeah a lot of again a lot of the stakeholders in different countries about yes it's great that we have this course that's you know hybrid and will need facilitation and a moderator but we also want to expand the reach you know to even people who who may benefit from it who are not from our initial target group um so for example in Nigeria actually some of the university uh faculty that that took part in our workshop they said oh this would even be beneficial for our first year undergraduates you know in the education faculty or adult learning or adult literacy um modules or courses that that they have so I mean that was pleasantly surprising for us yeah okay I'm done um yeah and I think I've shared mine throughout so you know just very quickly this um as I was building just testing often in all these different connection scenarios that was so important um and you know these are obviously things that um I know we know um but you know when you're actually working on a project of this scale I just think it really sinks in um and it's important you know just sort of reflecting these are kind of my major takeaways um after after all this work um this one is very simple but just using the html editor uh directly when you need to do a lot of copying and pasting is some of my most practical advice for all the content creators out there um you you know you you save yourself a lot of hassle with later cleaning up formatting that comes through uh and then finally just how important collaboration was um on this project there were so many folks who worked on this in different ways um you know and I definitely personally you know my favorite part about it is the relationship that I formed with John and others at you know the UI at UIL um it's it's really been great and it was so uh fun to work with all the interns and just different folks who contributed um throughout the process so um I think now we're moving to questions I I've tried to answer some questions in the chat but I'm sure we've missed some I could read one that I saw that I think is would be a good young question to answer how long did course development take from the initial idea to now how many people were involved UNESCO Moodle and others uh approximate cost to develops I recognize much is involved so you know sort of John do you want to just talk about that a little bit the overall time yeah sorry I was I was responding to a Jody's point um but yes um the overall time was approximately okay I mean course yeah it was um approximately three well more than that actually I would say about four months um because we we did have to actually set up the sort of the framework um you know the kind of skills that that the educators were expected to develop and then work through the content of course before that we also surveyed the existing material that was available globally that was relevant to this area which unfortunately was really limited I would say most of the the best material came from different literacy organizations in in in America in North America so the US and Canada yeah sorry did I did I miss other other points the cost did I hear yeah that was part of the question was kind of the project logistics I mean the cost is uh the cost was the cost for the design I think it was what was it maybe um was it third third 20 to 30 20 to 30 thousand overall but it's separate from the content so the content and the the content and the the content of the course itself so I'm not sure if what what you meant was like the online course or the you know the course content the instructional design or the course design versus the content of the course the content of the course was was more than the cost of of of creating the online course but uh yeah I think uh for the online courses it was like 20 I think ish 20ish thousand yeah should we just quickly scan the questions through the chat most of them have been already answered but uh just to be a little bit inclusive uh somebody asked for the nbz file of the course uh and uh Gian has already answered that it would be available after the piloting uh to mood before uh in a couple months um jack asked how did you decide to use the app rather than simply let people use mobile browser and that's already answered by lorraine uh the need for the course to be used offline I was the main reason the main the major decision to rely heavily on the app and Vanessa says thank you for the excellent presentation why you decide to choose a lesson instead of book um and uh you discussed about the header form but what was the reason behind that uh lorraine would you like to sum up your answer yeah um the the the the reason for the hidden pages were you know skipping over the lesson pages was so that the content could be printed because the discussion forum prompts were in the forum activities themselves not in the lesson um but for those learners who were printing the entire lesson we wanted them to have access to the prompts as well you know because maybe they were participating in a mostly face-to-face discussion with their colleagues you know in a community center or something like that um the other question I I answered it kind of quickly in chat but was around version uh Moodle Moodle you know the Moodle version um the screenshots you saw are from the UIL Moodle site um which is three on 311 or at least the time when we were working on this was on 311 when I built the course I built it in my own sandbox um intentionally I built it in 310 uh because I actually wanted to be working in an older version of Moodle to then see what would happen as I restored into uh more recent versions um and Moodle 4.0 was actually released while we were working on this project so we did have a chance to test the course in in 4.0 uh Nicola asked about the recording of this session where uh we've reached already the hour yes the recording will be available uh from the course uh in Moodle Academy and of course in our channel uh in uh YouTube and just a few rough up notes before we finish and if you have enjoyed the session we'd love you to consider getting involved further and help us grow by contributing to the development of Moodle Academy. 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