 All right, well, hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us and welcome to today's Moodle Academy webinar, What Moodle Cloud Can Do For You? My name is Richard LaFroy. I am the Learning and Media Technologist with Moodle Academy and I'll be introducing and hosting this session. Joining me today is Francis LaPage, Product Manager of Moodle Cloud and Francis will be taking over very shortly to give us a tour of Moodle Cloud and to show us just what it can do for you. We'll explore the differences between Moodle LMS and Moodle Cloud and we'll look at the specific details that make Moodle Cloud unique. We've also got other members from the Moodle Cloud team with us. So yeah, look, as I mentioned just before, please do feel free to drop any questions that you have into the text chat area. And we will take a few opportunities as we go to stop and address any of those questions. So thank you and Francis, over to you. Well, thanks, Richard. Yes, my name's Francis LaPage. I'm the Product Manager of Moodle Cloud. Today, what we'll be talking about is running through what Moodle Cloud is, who mainly uses Moodle Cloud and what's included in a Moodle Cloud plan. We'll be demonstrating our Moodle Cloud customer portal, a Moodle Cloud trial site and a Moodle Cloud site that's already been set up with a course. We'll be talking about what the differences are between those and what the differences are between a Moodle LMS self-hosted solution and a Moodle Cloud site. We'll show you what you can do with a fresh Moodle Cloud trial site to make it your own and then show you some examples of what a course can look like within an already set up Moodle Cloud site. And I'll be going through some settings from there. We'll end our session today with how to get started with Moodle Cloud and then of course, there's time for questions. So to start off, the big question is, what is Moodle Cloud? So Moodle Cloud is Moodle's own affordable cloud-hosted solution for anyone wanting to use Moodle LMS to deliver online learning. So you can easily sign up for a Moodle Cloud free trial or a Moodle Cloud paid plan and you can add your courses and start your online journey. So who uses Moodle Cloud? We have three main sort of sections that we break our Moodle Cloud users into. We've got our Moodle Cloud educators so they can measure students' progress and provide timely feedback in that sort of, in any different type of education sort of area. So it could be a teacher, you could be teaching yoga classes, any of those sort of things. We then have our workplace trainers that use Moodle Cloud. So this is for sort of compliance or certification tracking different analytics. You can report tools, those sorts of things to monitor employee progress. So a lot of them can have like a simple sort of certification and then they get a certificate at the end and then they'll have whoever new employees come on. And the last one is a bit of the entrepreneurs that use Moodle Cloud. We have the e-commerce integrations to have payment gateways to easily accept payments so you can sell courses, those sorts of things as well. And there's different features like gamification features like badges, certificates and those sorts of things. So what's included in a Moodle Cloud sites? All our Moodle Cloud plans include unlimited courses and activities. We have our built in video conferencing for up to 100 users and we use big blue button. We also have the ability to personalize the site name. So for example, you could have my site at MoodleCloud.com. You've got access to the Moodle Apps Premium plan which has quite, you know, got lots of different features and things available. There's ability to connect to repositories such as Google Drive and Dropbox. And we have payment integration using PayPal, custom certificates, got document converter, automated backups and the latest version of the Moodle LMS. So we're always up to date with what the most recent release of Moodle LMS is and we take away all of that hassle if you've ever tried to host a Moodle site yourself. We upgrade that for you and you just sit back and you get the new features available to you when they're available. So what's not included in a Moodle Cloud site? We get this question quite a lot. It is a little bit different to what you would get on your self-hosted or a premium sort of solution. Moodle Cloud plans have some features and options disabled that you might have available in those options. For example, the plugins and theme installations have been disabled. We have a selection of a couple of plugins available to you that we keep updated. Additional storage, unlimited users, custom domain names for example, but that's actually coming soon within our plans. Personalize onboarding and support. So there's some sort of support packages that you can get with premium hosted solutions for example that can do all those onboarding for you. We also have the accessibility tool Brickfields Disabled at this point. Installing your own language packs but you are able to change your language within your site and some other advanced settings such as access to the server has been disabled. So whenever you see this little defined in code big symbol that's where something has been disabled within your Moodle Cloud site but these are the main ones that you might come across. So before I move on to a little bit of a demo through our different parts of our sites does anyone have any questions that they want to raise before I move on to that? Not sure if there's anything in the chat don't have it open. Hasn't been anything in the chat just yet. Good people a second to drop anything in there. If I can just a quick comment maybe from my, I guess from my perspective coming from previous job working in a university we're working with academic staff who would often find it pretty difficult getting their hands on Moodle so they can try it out for themselves and Moodle Cloud from my experience seeing several years ago Moodle Cloud was a great option for baseball anyone really but in my case it was teachers that just sort of go off on their own time and being able to skip all of the difficult technical challenges that a lot of teachers just don't want to deal with and just be able to get at a Moodle site up and running and be able to test it out so yeah I guess seeing that first hand was pretty great for some of the people that I was working with before. Yeah I think, sorry carry on. That's right I was about to say yeah it's very great to have that and it's easy to sort of sign up even just to go and have a look at the free trial and you can see what the latest sort of Moodle features are as well which is quite handy. So I'll move on to a bit of a demo here. Just as Francis is doing that there's just one comment from Christina who says really appreciate the insights into what's not included. So companies often fail to make that information transparent and readily available. So thanks Christina for that. Yeah exactly as I like to mention it because we do get questions around that and it's really important to show the differences and things like that as well so no worries at all. So first of all I'm going to show off the Moodle Cloud Customer Portal. So can you see my screen Moodle Cloud Customer Sign In wonderful. So I'm just going to show you from here the login is your site name. So it's the first text that you added into your URL for your site name to log in to the customer portal and the password is always the same as the one where you signed up. So this is as a site administrator for Moodle Cloud. So once you log in of course my internet goes a bit slow you get your Moodle Cloud Portal. So from here this is a free trial that I've logged in as viewing. So you'll see that you'll get the free trial expiry banner here and that shows how long I've got left. And then there's also sites recently been upgraded to the latest version of Moodle 4.2.1 and you can check out the new sort of features in there as well. So from here we look at the package. So this is the information that you get to give a bit of details on what sort of your package is. So this is your site name and your URL and you can go to your site from here. You can also click the site rename button here which is a new addition to our portal and you can rename your site. So say I didn't want it to be demo Moodle Cloud anymore and I changed it to my name Francis for example. It does depend if that site name is available but it will go through that process. So it also gives you detail of what package you're on. So I'm on the free trial but this would change to either mini, small depending on what sort of plan you have and from here you can also upgrade your plan. This is where the latest version of Moodle LMS is. So it gives you the most recent reference number. So we'll be going through the next upgrade phase of Moodle 4.2.2. This gives you a bit of a summary of the limits that you've got. So you've got 50 users, the storage space and your big blue button sessions. This is your little hosting location. We have three hosting locations. We've got Australia, Ireland and United States. So you can choose those on your sign up as well. And this is your status that your site is live. Here you can go into the statistics tab. This will load to show what users you've got on there, what files you've got available. And you can also click here and it goes out to your middle cloud site to see what files are available. There's not much there because it's a brand new site. So it's not a very good graph to give an example of. We'll go across to the Billings tab because this is a trial site as well. There's no payment information on there but if you go to upgrade, you'll need to put some payment information in there. So from here, you can actually select credit card and you can put your credit card details in or you can add your PayPal and it comes up with the PayPal pop up to either login or create an account from there. The next tab along is the tools tab. So this is a bit more about exporting your site or deleting your site if you want to do that. So you can go through exporting your site. There's two options that you can have the format in. This is generally used for if you're exporting your site and wanting to grow into a Moodle partner or Moodle services and you want a more sort of custom solution, you can actually export your site with all your courses and users and all those information in there. And you can give it to them when the download's ready and they're able to upload that into their own sort of hosted solution for you. Or if you wanted to go and do that yourself that's an option as well. It is a little bit technical. So if you're not on the technical side I would suggest going to a Moodle partner or services from there. This is the big scary stuff to remove your site. You can remove your Moodle Cloud site from the portal. You just have to be aware that once you've done it's completely gone from our systems we wouldn't be able to get it back from you. So I would suggest to always take a backup of your site and that's why we've got the big scary stuff symbol there. The last tab that I'll go through is the change plan. So this is where you can upgrade your plan to one of our paid plan options. So we've got our starter, mini, small, medium and standard plan. You can select one of those and upgrade to the plan that you want and you can click down here for some more plan information from there as well. And if those plans don't suit you you can always go to the Moodle Certified Service Provider or Moodle Partner from here and it will click into a form but you can fill out the information that you would require and they will get back in contact with you and start sending you up with a customized solution from there. The other thing that you can do in the Moodle portal which is quite handy is get another site so you can actually get another paid plan for example or another trial site if you wanted and you can click here and have it all in the same portal. And once you do that, you can have a dropdown on the left here that will show the different sites that you have available and it's all under the one site administrator account. So you can sort of keep track of all the sites that you might have. In the top right-hand corner here is your account tab. This is where you do all your account for this site administrator that's controlling all these different sites as well as the portal here. So you can have your personal details. You can also add a VAT number so that can be added to your next invoice. If you do add this in after you've already had been invoiced, it won't be added to the current invoice. It will go to the next one when you start having that payment out. You can add organization details which also will be added to your next invoice. Same thing, it won't be added to the one that's already been issued. And you can also opt in and out of communications here. So you can sign up to the Moodle newsletter and learn a bit more about what's outside of Moodle that's happening in different product areas. So we've got the update password detail and email address from there as well. And if you do add any of the details in here, you always have to press save details at the bottom. It doesn't automatically save them. So that's the Moodle Cloud portal. So from here, I'll move on to the trial site to give you a bit of a view of what that looks like. So this is what a trial site will look like when you first get in it. When you first log in, you will get some onboarding pop-ups added to here. That just sort of gives you a bit more of guidance of what you wanna do when you first get there. And I strongly suggest everyone follow them unless you're a Moodle expert, but they are quite handy to see there's got a little pop-up saying welcome back. You can easily dismiss them or you can even snooze them so you can come back another time and go through that onboarding journey. So the first thing I was gonna have a look at is, gonna show you, this is where you can access the Moodle Cloud portal that we were just in. You can click that and it will go out to it. There's little toggles around the site as well that can give you a bit of information on what these things are. For example, this edit mode at the top right-hand corner is where you wanna be able to edit anything of your site as the site administrator or the teacher, for example. So on the right-hand side here is the block draw. So if you have the edit mode on, you can then add a new block. For example, I can add the calendar and it will pop up here. It's really quite simple. And if you're in within a course, we've got a little starting with Moodle course to help you get started and learn how to sort of add different activities within there. To be just to note that this course is hidden, so it's only visible to the site administrator and it's just to get started and learn how to add things. And on the left-hand side here is you'll find the course index. So how you've set up your course, you can see the different topic one, topic two, for example, and the different activities within there. The other thing I wanted to show you was the little help icon at the bottom. So you see the little question mark. If you pop up this, you can always see, you can go into the Moodle documentation. So this is docs.moodle.org and there's other information in the forums as well that if you need any help. So I would always suggest to go and have a look at that and you can learn about different things and aspects of Moodle to help you and go into the forums to ask any questions from anyone. There's also the services and support that goes into more of the premium solutions and services that are on offer there. This contact the site support, so that would be you as a site administrator. Not very relevant in this one. And there's where you can learn more about the mobile app as well. You can also give feedback on the software from this little section as well and it can show you the latest version of Moodle at the bottom. The last thing I'll show you in the trial site would be a little, the drop down here is where your profile is. So this is where you can go in and edit your profile. You can add a picture and you can change the names, no sorts of things and make a bit more personalized. You can also have a quick link to grades, calendar, messages, private files, reports and preferences. There's another drop down here where you can change languages that's already built into the Moodle languages. But as I mentioned before, you're not able to install your own language packs. So you can only use the ones that are available in the standard Moodle. Another last thing I will show you is looking at your dashboard. So this is where you can edit this to make it look like you want for your students and yourself. And same thing, you can add blocks on the right-hand side as you want to have them look. And I think I looked at the, and this is in my courses at the top, you can also look at what my courses look like. You can do configure the settings and things like that from there. And this is the last one is site administration. So this is all the little, a lot of the settings that you want to change, different parts of Moodle in here. And you can learn all about this things in the docs, for example. It's always good to go into the actual section, for example, and you can go into the help documentation from within that area and it will help you with that information. And from here, I will go onto what an already set up Moodle site looks like. So can everyone see this screen? What you'll notice is that I've changed a few little bits here, a bit more customized. I've got a background for Moodle Cloud. We've got our Moodle Cloud logo. There's the profiles. Got a little profile at the top as well. So you can personalize your site and make it look a bit more how you want it to look. So from here to show you what the difference in Moodle Cloud would be is we have our own toggle at the top here to show you your users and storage. In this site, for example, I have 36 users out of my 50 and I've used a bit of storage in there. If you wanna have a look at what you've actually used in your storage, you can go to see all and it will take you into your server where all your files are. And this is where you can have a look to then try and either remove some files if you don't need them or tidy it up a little bit. Now some of these files though are already in the Moodle site. So you're actually not able to remove some of them but they do not count towards your storage. So anything that you've added extra is what adds to your storage on top of that. So to highlight some of the personalized bits that I've done, you can come into Moodle, the site administration and you can go into appearance. And this is where you can add your logos, for example. So you click on logos. Now to add a new logo, you need to remove the one that's there. They don't allow more than one in there. So you click on the logo, you delete that one and then you click the file picker to add a new one. For example, I've got a little demo logo and you type in the name. Oops, that must have been the wrong one. This one, as demo. And you can also change the compact logo. So this is one, that one on the login page. And you can do the same thing. You can delete and add a new one. I won't bother with that one. You can also have a little favicon as well. You might not be able to see on my screen but I've got a little Moodle favicon. So you can actually make that your own. So at the end, you go save changes. Oh, that one must have been the front page. Actually, I will change this one. Got that the wrong way around. So then if I just add in the demo, call it demo. And there now you see in the top left-hand corner, it's a little demo logo instead of the Moodle Cloud logo. So another thing that you can do in the appearance is you can go within the theme. Our theme is boost. So this is where you can edit some of the different, the background image, for example, those sorts of things to make it a bit different. You can do the brand color as well. So if you wanted it to be a certain color, you can even type in what the color is. And from there, you can then save the changes and that would change. I won't do that now, because I may don't have a backup with a different photo to use for this one. From here, I will go into showing you what the course looks like. So if you go to the home page, you can see what the courses you have available. You can also change the settings on how this will look. So if you go into the settings, you can also change your site name. So I've changed it to demo. Say if I wanted to go change it to moodle cloud. And you can do a short name. From here, you can also change what your site home looks like where I was before. So you can have when you've logged in, for example, this bit where it says front page logged in, you can have enrolled courses, course search box. You can have as many as you like. And then you can also say category depth. This site home, this part is for front page when you can have different things when you haven't logged in. You can change that down the bottom here to be like as logged in as guest. And it will have an option from your moodle cloud site front page that you can say log in as guest and you can see a home page. And that's very useful for people that are trying to sell courses or get people to buy a course. For example, they can have a look at what courses you have available from there. So you can save changes, go back to home and you'll see that my site name has changed to moodle cloud. Excuse me. So from here, we go into the course and you can see what a course looks like that's already set up. So it's got a little image. It's got different sections. You can see the course index on the left. You can quite a few different broken down activities, those sorts of things. You can have your different activities that you wanted to set up. You can also have your block drawer on the right. So who's your teacher of this course? Different sections on the right that you wanna have there as well. So from here, I'll show you how you can add an activity and a big blue button session. We always turn on the edit mode from the right-hand corner if you wanna edit anything at all. So there's a few options to add an activity. You can go through and there's a little plus sign if you wanna in between activities you already got there or if you have nothing, it's a blank course, you'll see something similar like this where it's add an activity or a resource. So you click on that one and you choose what you wanna add. So I'll add a big blue button session just to show you how it looks like. You can change the different instant types. So room with recordings, room only, recordings only. I'll keep it with room, you can call it demo. There's lots of other options that you can do with the room settings. You can add a little welcome message. You can say wait for a moderator, for example. This session may be recorded. The recordings view, there's no settings to be added in that one. So there's different lock settings that you can make with the big blue button session as well. Some role assigned during live sessions, session timings, restrict access, activity completion. If you wanted people to view that video to be as part of your course completion, you can always add that in there as well. So at the end, you say save and display. So you can look what it has it looks like. And then you can also join the session there and you can go and test in there. You can also select the settings and change some more things as well. But that's what it will look like. And if you go back to the course, scroll down to where it was and there's the demo big blue buttons there. Another one, if you wanted to just add a simple file, you can click on add an activity or resource again. You can click on file or you can look at any of the other activities that you have there, custom certificate, for example. You just click on it and you go through the settings as I showed you before. There's different settings, different activities. And for this one, you can just select a file. You can either upload or you can go to your server files if there's already things in there that you wanna reuse. For this example, I'll just upload the demo and you can save it as and we can just name it and save and display. We can go back to the course here. So that's my short name for the course, mindful course creation. So that's where that shows up there, but that's back to this course here and you can see the files there. Another interesting thing to show you from this view is if you go on edit mode, you can change what it looks like. So you can actually switch the role to show either manager, course creator, teacher, student, guest, all those sorts of things. So say if you wanted to have a student, you can have a look at what it would look like from a student view and then you can go return to my normal role. From here, I can show you how to add to assign a teacher role. So within a course that you're already in, go into participants and you can simply click this edit mode next to what the role is. So for example, I wanted to change myself to manager and not teacher. I could remove the teacher role and just have manager and then click save above the little save changes and now I'm a manager. So you would have already had to have this person enrolled into the course and I'll show you what that is in a minute. So to enroll someone in a course, you actually need them to be in, they needed to be added to your site. It's a bit of a two-step process. I'll show you from adding to the site. So you go to site administration. We go to users and we can go add new user or you can also do bulk actions from there as well. I'll just do the add new user from this one and you can go in and give them a username. You can choose whatever you want. You can generate a password and notify the user or you can make your one-on and force password change. You can go through the details and add in their first name, last name, email address, all of those sort of things. We can add the user picture if you want those sorts of things and then you go create user. That makes them a user on your Moodle Cloud site. So the next stage is then to add them to a course. So I'll cancel out of that because I'll already have the course there. So you can do it from here but I'll show you from within a course. If you go back to my courses in the course creation, you can go participants and we can go enroll a user. So this is where you can search for user that will be there and you can add a user that you wanted and then you can assign the role. For example, I want that person to be student and then you can click enroll user. Okay, there was one last thing I was going to show you from here. There's different from the homepage. There's different things that you can also look at. You can go do your settings as I showed you before. You can change your site name, participants, question bank and there's a different course reuse as well. So you can do a few different things and back up courses and reuse that but I won't go into too much detail on that today. The last bit to sort of, pardon me, wrap up from here is just a bit more how to actually get started with Moodle Cloud. So you can sign up for our free trial. You can simply do this from Moodle.com. One of my team members will share the link in the chat so you can easily find it. And from there, there's no credit card needed. You can sign up. You can either create a new account if you're new to Moodle or you can link it to an already Moodle site from there which is that already a Moodle Cloud site and you sign in to the Moodle Cloud portal. And the other option is you can sign up for a paid plan straight away or once you've done your trial and you're really happy with that, you can upgrade your trial to a paid plan. So these are our five plans that we have and they range from 50 users all the way through to 1,000 users. And if you end up going to our largest plan and you need something a bit bigger and you need something more customized then there's the growth option to go towards our premium solutions. So that's with our Moodle partners and Moodle service providers who would be able to offer the plug-ins, for example, customized steams. There's lots of different options that they have in there as well as support packages that they can offer and they can help you build and make your site look just the way you want for those things. And that was it for me, really. Did anyone have any questions? Excuse me, thank you for answers. There is, yeah, we do have a question in the chat just very, very quickly before I get to that I'll just point out to everyone. We do have another webinar coming up called What is Moodle LMS? So obviously what we're looking at today is some Moodle Cloud-specific things. If you need or would like a little bit more of an insight or to dive into the Moodle LMS itself we do have another webinar coming up on September the 6th which is, what's that? A few weeks away, not too long ago. Sorry, not too long away. So if you want to dive into Moodle a little bit more in a sort of introductory sense, I guess, then feel free to come along to that webinar as well. So yes, a question from Christina now. I think this is back in the Moodle Cloud portal, I believe. Where's it gone here? It was about visualizing the data. Can you choose how data is presented in the reports section i.e. pie charts, tables, et cetera? But yes, you can do different reports within the Moodle Cloud site itself. There's lots of documentation on that but in the actual Moodle Cloud portal you can't make this your own. This is just showing you what users and files are available. I'm not sure if that answers the question or not. Yes, I'll give it a second, just in case there are any more coming in, but yeah, thank you very much to Francis and to the rest of the Moodle Cloud team for putting that together and coming along today and just giving us a quick little insight into Moodle Cloud. I think probably there's a lot of, there's probably a lot of Moodle users, people who've been using Moodle in whatever sense, whether they be admins or teachers who haven't actually looked out or needed to look at Moodle Cloud. So it's good to just get a little bit of an insight as well, a little bit of an insight into the other things that we offer outside of just the standard Moodle LMS which a lot of people will be used to. Yeah, and the great thing is that as I said before, we take care of all of those, the upgrading and all of those hosting sort of issues. So you just get to go on there and create the sites and add users and you don't have to worry about any of that sort of technical things at all and it's all taken care of for you. So yeah, but if anyone has any other questions or anything, there's the Moodle Cloud forum on Moodle.org that you can find and you can add things there. So look, if you have enjoyed this session, we'd love you to consider getting involved further and help us grow by contributing to the development of Moodle Academy. You can do this by visiting our Get Involved course which you'll find on the front page of the Moodle Academy site. You can suggest ideas from your webinars and your courses. You can vote on ideas that have been suggested by others already. We're always on the lookout for community members to help present webinars and co-create short online courses and we would love your help making Moodle Academy more inclusive. So if you're able to, please jump into our Translate Moodle Academy course and you can get started with helping us translate our courses and webinars into other languages. And of course, please help spread the word about Moodle Academy by telling your colleagues about the courses we offer and the events we run. When you do complete a course, you will earn a badge. Educators might like to think about getting involved with the Moodle Educate Certificate. You can take the RU Ready for the MEC quiz and one of our certified service providers will support you through the certification process. All right, that is it for today. Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you to Francis and the Moodle Cloud team. We hope you've found this useful and we look forward to seeing you all again in our Moodle Academy courses and in our upcoming webinars soon. Thank you and we'll see you next time.