 It's day two at Moodle Mood Global, and I'm here with Phil Hill, who's very well known in the Ed Tech sector. He's a commentator, consultant, researcher, a strategic thinker, with a real focus in the US. So it's really great to have you here today, Phil. Thanks for joining me. Well, thanks. I've enjoyed my time here, and I always appreciate coming to Barcelona and then being with the community. But thank you for the introduction. Yeah. It's wonderful. There are over 800 people here today. I know. That actually, that surprised me to see how many people were here. I mean, I went to the first one three years ago, and it was noticeably smaller, and it's good to see the community and what it's doing. Yeah. Working together vibrantly, I guess you'd say. And I know you're very close to the market, and I do read your blogs and enjoy them. And I particularly enjoyed your recent blog on the fact that students have developed a more positive view of online learning since the pandemic. And I was curious, could you just explain that a bit to us? Why? Well, before you get to why, I think the bigger point that's important to understand is it goes against a lot of assumptions. So much of the reaction during the pandemic was for schools to go to emergency remote teaching. And a lot of it was poorly designed courses. So online learning helped save us, get us through the pandemic. But everybody knows that students aren't happy. So the biggest point of the data and that I was highlighting is maybe our assumptions aren't accurate. Maybe there's some nuance there. Why is it that students are actually more have a more positive view of online education than they did before the pandemic? We should think about that and try to figure it out. Now what the answer is is not as easy to answer, because I think there are multiple aspects of it. One is you're getting past the theoretical. This is what I think online learning is about. And now teachers and students actually have done it. And I think that a lot of this is just now I get what this is about. Now I understand where the anytime, anywhere aspects can benefit me in my education. It could even be little things such as, hey, now I can watch a video and play it at play at multiple times. And I have no shame having to rewatch something to learn. So I think a lot of it's just getting to the reality of what's possible, as opposed to just the talk about online learning. The other thing I would say is it's shown how the education community is actually quite resilient. I think we need to give ourselves credit for how well the ed tech infrastructure, the schools, and even the students handled this adversity switch quickly and even learn to appreciate what they're dealing with. So I don't think there's one simple answer, but it's fascinating and I think it should cause us to be careful about our assumptions about what's been happening. That's very interesting. I mean ed tech and LMSs, learning management systems have been around for a long time. Of course, in Moodle's case, 20 years, but the market perhaps didn't understand the possibilities and I think what you're implying is actually the pandemic has forced institutions and organizations to engage more deeply with their ed tech and consequently learners too have started to realize that there are some significant benefits, as you say, around differentiation and convenience. Yeah. And I've written about that a lot of what's going on right now is really about technology adoption. So it's not just about the technology. It's about the human activity of choosing or being part of an innovation, a change that's based on ed tech. So it's about the group dynamics. It's about the, hey, I'm trying something new for the first time or I've used this slightly. Now I'm using it much deeper because it's the core thing I'm doing and the humans are adapting to it. So I think a lot of this is about the people involved. The other aspect though is I've said, can you imagine if we had this pandemic 10 years ago because yes, LMSs have been around for a long time. So of other tools, but not in the same state 10 years ago. For example, the hosting, so many of the systems were set up at schools, not configured to be able to scale or be highly reliable. And what happened in the pandemic in a matter of weeks, schools around the world went online and just dramatically increased usage while we were very fortunate. This happened in 2020, 10 years earlier, we would have been hearing a lot more examples of this system of education, this state in the US, this country or the individual schools were shut down for like two to four weeks because their systems couldn't handle the scale. So part of it's about the technology, particularly the maturity and the scalability, but a lot of it's about the human adoption. Yeah, adoption curve. I think I've watched one of your videos where you talked about the early adopters and often those were very technical people, not surprisingly. And now mainstream or the market is catching up and understanding how to use the tools more effectively. Yes. And, but then that causes a shift. So for example, you know, I mean, as LMS such as Moodle, but any type of ed tech system, but also the people here at the conference, the people who need to support this, they've got to support both types of people, you know, these innovators, but they also have to support the people who's like, just make it safe, make it work. So it's not just they're learning to use the technology. It's that we need to learn or support people, need to learn how to support them. Yeah, different types of people. Absolutely. It's that tension. Hold on just one second. Sure. I've been talking too much today. Yeah. Yes. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, sure. Different types of people. I totally understand what you're saying. And actually that's a tension, isn't it? Because people new to technology need very simple and clean platforms to engage with, whereas those who've been working for a time need depth of functionality or customizability. Would you agree with that? Oh, I definitely agree. It's one of the biggest challenges and to be direct about Moodle, I think one of the biggest challenges that Moodle faces is it has not just a long history and working with people, the types of people who have been implementing Moodle are very detailed in the weeds. I've been doing this. They're early adopter, innovator types that give me the freedom to go develop this new plug-in. Let's make this detailed case work. I want to specialize. And one of the challenges is that the new world and it's not just a pandemic. I think it was happening ahead of time, but the pandemic accelerated it as you have this new type of learner who's becoming much more prominent learner or teacher and you have to support it. So I think one of, I think providers such as Moodle have to think about, well, how do we, how do we support different levels of people adopting the product? Absolutely. And that's certainly on the agenda. And you know, we've had our recent UX releases, both Moodle LMS and Moodle workplace. From your perspective, what do you think the market, you talked about scalability, for instance. So I agree that that is something that's increasingly important. But for say large education institutions, what are they looking for? Scalability would be one data protection perhaps? Number one is intuitive design as we've gone are the days where people want to have a system that it takes you a long time to train to learn how to use it. And that gets to all the adoption stuff we've already talked about. So number one is intuitive design. I get it. I see how the system works, maybe not leave me alone, but I can use this. I don't need an extensive training course. I'll get specialized help if I want, but I get it. This is so natural. Scalability and reliability I guess would be number two. Unfortunately data is not number three. I think we've talked about it in the community for so long. That's taking very long for people to actually learn what to do with data. So I think it's important, but it's not what the decision making is based on right now. Yeah, it's interesting and maybe different markets, different sensibilities to that. Perhaps in the European market that is increasingly important. It's a roadmap issue. So I mean, it is important. I'm just pointing out that if you go back 15 years, you would have thought that the LMS companies were really data analytics companies who happened to sell an LMS on the back end, but it just didn't work out. There was very light usage of data and it's taken a very long time to where schools are more and more actually looking at the data and using it. Now today it is important. It's just almost always slower than people expect. So it's important, but as a roadmap issue, give me a platform and a way to deal with this and I'm going to find out things three years from now on how to use it. It's not that I know all the features I need today. I guess the one other thing I would add is you do need to have variability or flexibility that if you're doing a large institution, you have different academic program types. Some of them might lend themselves to individual instructors doing whatever they want. Other ones might be very coordinated with a specific curriculum. Some might be based on competency. And so you need to have the flexibility to be able to support different program types within one cohesive experience. That's another key feature that people are looking for. Give me an enterprise solution that can handle the entire enterprise that doesn't all look alike. They behave differently. Yeah, that's a good point to talk about perhaps the collision of workplace learning and education because obviously the Moodle workplace platform accommodates that through its multi-tenant structure, which is basically a centralized well. You can have different learning platforms within one instance of the LMS. Has that been interesting to you to see those worlds of formal learning through institutions and perhaps skill development in organizations, whatever type they are, come together? Well, they are coming together. So what's been fascinating is seeing so many attempts to resolve this issue. So it's not going away. It is the new challenge. We don't want to have these strict walls of here's academia and here's workplace. Some of the most exciting work in ed tech is that bridge between the two. And whether that's internal training of staff that happen to be also delivering degrees or whether it's we're an academic program, but we also are helping with workforce training. Either way, there's a lot of blurring of the lines between the two. And I think that that's where you're going to continue to see a lot of innovation in the industry and solutions that need to happen. Sometimes the issues are very pedantic, such as my registration system doesn't easily allow non matriculated students. But if I'm doing an academic helping with workforce training, I need to have that. So sometimes it's just we need to get out of our own way and allow the systems to solve problems. Other times it gets more into, you know, different types of learning, rule based learning and different assumptions that go into a workplace environment than in an academic environment. So yes, it's a very exciting area and I think it will continue to be. And there's a collision, I think, between competencies and or learning paths, actually is what I'm trying to say, learning paths and differentiation. Yes. So it's as if workplaces were quite potentially for certification. But in education, you could use it to differentiate students or that, you know, so you can assign learning based on different learning preferences or abilities. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of the competency based education within academia fits in the same mentality, if you will, or the same assumptions about pathways and individualized learning. It's a lot of the same stuff. So a lot of the check sometimes it's as simple as let's change the name of this and in a workplace context, it should be named this. But in a competency based academic program, it should be named this. But underneath it, it's got very similar assumptions behind it, which is really based on let's look at the outcomes of what we're looking for and not just the grades and not just the seat time and let's personalize it to what individual students need instead of assuming everybody has the same needs. Very common assumptions between them. One of the biggest differences is just simply terminology, actually. Learning design applies in both contexts. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's driven by the same needs. It's just a different language that describes them. Totally agree. Well, look, we could talk for a long time, but I know you've got a busy agenda. Thank you very much, Phil. Yeah, thank you.