 Good afternoon, good evening. This is Moodle Mood Global 2020. My name is Michael Blake. I work in the commercial team at Moodle HQ. You are in the education room and our next presentation is ready to go. Our next presenters are Roland Sherwood and Nali from the Jiang Jiao Tong Liverpool University and their presentation is entitled, Moodle as a Noah's Ark in Higher Education, a case study from China. So with that, I'll hand over to Roland and Nali. Thank you very much, Michael. And hello to everyone watching wherever you might be, whatever time it might be, wherever you are. Yep, our presentation is Moodle as a Noah's Ark in Higher Education and very quickly. This is, oh sorry, this is who we are. My name is Roland Sherwood. I'm the manager for educational technologies at Jiang Jiao Tong Liverpool University. My name is Nali. I'm the senior educational technologist from the same university. And as you can gather from the topic of our presentation, the flood that we're talking about here is the COVID-19 situation that it does. And our institution in China quite hard, way back in January, obviously being based in China, we were one of the first, among the first sort of institutions really hit by the COVID-19 situation and then having to move everything online. So we're taking that as our theme and Moodle as our arc that saw us through this flood situation that we've had for the last few months. So we, just very quickly by the way in terms of our institution and where we are and who we are, we're a very young institution. We're a joint partnership between Jiang Jiao Tong University in China and the University of Liverpool in the UK. We have about 15,000 students and 1,000 teachers. We teach everything in English and we have a historically quite a strong focus on using technology in particular Moodle but also Big Blue Button and Mahara and other bits and pieces within our institutional learning and teaching delivery. This is our campus and also just interestingly, we organized the first Moodle Moods event in mainland China just last year and we were actually very happy to have Martin as part of that event as well. So that's just a little bit about who we are. But I'll hand over now to my colleague Lina. Thank you, Roland. So before the flood, we were doing planning learning on Moodle and it was back to the December which is the end of the semester. As you can see from this picture, our students, they can take face-to-face class as well as having the Moodle-based virtual learning environment as their online learning platform. This is a front page of our Moodle-based VLE and we have started to use Moodle since 2006 and we have integrated many different technologies into the Moodle-based VLE. Then we heard about the sad news about the virus in Wuhan. Although Wuhan is a city quite far away from our city in Suzhou, so we were not so worried at that moment. We still had a good break in the spring festival but during the spring festival holidays, we heard the situation just become more serious and the travel restrictions were imposed. We were locked down at home, as you know and also we heard the new target for us was to support a fully online education for the whole university. The first five or six weeks, we think, okay, five or six weeks, it's a target that possible but it's still quite challenging because our staff and the students, they are from different cities all over the world. They have the different time zones. We need to consider these challenges when we design the support and the online education for them. And in relation to the technology platform, the Moodle as our arc, we also need to optimize it to better facilitate the over 15,000 students and the 1,000 teachers all over the world. And we've obviously talked about Moodle there but in fact Big Blue Button was a part of this, a big part of this project as well. We, before the flood hit us, we actually had one Big Blue Button server but of course one Big Blue Button server is not going to support a large number of students and staff. We never had the demand to do fully online learning in this way previously so that's why we had sort of limited resources in that sense but very quickly and rapidly we had to develop a new, highly scalable, low balanced Big Blue Button solution which I'm very happy to report we were able to do within about three weeks with the amazing support of Fred and his team over at Big Blue Button HQ. So yes, we were able to very quickly put that into place to help us with that part of this puzzle. Another challenge that we faced is the size of the team, the team that supports educational technologies within the institution, it's a very small team and unfortunately, unlike in a picture, we don't have lots of animals to help us and contribute to our efforts. We're, as you can see, we're a very small team of people supporting a very large number of staff. But we did our best, we set to work and we set about developing resources and support for staff in various ways. We developed lots of guides, lots of user guides and tutorials and things like that. We also had to develop policies and frameworks to outline expectations around the use of online learning and teaching. And we also made, again, sort of guides relating to the various technologies that are available and how they could be appropriately used and incorporated into people's teaching delivery. All of that content we put here onto Moodle itself and then we made that available for our staff to browse around and access whatever they needed in that way. We also did the same for Big Blue Button. Again, a very big important part of this puzzle for us and we wanted to make sure people were properly supported with using that in their day-to-day learning teaching activities. And then, in addition to all of that, we had to very quickly develop a program of training activities online delivered through Big Blue Button to, again, help to familiarize students and staff with using these technologies and just to answer any questions that they might have about that as well. You're seeing some of those things here. That's a sort of screenshot of one of the session recordings. But the Moodle community was also a big part of this process for us as well. While we were doing all of this work and sort of scratching our heads about how to solve various problems, we were actively looking at the forums on Moodle.org and listening to what people were talking about there and how they were dealing with problems. And we were sharing ideas and we were taking ideas from other people. So it's fantastic that we had access to a resource like that. And also, just on a technical level, we had, with lots of teachers, new to really engaging with the platform in a serious way. We had lots of new demands for things to do on the platform. And so we set about very quickly sort of scouring the plug-ins database for things that we could drop in and make available to teachers to meet the various needs, the new needs that they had brought to our attention. Yeah, we survived in the first five to six weeks and then we think, oh, if that's the time we can have a break, boss. My boss told me, no. We've been told by the senior management of the university the whole semester will go online, which brought a lot of new challenges things like online assessments. This is a sentence I quoted from one of my favorite movies. I think this crisis also give us the opportunities to be courageous. So when we need to build the arc to provide a place for all the staff and the students to be on board before the flood, we need the courage, we need the innovative contribution and the collaborate with each other. So this is what we have done. We have developed these arrangements for assessments, the documents and the guidelines for the staff to consider how can they set up appropriate online assessments elements and to assess the students learning outcomes. And as the educational technologies team, we provided the different training sessions and the materials to guide the staff. For example, this screenshot, you can see this is one of the course we have developed to guide the staff to know how to set up appropriate online quits to facilitate the online examinations. We have successfully arranged over 200 online formal examinations by using the online quiz and the online assignment activities. From the technical point of view, there are no major issues and for the students, they have experienced disruptions during the lockdown and also lots of challenges of learning from home and to adjust this new model of fully online education. But as you can see from this result of the grade, our students, they have achieved positive grade and they are learning outcomes. So overall, we think we survived in this battle. And finally, we're at this point right now where it's the end of the semester, our assessments are out of the way, learning and teaching is over and we were kind of hoping that there's land on the horizon and the flood waters are starting to go down but we've actually just found out recently that it looks like next semester for us and probably for a lot of people around the world, there's going to be a whole lot more online learning and teaching. A lot of our staff and students again are located overseas and they won't be able to get back to China before the start of the next semester in September. So we will be continuing to do a lot of our activities as a university online. But we've learned a lot of lessons from this previous semester, these last six months. We've put into practice a lot of things now that will be very useful I think for the next semester. So we're very sort of hopeful and confident that we'll be able to do a good job next semester with supporting staff and students again. So with all of that said, finally just to say thank you very much for listening to our presentation today. Thank you everyone for your attention. And if you'd like to get in touch with either of us, myself or my colleague Nali, please do, our email addresses are here. And otherwise we just like to say, we hope that you enjoy the rest of your Moodle Moot experience. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm wondering if you don't have any at this point. However, I have a question myself and that is besides the response that you received from the students that you showed on your graph there, are there any other ways that you are thinking about quantifying the success or not of your courses? I think that seems like it's gonna be a real big area of concern, an area of inquiry. How do we know that on our online courses are successful? Especially when we've had to go from, in many instances, a blended learning environment, but sometimes where there was no online element to a situation where it's completely online. Thanks Mike, that's a really great question. And there's the two answers for that from our side. Both of those really involve surveying and questioning students and staff actually about the courses and delivery this past semester. Every semester, in fact, in this university, we deliver what we call module questionnaires, which are formal surveys of the quality of learning and teaching. And students answer these surveys, they rate the quality of what they've learned, the quality of the teaching, and various other factors as well. So we get a lot of very useful information through that formalized process, which again feeds back into changes for the next semester. We haven't got the results of that yet. So we'll be looking with great interest when they are made available, hopefully within the next couple of weeks or so. In addition to that, we also do an annual survey ourselves as an education technologies team around the use of the platform, around the use of Moodle. And again, we embed questions into there concerning how has the platform sort of benefited your learning and teaching? In what ways, what challenges have you encountered? And particularly this semester, we're very interested to hear what people will be telling us through that channel as well. So again, right now we're sort of in a waiting period, just waiting to get some of this data and information back from our staff and students. But again, it will be very, very interesting, I think, for us to look at that in due course. Sure. And I guess that's one of the great things about Moodle, isn't it, that it can be modified and you can change your course, even right in the middle of a course, if need be. But the idea is always to solicit that feedback from your learners and make changes as you go. And hopefully that constant feedback means that you're always improving your performance. Yeah, definitely. We are getting a couple of questions coming through. We received one and it says, thank you for your shared experiences, which looks a lot like the way we have worked. And Alex is asking, with assessments, with a small team, how did you handle the fact that students were using their own devices for taking assessments? I'm not gonna lie, it's been very, very challenging. And we had a lot to think about when we realized that all of our assessments across the university would be delivered fully online. And one of the challenges, of course, was how do we ensure the security, the robustness, the equity of that experience for students? The way we've managed to do that, I think, hopefully, is to implement a sort of a quality assurance process, almost. So when our teachers, for example, were developing quizzes and quiz activities and questions and things like that, we worked with them as actively as we could. And right up until they delivered the quiz activities to students, we actually were doing things like going in and checking settings and making sure everything was configured in a very, again, a secure and sort of robust way for us. In particular, for us, that involved things like sequential delivery of questions. I'm trying to think of some of the other ways we locked this down. Minimizing feedback, obviously time limits and things like that. So those are just some of the ways that we sort of approach this process. However, we realize it's not full proof, it's not complete. And we've got a lot of work to do for the next semester to further improve and enhance that process. And we're looking at things like possibly online proctoring as well as use of the safe exam browser, for example, now that it's really nicely integrated with Moodle 3.9 as well. Sure. Yeah, this whole element of proctoring has become really important. And as you said, I don't believe that there's any 100% foolproof way of ensuring that there isn't any people trying to get around the system. But again, it's that idea of constant improvement. And to this concept of ensuring that over time you're doing multiple assessments, you're looking at many ways of assessing is that information getting through to the learners over and over again, so you don't have to have everything that's contingent on one exam, for instance. Yeah, that's right. Lena, sorry. Yeah, I was about to say the mock exam also worked quite well, especially for using these new technologies to facilitate online examinations. The mock exam gives the students and teachers some idea about the limits of the technology because you know technology is not perfect. They need to know the limitation of the technology and to make a good strategy how to minimize the burden of the technology will bring and then they can benefit most out of this online examination. Okay, thank you. Another question. The question is asking about plugins. What plugins were in the database for teachers like and they're asking for some examples? Well, for us, actually a lot of the plugins that we looked at or had to search for very quickly were again related to assessments. So we are a university that's quite heavily focused on science and mathematics and engineering. But a lot of those disciplines in our university hadn't done online assessments very much before. So we were looking again at things we could use and drop in to support them. So lots of question types, things like the stack question type formulas, all these kinds of specialist science related question types were things that we needed. We needed a more sort of, a more robust way to do question and answer forums for example as well. So we found a nice plugin called the Moodle Overflow I think it's called. Things like that, things that we hadn't necessarily implemented fully ourselves in the system previously that teachers were now raising as a demand were what we were searching for. Sorry, the names escape me right now but there's quite a long sort of list of stuff that we looked for and we found and we put in, I think we put in almost about 20 different plugins in total over the last couple of months to satisfy that need. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. The next question again from Alex asking what was the attitude of lecturing staff especially those who have not used an LMS to having to go online? Oh, thank you, Michael. Thank you, Alex for the question. I think, yeah, we do get a lot of digital immigrants especially for our staff and in this online education transformation teachers, they are not used to use new technology but they have to do it. The training sessions helped a lot from the feedbacks. A lot of the teachers before, they may be with the anxiety to try these new things but then in the situation, they have to try it, then they get some benefits from it and then they are willing to more desirable to know better. So I think, yeah, overall our teachers, they are also transforming from cognitive about what is the technology in house of learning and this special situation has provided all of us the opportunity to reflect what we have done before and what we will do for the future. That's the answer from me. Sure. Great, great. And I guess again, one of the benefits of using the Moodle platform is that lectures can come to Moodle with very little experience and can start out using just a couple of the resources or activities in Moodle, sort of very small, maybe it's just kind of putting some of that content online and using Moodle as a repository but very soon lectures if they're kind of caught by the Moodle bugged and they say, oh, what other tools are there? What other things can I build? What is this quiz module about and they can quickly build up their skills around Moodle and pretty soon teachers are developing these quite sophisticated and very powerful courses in Moodle. Definitely. Okay, we've got another question here again from Alex and Alex has stated that the Moodle has shown that there are quite a lot of people struggling with the same issues, especially with assessments. And the question is, I think it would be beneficial that we create a community of practice with Moodle personnel to find better solutions. Well, I just might add there that this is really what the Moodle Net project is all about and some of you may know about the Moodle Net project and maybe some of our listeners don't. The Moodle Net project is this concept of a curated area where teachers, instructors, the lecturers can create resources and tools that they use, but it's a curated a group of things that are best practice and they can share their experiences with others who are using the same tool, but it's much bigger than Moodle. It's about building best practice in education. So it's kind of a social platform for educators where they can go and while it has Moodle at the heart of the Moodle Net project, it goes well beyond that and it's more than just technology but it's building best practice as well. Yeah, it's very interesting. You mentioned Moodle Net actually, Michael. We're very excited about that and we're really looking forward to participating in that project. And here within China, for example, we're very keen to set a Moodle Net server up and to connect with other people. And certainly in the kind of situation that we've just been placed in and of course that people all around the world have been placed in being able to share knowledge, share your ideas, your practices, your questions, all of that information, sharing it across the community would be so beneficial. And in this last six months, having something like that available, I think would have made this process so much easier for so many people around the world. So let's hope that it is coming soon and we'll get as much benefit out of it as we can when that happens. Sure, great. Well, that's it for the questions. At this point, we still have a couple of minutes left, but I don't see any other questions. Any other final comments or observations? Nina, do you have anything? About Moodle Net, I try to register it, but it says it is now by invite. So we cannot register accounts to the Moodle Net. Okay. Well, I don't have the address right off the top of my head, but we do have a team of people at Moodle who can help you. So go to the Moodle Net website and undoubtedly there's a contact there where you can make it known that you're interested and I'm sure they'll be happy to get you involved in the project. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. I think just a very quick final comment from me, Michael, would be thank you very much to Moodle for, you know, for organizing something like this. It's the perfect time and it's fantastic to have this opportunity to interact with people around the world who were doing very, very similar things and all engaged in solving these kinds of problems during this time. For us, it's been a great experience to have, you know, to have this opportunity and access to those people. So again, thank you to, you know, to yourself and all of your colleagues for making this possible, I think. Yes, I agree. It's an exciting time. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks.