 So I'm Gavin. Compared to last year, some of you may or may not know that I've worked with Moodle for nine years and ran the Moodle Meet for the last, whatever, four years before here. But last September, I joined Moodle HQ as a community projects manager. So it's been a very interesting journey. But let's start off. If you've been to any of my other presentations today, you'll know what's coming next. So let's whip out your mobile app or just access the Mood site, please. And there's a few short questions there. I just want to start off this with. And someone's going to ask me at the coffee break, Gavin, are you trying to demonstrate the usefulness of the choice activity for audience response? I mean, never thought of that. I mean, all that lovely money you paid to as a touring point and other clicker technology, can't imagine why you'd want to save spending all that money. However, let's go and have a look. So there's a few different questions in there. So the first one is, what version of Moodle are you currently using? So if you can go in, please, and come on. Come on, Phil, go in there. What? No, no, it's on. It's through the mobile app. Two point. Yeah. Come on. This is, if you log into the mobile app, there's a course called Responses. And this is basically showing real time information. Well, near real time, as the technical people say, information of what's coming in that choice. So this is something which we're looking at also, maybe ending up in core, is a teacher view, so they can use it while you're in class. So we have 3.0, 2.9, and 2.8. Oh, I'm surprised there isn't more people on 2.7. Oh, it's fighting back. Well, if you're on multiple Moodles, okay. Yeah, pick the highest number you can think of, and add two. Somebody's on 1.9 or below. That person needs a hug. Where are you? Where are you? You need a hug. Okay. It was a joke. That's okay then. Right, so 2.8. It's actually quite nice to see so many already on 3.0. And I think that one of the challenges, I think it was Andrew Boyk from Catalyst, talking about this whole idea of continuous integration and constantly trying to stay up to date. I mean, most people do a major upgrade once a year. And so it's really interesting to see what versions they go to and when they go on. In the Northern Hemisphere, most people seem to go to like 3.0 in this coming summer. And that's what one of the next questions were. So as soon as it refreshes. If you go on to the mobile, well then if you just log in on the website, it's the same. It's called. Yeah, go to your dashboard. It's under Moodle Moot responses. So if you're upgrading, what are you upgrading to? Okay, 3.1. So you're all looking forward to all that CBE stuff. So what's the one reason you're going 3.1 over say going 3.0? Anybody? Pardon? So it's the long-term support. Yeah, I mean, that's why I was surprised so few on 2.7. Because that long-term support is really useful for an institution to not have to retrain each year. Of course, the downside is you don't get all the sexy stuff every year or every six months. But if you don't mind, if you don't want some sexy in your education, that's okay. Let's have a look at any of these others here. So does your organization use the mobile app? Wow, okay. Really like the second one there. So between yes, but no, but plan two, 63%. So nearly two thirds. That's cool. Obviously we've been using the mobile app to demonstrate that it actually is useful now. And especially with the calendar and all that sort of stuff, but I'll come to it later. But I particularly like this use for audience response. Now, since we're going to, oh wow, that's pretty emphatic. It's lucky. Did someone hear my comments downstairs by any chance? So I scoped out Liverpool and Manchester last year to try and make a decision on where to hold them out and then ended up doing it back in Dublin. But Birmingham's coming back up, please no, no. I was nearly born in Birmingham. I was born in Coventry. Two hours later, I would have been Birmingham. At least people forgive me for being born in Coventry. Is it no one here's from Coventry as well, are you? That's okay. Yeah. So yeah, so obviously we're going to take this into account, but my favorite was certainly Manchester for the Moodle Mood next year because it has some kick-ass jazz clubs. Really important to get your priorities straight. Okay. So just before we move on, so what do you think of using a choice and this for interactive response in a say teaching session or a conference? Awesome. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, well basically that is a 20 line PHP script calling the web services from the mobile app. It basically goes give me a list of the choices I can use and then when it selects it, it just says give me the results for that and use graph.js. But we are intending to try and get that, or at least Martin said wherever he's hiding. He's there. So what? It should be in the app and on the web at the teacher view. So you can just do this out of Moodle. So yeah, so in that way we will release it. But it took my other half I think an hour or two to put together. I love graph.js, it's just so sexy, the stuff it does. Okay, moving along. It's a road. Except you wouldn't be able to cycle along this one. Well, at least not at the speeds that he cycles. So when I say cycle, it's more like electronic projection. It's like. Really, are you sure? Okay, okay. So what's this about? Well, over the last 20 years of me using technology and working in business, I've had a very windy road in my career. I've worked in hotel trade. I'm a qualified PR consultant, which you probably never guess. And I've worked in telecoms, worked in ISPs. But then it's always been sort of going around technology, a little bit of education and did a sort of a Jeb IT trainer thing to sort of get an idea around that. But I started off working with a Moodle partner and then got into Moodle and started blogging about it and started reflecting and sort of being part of the community and wanting to share and reflect on things like I started reviewing plugins from the plugin database because people were saying, hey, Gavin, what ones are good? And I go, I've no idea. So I'd go off and play with them. And it was really interesting to sort of be sharing and then be part of a community and start becoming part of a community. And that sort of journey, it wasn't sort of becoming a thing. It was more becoming a part of a thing. And it was a really interesting process from looking back at it because the more I got involved, the more I got feedback, the more I wanted to get involved. And clearly I like writing way too much. So three books at this stage, all collaborated with other people who probably did most of the work. But it's again, it's about sharing ideas. And it's about giving back, it's about trying to reflect on the process, reflect on the business one, there's case studies in there, which are really cool, some of them. Didn't write them all, but they were quite cool. So I was with Innovation for about three and a half years and they do a huge amount of different open source software. Now they're actually not here. They're one of the Ireland UK partners who weren't able to make it this week. But it really opened my eyes to the community and the overall, because they started off with Moodle in Ireland and when someone came along and said, hey, we need a learning management system. And they went, okay. And I went, well, we haven't got really a very big budget. If you're a service provider, I bet you've never heard that before. So they looked out there and they found Moodle. And this was, I think 12 years ago now. So they'd been using it for a while before I joined them. And it was a really interesting experience working with people and working and starting to learn about the Moodle community, about you, about other people sharing their ideas, by sharing code and that whole different way of thinking. Because before that, I'd done software development. I'd had a software development company with all closed source. It was proprietary. It was license driven. It was a very different mentality. And your worth was based on your product and your code and stuff rather than actually on the sharing aspect of it and which made it more valuable. So it was a complete mind shift. And I think over time, worked with them, I said three and a half years. And when I left them, went off to the States in Canada for a while and came back, set up by myself and I went, okay, I'm not a Moodle partner anymore, not working for one. But maybe I want to become one at some stage, but I wanted to keep giving back to the community. So that's when I started running the Moodle Moods four years ago. And it was really interesting seeing what people wanted getting people involved in the program committees and seeing how that worked and that people were so willing to share. I mean, we're here, there's 335 people who showed up for this conference. Last five years, it's been consistently over 300. Edinburgh was 400. I'm not quite sure why, but there was like a hundred Scottish people at the Edinburgh Conference. How many people from Scotland now? Two, three. I think that's the difference basically. It's like the Welsh. I keep getting asked to run a Moodle Mood in Wales and I'm going, okay, but no one ever comes out of Wales. Like there's one person, where is he hiding? He's gone. So, pardon? Welcome. Yeah, so it's like, I mean, there isn't that many Welsh Moodlers, but clearly they don't like communicating with the rest of us, but it's... It's been a really interesting process of working with everyone in the community and moving around and seeing how people are so willing to share and so willing to be part of that community and how much they get back from the feedback from their presentations. And it's, I mean, I know some people are serial sort of presenters at this stage who just want to present every year in as many as possible. I think it's great. But then this sort of led me to last year going, well, my business has been there for four years. Either I then tried to become a Moodle partner and grew and got big and competed with all the guys here or I went, made a change. So I was really lucky to join HQ and I feel privileged to now be more in an integral part of the community and the community team here. Because it's, it is a privilege to work with these people who literally have a completely different vision. And part of this is why this is a windy road. This is a journey of ideology and a way of changing how you view things and how you interact. Not just on it. I mean, obviously there is a commercial aspect to all of these things. This Moodle Mood basically pays for itself with the sponsor's help and they fund about a third of it. Otherwise you'd be paying real conference rates. I know that it's not cheap in London but it could be a lot worse. But it's really interesting and seeing a different vision. And even from the outside and the inside it was quite a big mind jump. And I'm still on that road. Still wobbling on my bike, going down that road. And the community team in Moodle, they look after obviously the main Moodle site. They look after Moodle docs, languages, all of these aspects which interact with you on a daily basis. I mean, I mean, when we looked at some of the statistics of how often Moodle docs pages are being looked at and it's just astounding. Ridiculous amount. But things change. And we can see that, for example, the community interacts with Moodle more on Twitter and on Facebook and in other areas and not just on Moodle.org. So the community adapts with technology and we adapt in responding to that. And the Moodle Mood, us running, our HQ running, official Moodle Mood is part of that. That we want to be seen to be more involved. And I think that's a really important thing. I mean, this year, I have the really difficult task of having to run a Moodle Mood in Hollywood, Perth in Australia and Rome. It's a terrible job, but someone's got it to it. Actually, yeah, because it's like the Hilton Los Angeles in LA and it's the Hilton Universal right beside Universal Park. I mean, there are worse places. Well, actually, it's nearly as good as this place except it's not all underground. So I feel a bit like we should be in Wimbledon Common here, not beside the Thames. But speaking of official Moodle Moods, that was a picture from the first one. You can see these lovely letters which I have now. These are my hand luggage on their lingus. I'm not sure they're gonna charge me extra or not, but it should be an interesting one. But those letters started off, there's a group of them off in Australia. Someone's looking after the ones over in the US and these are now my baby. However, Hideo, where are you? So he today just signed the agreement to be the official Moodle Mood in Japan. So, now the Japanese Moodle Mood is a little bit different to this one. This one's much more practitioner driven. So there is some research and I'd say about one eighth to sort of slightly more research based here. But the Japanese Moodle Mood is very uniquely, it has a very strong research base. So if next, I believe February 14th, yeah? So if you are not doing anything on February 14th or you've been kicked out of the house, Japan Moodle Mood, I know that's where I'd like to go. So unfortunately, I think if I went to it, I'd get kicked out of the house. So that's good, so that's another one. And this year we also had the Indian Moodle Mood, it was an official Moodle Mood. And next year we'll probably run that one. And we're also looking at a Latin American one as well. So it's gonna be very interesting times because this gives us a much closer relationship with you. Because we get to get that sort of feedback and interaction, which is so valuable. And it's what drives Moodle. And the other side of Moodle community, especially for me, because I've got two hats. I actually don't wear any hats, but I've got two hats. And it's sort of, I also work with the Moodle partners on the business side of things. And I mean, the Moodle partners primarily fund Moodle. I mean, Mark has explained that you have the Moodle User Association, which will help fund one aspect of development and donations and so on. But so the Moodle partners are an essential and integral part of what makes Moodle work. And every time you use a Moodle partner, a portion of that revenue goes directly back to help fund the development of Moodle. I think that's an amazingly circular relationship. That we support them to support you, to support us. And it just makes Moodle just roll along. And so it's really interesting, because a lot of these companies are small to medium-sized companies. I think at this Moodle meet, we fought 14 Moodle partners here, Martin, was it? Yeah, and which is brilliant. I think it's amazing. Some of them I've never met before. And it was a real privilege to work with these people who are so dedicated in supporting institutions. I think it was the Portuguese Moodle partner I hadn't met before. Is he still here? He's down at the back. And of course, we've got then, so we have some small businesses the whole way up to Blackboard and Phil over there. And so it takes a lot of different types of companies to deliver those sort of services, but it's a privilege working with them and helping them and listening to them because they also have the ear of an awful lot of people who are using Moodle sort of in anger as such. So, on the project side, I'm partly involved in mobile. And as you can probably guess at this stage, I like the mobile app. I don't know if that came across yet, no? So, but what's, I mean, for me, before I worked with innovation, I had worked in telecoms and primarily mobile telecoms. And we had built one of the first TV interactive Java apps, remember those? It's like a red button thing, but on a mobile. It was some really interesting stuff with some of the big sort of reality TV shows when they were beginning. And so understanding mobile and where mobile is and how people use mobile, and that now there is more traffic on the web on mobile than there is on a normal desktop or even a tablet. So people want to interact that way, but how they use mobile is quite interesting. They use mobile for education in the same way that they have used mobile for quite a while, primarily for messaging and consumption. And, but it's the activities, I think, which will bring it to the next level. So, if we look at messaging, so first one's obviously notifications. If you've got notifications turned on your profile, you'll have been cased by notifications for the calendar events, which again, we're trying to show that this is how your students could be getting alerts for classrooms, deadlines, whatever it might be. And so that's the way it works and you can see the information that's shown in there. And we had it synced, the calendar synced up with Twitter. Although I think the first time we synced it with Twitter, it was synced with Eastern Standard Time. So that was a bit of an echo. However, it got fixed. So it's, and then you've got obviously the forums, which now work and you can interact through the forums on there. And we're also planning that that can be sort of an offline sync eventually as well, that you can reply offline and eventually it just gets pushed in. And the messaging obviously, some people have been using that messaging already and messaging me going, Gavin, what's the address code for the dinner? This was a guy messaging me and I sort of went, okay, well actually it's smart casual, but if you want to come in a dress, that's perfectly okay. He didn't reply back. So I'm not so sure about that one there, but it's my standard reply when people ask about dress codes. And then you've got the other side of the app. So you got, that's the messaging. You have I think comprehensive functionality already there, although we're working to improve it. Then you've got the whole aspect of around the courses itself. So the course structures, the content that you can have pages there, you can have documents, you can have books, and you can get all that offline. You can go into a course and go download all, just a little cloud with the down arrow and it takes it offline. So while you're in the tube or you're out hill walking and where is Tim currently walking along? It's Norfolk. Norfolk, he's walking along in the rain, Tim Hunt on holidays. So he could be there doing some CPD SCORM object on his mobile without any mobile coverage. I imagine he's doing that right now, Health and Safety 101. But it's that kind of functionality, being able to really be mobile. I think that's gonna be really powerful for students, that they can go on campus, get their all the content offline and then use it without using up their data on their mobile as well. So I think that's just really special. But that obviously has challenges because you need to think about, well, if I embed content from everywhere, they can't download a copy of it. And I'm always a fan of using YouTube because if you're gonna use a bit of free technology to transcode your video. When I was working on mobile, we had transcoding engines and it is the most complicated, expensive thing on the planet to transcode video the whole time. So YouTube doing it, thank you very much. But if you want it downloadable, you have to use MP4s. And actually on LearnMoodle, a lot of people do download the MP4 as well so they can have a copy of it offline. So it's something to think about. Because when you think about using in a classroom, you might give printouts. It's what I call takeaways from education. You need to do that on mobile as well. You need to enable that. Now, very briefly going through these, this is what we have online and offline in the different feature sets in the mobile app currently. And we're constantly working to improve it. We now have three people in the team. We've two of them here on the table at the front. So it's constantly working away on it. The quiz, really super sexy stuff at the moment. I love it. We're working on, so how's the offline stuff coming? When do you think that'll be ready there, Juan? Two weeks, okay. Thank you, Juan. And then of assignment submission as well. So the fact you'll be able to do all of this sort of stuff, so most student experience can be done just through the mobile app. I mean, to me, that's like a nirvana. That is heaven for the students. They're totally in control of that engagement. And of course it works single sign-on. One of the challenges with the MoodleMood site is that it's single signs on Moodle.org. But it's worked, most of you are using it. I think it's 60% of people at the conference here are using it, so I think that's great. But people have been asking us going, you know what, we want our own brand. We want, for example, a DCU mobile app or we want an ICT mobile app or whatever it might be. And we're saying, well, it's open source, you can do it and they go, yeah, but you know what? Our IT department said, great idea, get someone else to do it. Or they just said, no. And anyone from the IT department who keep hearing me say, call you to the department of no, that's just what other people tell me about you. I'm sorry, but it is, it's totally like, so the idea of this is branded, it'll be called your institution name Moodle or not Moodle if you rebrand it and that we will then just do the publishing for you and look after all of that. And one of the Moodle partners will work with you to advise you on what you might have to change. Because if they look at your site and say, hey, you have 5,000 scorms, that's cool. 4,995 of them are in flash, not so cool. So they will be able to help and advise you on what you might need to do to change or if the settings or a version that you need to upgrade. So that's part of the overall service. And it's something that we basically currently release, I think it's a monthly, isn't it? Yeah. So for this one, we're just planning to do it every two months because there is a significant amount of work to republish with all the updates. So that's a service that we're going to be offering with the Moodle partners. So if you're interested, come along and chat to me and I'll point you in the direction of which Moodle partner to go and have a talk to or chat to them and they'll come to us. Okay. Oh, just to explain the simplified login. If you had a look at the Learn Moodle app, when you go into it, it just points you directly at the Learn Moodle site. So this would be the same for you. They would just go directly at your Moodle site. They wouldn't have to add the URL in or anything like that, which the normal mobile app has. So it makes a seamless experience. And that's really important. So I heard Mark Brown let a cat out of the bag or at least I was up in the office and I heard it screaming. So he introduced, what was it? The DCU Open Academy, was it? Or something like that. So a lot of people are running MOOCs on Moodle. Some of them run it on their institutional Moodle and some of them run it on secondary Moodle. I think someone was saying, oh yeah, we have an external Moodle for anyone not in the institution sit because our IT won't let them in, which is a good idea. You don't want 30,000 people in for three weeks on your infrastructure. It might creak a little like this stage or at least with me on it. So the idea here is that Moodle allows you to innovate. So in the presentation I gave on MOOCs, when you have your own Moodle module in your Moodle course and then you run an equivalent one as a MOOC, you can make changes, you can experiment, you can do A-B testing and sort of give different types of assessment, run two parallel streams of learners through it, which would be very hard for you to get ethical approval for doing that type of research on your current student cohort. And then what you learn from that, you can bring back in because it's the same platform. You own the content, so it's a commonality. You can copy and reuse. And I think these are some of the key things and it's also leveraging the skills because if you already are using Moodle, you'll need to learn another platform or figure out, well, what features the equivalent of quiz or workshop or whatever it might be. So in response to a lot of requests, we're launching Moodle Academy, which is gonna be a centralized MOOC hosting platform ran and hosted by Moodle. So that institutions will be able to choose to basically use that software as a service solution so that they would say, hey, we have a four week course, we wanna run it for 60,000 people. They can just put it out there and then we'll be able to look after the hosting and stuff of that. There's obviously a whole sort of process about we will have experience with running MOOCs and not just learn Moodle but also outside of that. So it's a service we'll be able to offer again with the Moodle partners to try and help you be able to run MOOCs on Moodle but in a way that is cost-effective. So this is just a few screenshots of some of the mock-ups that we have at the moment. This will be May, June, aiming for. We have two partners already and we'll be looking for some more. There's a few interesting parts of it. You can see that in the my courses part, which is there's actually sort of completion tracking built into there. Completion tracking built into the course catalog part or the my courses area of Moodle, including percentages. Oh, oops, go back up one. So this page, every single institution will have their own little landing page which is I think quite DCU's calling there as the DCU Academy. And again, we really believe this as Academy in the truest sense where people can come together and sort of share that experience and bring that learning aspect to a different level rather than just running it on their own individual Moodle site, they can leverage others around them. Also have sort of a slightly different dashboard because obviously, unlike a normal Moodle site where there aren't current upcoming and archived courses necessarily, it depends on how you manage them. This is a different interface to be able to use this as a MOOC environment. Also, yeah, very big picture there. Obviously Moodle has it usually a little bit smaller but a different profile interface. So I think I was mentioning this to someone at the Hackfest, was it? I don't know if they're still here. But again, it's just about having a more MOOC-like environment based on Moodle. Also made changes to the actual management interface. So this is what editing turned on. So it's using more of the modern sleek type of layout for editing rather than words, icons, that kind of thing which would be, again, quite standard on a lot of applications. So also along the left there, you have the completion tracking rather than on the right. I think a few people do that now. And we also have completion tracking on a literally section by section basis within the course as well. So it's a variation of a topic, a topic course format. Also on the right hand side, one of the things which we made a change was for a discussion block. Who here uses the comment block on Moodle? Okay. So the comment block on Moodle is one where you actually are bottom posting rather than top posting. So you read through all the comments and then at the bottom you write in. Where this one is using the format very similar to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or you top post. So it's just a subtle change in that respect. And so that's sort of academy and that's basically what it is. It's something which we will run those courses or host those courses while you run them. You work with you and with the partners to actually get you to optimize your course because not everyone is familiar with running MOOCs. You might all be running those modules as 12, 16 week courses. But when you come to think about them as a MOOC, it is a little bit different as Mary will have gone through with some people on the master class on Tuesday. So you have to think differently. It's very much project managed, how you facilitate, how you engage, how you structure and also the cadence of a course is different to make sure that you don't suffer the challenges of the funnel of engagement in these things which are again, research based being problems of how people engage with these courses. I think it was really interesting point in one of the earlier sessions of surveying people and actually asking them what their expectation is at the very, very beginning because how do you know if someone's successful in a MOOC? Well, they say so rather than you say so. So for them to say so, you need to know what was their goal. It's been a nine year journey for me using Moodle and there's so much ahead. I mean, I feel really privileged to have been working with the community for the last time, especially over the last four years with Moodle Moods and now to be working with HQ, it's really good. So there's a lot of really cool things ahead and 3.1 and another project that we're doing in Moodle Cloud and so on. So that's it from me. So sorry for all the roads, but this is the road ahead and we're going into a very luchas valley there. So thank you.