 Adoption is a bit of an overloaded term, so what I'm going to be talking about here is how you can encourage people in your organisation, your institution to make use of moodle or educational technology in general. Before I get into it too far, I just have been in interaction for myself, so I live in Australia, I don't know if you can tell by my accent. I'm currently living in Canberra, which is a lovely place to go hiking and there's lots of wonderful things to do around there. I have a family and they're enjoying the good schools there and so it's a nice place to live. For moodle HQ, I'm the research director, so I'm sort of the R in R&D. I'm sort of trying to drive things from the beginning a bit there. A lot of it is related to educational technology research, so trying to encourage that within the community and making people aware of it. So there's a forum and there's a Twitter feed for moodle research. We have a repository of moodle related academic papers, that's pretty recent and we're yet to make a big deal out of it, but it's something that if you're doing research or you're interested in research, you can share your research there or you can go and find other research there, which is really good. And obviously the moodle moots are not entirely research, but there is a component of research here, so involved in the organisation of that. We've got an actual research session tomorrow. All right, before we start to sort of get into the nut of this, I guess the main premise here is that if you're going to try and encourage people to use moodle, you've got to sort of think of them as individuals, because just like students, if you try a one size fits all training approach, it's probably likely to hit a very small proportion of those people effectively and there's going to be a lot of people who are either behind or ahead of what you're trying to aim at. So you need to be able to differentiate different types of users. Now, by what means would you do that? A good way of doing that is through this notion of adoption theory. So there was a paper on a diffusion of innovation. It's quite a mature sort of idea now and has been used widely. Basically it sort of plots a population of adopters on this sort of curve. So most people are in that middle bit where they're sort of about to adopt or they just have adopted and they're sort of moving through different stages. What I'm going to do is just sort of go through these different sort of groupings of people and talk about ways in which you can try and drag them just that one step forward. Now here's like the adoption theory in education. So let's start on the left. You've got these innovative people. They're really keen. They want to know, what can I do next? It's not working. Why is that not keeping up? Got too many copies of PowerPoint running here, I think. Let's try that again. There we go. See that? Let's go back a bit. So this diffusion of innovation. Basically, you've got laggards, people who are resistive to change. You've got the late majority of people who are not yet using a system, but they're considering it. People who are early adopters, they have, sorry, the early majority, they have adopted the system. They're sort of considering what to do next. The early adopters, these are the people who are ahead of the game. And there's always a bunch of people who are pushing that limit there and moving on. And what does that look like in terms of educational technology or education in general, really? The laggards tend to be the people who are really resistive. They're comfortable where they are. They don't want to move. They're saying, I don't want to do that. You've got the people who say, well, I'm not sure. You know, it's pretty safe back here. Yeah, what can we do about those people? There's the people that have adopted, but now they're not sure what they want to do. I don't want to, but how do I do? What do I do next? There's the people that want to do things better now. They're confident they've been doing things for a bit of, you know, for some time, and then there's those people. What's next? They're keen. They're looking ahead. And I think I've said that three times now. So we should be one to. All right. OK, what do you do for the people who are the laggards? Well, there's no real incentives that you can offer them that won't be counterproductive in most instances. If you try and force things onto these people, you may end up with bad results. There's a notion of social norming that goes on. If it starts to become the norm that your organization and the people working in your own organization are using something, it becomes very hard for them to resist and they get sort of drawn for it. But there's not much that you can from a training or authoritarian point of view to do to drag them onwards. A good example of what you don't want to do, you don't want to emphasise nonconformance. You don't want to say, oh, those people in music or maths or something, they insist on doing it the same way that they've been doing it before. If you highlight those people, you're going to start to basically give an excuse to other people who don't necessarily want to do it either. I won't go into this particular example, but you can look it up, the petrified forest study. It's quite a relevant thing there. People have also done studies in conformance around, you know, things like water restrictions and, you know, basically adopting practices that save water and that sort of thing. The ultimate thing is, if others aren't doing it, if you can find examples of other people who aren't doing it, then you've got an excuse not to do it yourself. What do you do instead? Well, you want to promote the good. You want to emphasise the people who are using the system and using it well, and hopefully that social norming will then become apparent, they'll draw those people forward. OK, now, ahead of the laggards, you've got this late majority. These are people who have not yet adopted the system. They're not resisting things as much, but they need a bit of encouragement to go over the hump and get into that list of people who are using the system. So what incentives can we offer to those people? Well, the main thing is saving time. OK? If you can say to these people, yes, it's a bit of an investment, but in the end, you're going to save time. Think of all the time you're wasting doing this, OK? You can possibly save that time. All right. So the late majority can be given tools like the forums and the glossary to save them repeating themselves. You know, if they're answering things by email or if they're having to go to classes and repeat the answers over and over again, then some sort of mass communication facilitated within the learning management system will save them a lot of effort. Materials reuse. Obviously, if, you know, you can get them to bring their things together, then the next semester, then it's already there. A bit of refinement will save them a lot of time. So invest now and then you can reuse things later. Now, the term dump and pump got a bad rep, but it's a starting point. People have to start somewhere. If they're there, they're, you know, not using the system at all, they need to get into that next step. So a few things in Moodle, files and repositories that you can encourage them to make use of. External resources, basically they've got systems outside that they want to use, at least linking to those systems. It's not, Moodle's not meant to be the be all and end all. It's not supposed to be the all encompassing system. So linking to things on the web, LTI is, you know, something that's growing and something that facilitates a lot of external systems. Thinking about Moodle as the learning operating system, the place where things can be linked from and work from. Repositories are a way that, you know, advanced people can share their things with less advanced people and they can become more productive without too much effort. So, you know, within institutions or within departments, shared content. Media streaming repositories, obviously, if staff are having their things recorded and so on, making it available to them and automating some of that can be really helpful. And there are a number of standard, even, so YouTube, we've got standard repositories and things like that, but you can also link to other things as well. So that's sort of external stuff. Now, does this sound old to you? It should. Probably does, okay? You don't expect to hear this sort of preach that a Moodle moved. Probably because you're some of the people and you're further along that adoption curve. But don't forget those people who are behind you still. Okay, if you expect them to be at the same level as you, you're probably gonna find more resistance. Okay, so those people who have adopted, they've gone over, they've braved things, they're into the next sort of segment. They want to do things, they're not quite sure how. The incentive for them is easier management. All right, things like electronic assessment can save loads of work, thanks. If you can get things submitted electronically, there's such a saving of time and handling that that is really significant. You can quantify that. You can really make that obvious. Offering them means of assessing students' work in a more efficient way through rubrics and checklists and so on. It really does save time and it also adds a lot of other benefits and I won't go into that here, but. So Moodle offers and you've seen some of Martin's stuff that this has improved even further. One of the resistance sort of ideas that I've had mentioned to me is that people want to mark red pen on paper, okay, and they can't do that necessarily in an online sense, but now they can. There are equivalent tools and they can do it in a more efficient way. Automated assessment, so shifting some of the monolithic assignments, distributing assessment out and introducing some automated elements to assessment can really save effort as well. So obviously automated assessment with quiz and lesson can really make that a lot easier. Those people who have been doing it for a while, they want to know how can I do it better? What is their incentive? They're aiming for better outcomes for their students. They know that they've been doing this. They've mastered a bit. I want to see my students doing better now. The earlier doctors, they're seeing that, you know, transforming their way of teaching from this transmission model to more of an involved model will hopefully be seen as something that they can get better outcomes from. Peer-to-peer assessment is something that the workshop module encourages and that can bring the people together. A lot of research has gone into peer assessment and the benefits to learners from that. We also offer collaboration in a number of different modules. In fact, most modules in Moodle can have group modes turned on and you can bring things together. The group assessment is really strong. It's been encouraging to see that expand. Changing the way that you teach from that transmission model, there's a lot of other models as well. Different modalities, you know, obviously one-to-one, many-to-one, getting people to interact in different ways and also the system itself can be part of that. Different means of delivery, flipping the classroom and there's a lot more ideas coming about. Just ways of teaching that have come about simply because of the introduction of the learning management system. And the final group, they're keen. They want to do what's next. They want to be on the cutting edge. They're trying things. Their goal is to improve education. What can we give them to help them achieve that? Adaptive and personalized learning is something that basically shifts from this one-size-fits-all where everybody's treated the same product of which is a very sort of fragmented, holy understanding of things, going towards the not one-size-fits-all and recognizing that learners are doing this sort of in quite a different way. There's a lot of research following that. Basically, your goal is to create an understanding in the student's head, which has got a lot fewer gaps and the product of that is better learning later down the track. So in Myrtle, you can achieve these sort of different pathways, repetition, personalization. You can push people ahead. You can hold people back. You can get them to go around in cycles until they understand the concept using different activity completion and restriction settings. Course completion is a way of looking at a bit more holistically at a course level and there are other sort of means as well at the site level. If they're looking to push ahead, having an understanding of how their students are learning by looking at the data is definitely something that there's a lot of plug-ins and a lot of parts of Myrtle in core as well that are able to draw out that data and make it available to students, to teachers and to the people making decisions above them. And finally, obviously getting involved in the Myrtle project, and it's not just for developers. If you're doing research, it's a great framework. If you're interested in collaborating with other training people, other teachers, there is forums for you to communicate. If you're interested in making improvements to Myrtle, there's a tracker that allows people to communicate their ideas. There are plug-ins that people can review, try out, things like that, and there's QA testing of the next version that they can be involved in. Anyway, the take-home message then for this is that if you want to encourage adoption, you've got to recognize not all teachers are the same and you want to just draw them forward that next step, okay? In the same way, if you're heading forward, not all learners are the same. You want to use the tools to help improve education. Thanks.