 Excellent, well it's good, this is the point of today is that we can come together, because the internet is fantastic in many ways, but it's not the same as actually looking in each other's eyes and actually meeting, and then we can bring that online later. So it's all about the social networking, we're coming together, all of us are using Moodle in some way, some of us are making Moodle, and we want this thing to be something that's very useful and very important, and something that helps us all, and so we have to work together to make this happen, and so that's why these things are so important and so good. At the end of tomorrow we have the party, and you may think oh it's just a conference dinner, this is not just a conference dinner, this is a big social networking event. I've been telling everybody make the party really big, so I hope you can all stay for tomorrow night because it's going to be an epic Bollywood affair. So look I've got some time to talk and I want to tell you about what Moodle's doing. At the beginning of this year we reformulated the mission. It hasn't changed but we made it more clear. And my intention was that we get the mission into something that fits on a T-shirt and something that everybody who uses Moodle can actually wear. So it's not about branding, it's about something we believe in and something that is what the project stands for and this is it, right? Our mission is to empower educators to improve our world. The vision is what we're trying to do is we're trying to build the most effective platform for learning that we can. Now I want to explain why, why is this the mission? We all live on this thing, it's not very big and this year I've gone around it I think three times and I'm going around it all the time and I'm travelling a lot and some of you I think also may travel a lot and when you do you really see how small it is and that the seven and a half billion people on that planet we're all sharing the same tiny ball of mud floating in space. And as a species, the human species, we've done okay for the last, in just the last 200 years these are some statistics of poverty overall. So you can see there are only, only 10% of the world is now in extreme poverty. Only 4% of the world of children are dying before five years old. Now this is still a lot of people, right? But we've made some improvements. Only 14% of the entire population has no education. It used to be worse. In democracies about 50% of the world has a democracy where people have some say in the governing of their country. Now the way democracies are run is another story but just having a democracy is a good start. Now the UN, the United Nations have 17 goals for sustainable development and these were developed after a very long process of consultation and these are the things that they're saying that the whole world needs to focus on not necessarily to make the world a super amazing place just actually simply to survive on this planet because we're starting to have and we're getting so many of us that we're starting to affect the planet we're living on. So these 17 goals are quite useful but in my opinion almost every major presentation or keynote should probably refer to this list because it's like a guiding star for how we should be working, all of us. So some of the bigger problems you see in there are inequality and I was around Mumbai on the weekend and I could point to examples here but I could just as easily point to examples in the United States which has extreme wealth and extreme poverty and many many countries have this problem and it's actually growing the distance between the wealthy and the poor is increasing and the amount of wealth in the hands of wealthy people is increasing related to the economy. So if you have very wealthy you get more wealthy very fast and more and more of the whole economy is in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is a trend, this is what's happening in many, most countries in the world. This causes a lot of issues as I'm sure you can guess. We have climate change. 99% of scientists agree that the climate change is real, that it's happening the climate is changing, we have something to do with it and that it's something we can probably help fix. I kept asking people, is the very romantic haze in the air here? Is it humidity or pollution? Everyone said mostly pollution, it's probably a mix of things but the whole planet we are not really looking after our own planet very well. Food and water security. Just the quality of food, the quality of water. I would love to be able to drink the water from the taps here. I would love to, I think you probably would too. In many countries this is a problem, a lot of the problems in the Middle East are caused by crops failing for many years. There's no food, people are moving, it's causing disruptions, it's creating refugees and things like that, which leads me to refugees. 65 million people in the world do not have a country, they're wandering around. This number is growing. Data protection, more and more of our lives is now, we're using these things. These are very addictive, they're very useful but we are starting to operate our lives through technology. This technology is owned by other people. The technology guides our information from one place to another. Who protects data? Who protects people? These are very open questions and a lot of people are fighting for control over the internet and over the flow of data and the ownership of data. In many industries we are automating. We are creating robots, maybe physical robots like this or maybe software robots that are doing the work that people used to do. I think when the British Empire was here something they were famous for was creating machines effectively of many thousands and millions of people doing clerical work and they built organizations to do work, but it's human work. And machines are replacing, from the bottom they replaced a lot of agriculture, now they're replacing a lot of office jobs and things are being replaced. So what happens to people who are losing work? Are we planning for them to have a place in the economy of the future? What are we all going to do if the machines are doing everything apart from fixing the machines? Health care quality, this picture is in Africa but it could again just as easily be in most countries of the world. There are often problems of health care being evenly distributed. Everybody cannot just walk into a hospital and get a heart fixed or a major operation yet and that is something we should be having. This is a long list, right? I'm talking about the problems of the world here. We've got environmental damage. In the oceans that are around us are huge islands of plastic getting bigger and bigger every year. These are hundreds of kilometers wide and it's all rubbish plastic which lasts for hundreds of years piling up, piling up, piling up. It's killing fish, it's killing the environment, it's killing us. So these are major problems we're causing. These kind of big problems aren't really going to be fixed by a single person or a single government or a single anything. It would take all of us to be, in my opinion, this kind of person. We need to be globally oriented. So not just thinking about our own backyard but thinking about the context. Multiculturally aware. You can't care about refugees unless you have some understanding that a refugee is just a person the same as you in a different situation. Environmentalists, we've got to care about the environment. It's very easy to forget we live in an environment when you're living in a screen most of the time. And caring, we've got to be caring people. And I think in India, I think from my perspective I think the level of care that I see, the love basically in this room but in the streets, I think people, it's a very strong, I think as a culture there's a lot of it. Just in the number of religions and the types of religions that are here that there is a strong caring-ness. But I think we need that and we need to extend that beyond just the family or beyond people around us to think bigger. So that's the kind of person I think we need. We need a lot of those sort of people to solve the big problems. So the only way I can think we get there is through quality education. It's not just teaching people to read and write. It's about teaching people to actually care and teaching people to have these deep skills to attack big problems and to be active. Is anybody who agrees with that idea so far? Does anyone agree? We'll get some agree. All right, good. We're all together. So it's... Number four goal of the UN is quality education. Great. So we're aligned with the UN and quality is the key here. It's not just pushing some quizzes, people through quizzes to get them to a degree. It's about quality. Can governments give us quality education? What do you think? Yes? No? Look, governments are not bad. Governments are people like us. And a lot of them, there's a lot of good people in government trying to make things happen. But the nature of governments tends to be short-term focus. They tend to focus on the next election. When you have elections, you have people trying to win elections, and they're trying to make people happy and give them short-term wins. You rarely see people thinking about what is this country going to look like in 30 years, in 100 years, in 1,000 years. It's not... The next government can worry about that. So you do tend to see, and I'm seeing it in a lot of countries, and I want to know more about India, so I hope we have some conversations about this sort of stuff at the break, so I'm looking forward to it. But you tend to see the amount of money going towards public education overall going down. Because there are these economic drivers, like, it's... You tend to save money on those... It's easy to save money on public education and use it for more popular things. It's also easy to encourage private schools and private methods to do education, and you say, okay, they're taking care of it. And so you see more administration, more reporting. Education becomes like a machine of creating people for skills, for jobs. You're making people for jobs. You're not making those. Universities are not focused on making that. They're focused on making workers to work in jobs which may not exist in five years. And it's just a trend, and I don't blame anybody, but it's just how these things seem to be working. Can capitalism give us quality education? Can we rely on private companies to do all the work? Well, most companies are designed around profit. And profit is excess money, so you get money for something, which is fine. But most companies are focused on how can we make the most money by spending the least money so that we have the most money left over and we can become very wealthy. And this wealth goes into becoming for venture capitalists and investors, and it goes into private pockets, right? So that's just how that is structured, unfortunately. It's supposed to work in capitalism that if there is a demand that a company will come up and supply the demand. But the big problems I talked about, there's not many companies who are focused on that. There's no real demand there. The environment is not starting a company to save itself. People have to start companies. And in some of the places that are very capitalistic, you have a lot of wealth being collected in private people's hands and a lot of resources being used. So again, I'm going to point to the U.S. 30% of the world's resources are required to go there to look after 5% of the world's population. And when I come to other countries and I see the same model trying to be replicated, so lots of fast foods, lots of packaging, lots of... We must have everything. The shops must be full of every possible thing that we can imagine. And not just one of those things. There needs to be 100 types of everything from all over the world. And we need fresh fruit from South America coming to India. Everything's got to be everywhere. But we don't really need all of that. And shipping stuff around costs fuel, costs oil, costs the environment. And we're spending a lot of time caught up in this kind of dream that we're creating and we're actually damaging stuff around us. We're not living lightly. So there is little incentive for a company to look after people as a whole. The point of a company is to make profit. So unfortunately, when it comes to quality education, there's not the right drivers to change the world in a company, through companies, in my opinion. You can see this, and it's starting to become a backlash against the Facebooks, the WhatsApps, not so much the WhatsApp, but the social media systems that are distributing news, the YouTubes, these sorts of systems, that because they're based on advertising and profit and selling advertisements, everything is designed about capturing your attention, making you look at things for another five seconds, for another five seconds, for another five seconds, and they sell your mind, your attention, to an advertiser. And if you ever go to Twitter and sign up as an advertiser and look how Twitter looks, or Facebook, from the point of view of an advertiser, it's all about, oh, you can target your market down to, you know, 39-year-old women who live within two kilometres of the Mumbai Central, and you can be very, very precise, right? Because it's very... It's very... The whole system is designed for those people. It's capturing people and selling them. So, when you hear a lot of these technology companies talking, especially, they're always talking about it. We're going to disrupt, we're going to replace, we're going to control things, right? I don't think that's a good language. I don't think we want to be disrupting our life all the time. It keeps everybody off balance. This is not an optimal situation that we've built. So, this is the only thing that I can find that makes some sense here, that open technologies, open methods are a way of bypassing these two big systems, governments and capitalism. They're a way of building things that are bigger than those. It's bigger than any one person. It's bigger than a government. It's bigger than a company. It may be building something for the next thousand years. And there are a lot of people around the world working on open government, open standards, open education resources, open music, all sorts of open things. And Moodle is open source, so we fit in this tree. Who here is involved in some sort of open project in some way? We've got some hands? Yeah, okay, quite a lot of us, but a lot of us also not. If you're here, you're involved in Moodle, so you are involved in an open project. This is a good thing. It doesn't mean, I don't mean you have to be doing everything for free. I don't mean that you have to be like a zealot, like a guru on a mountain trying to create freedom. It's not that. Anything you have to do with the economy of an open product is fine, because it's a complicated system here. But open stuff makes sense to me. It's like the only, the biggest thing we can work on right now. And look at some of the systems that are open, that are super successful, that are so successful that we forgot about them completely, right? Email. We use email more and more. There are many other options. You've got messaging systems, left, right and center, but we're all still using email, and the reason is email is completely open. Anybody can make an email account and you can mail anyone else. And all you need to know is a little address. And if you get the address wrong, it bounces back to you. And this whole system is an open system that actually works really well. I think we're still going to have email in a thousand years. Seriously, you'll be sending emails to your relatives on Mars. And it's, you know, it will maybe evolve, maybe you'll have different attachments. You'll send VR or something, but you'll still be email probably. HTTP is the, every address is HTTP because it's the web protocol. Completely open. I could take this and install some software on it and make it into a web server. And you, on your device today, can go there and see my information. You can pass information around from any device to any device through HTTP. And Unix, again, all of these devices have some Unix influence. Android machines are basically a Unix variant. This is an iPhone which uses iOS which is based on Mac OS X which is based on Unix. All of the servers, all of the big.coms, the Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles, they're all running on Unix. All of the routers that push the information around, often Unix as well. Nobody talks about that, right? It's just, it's everywhere, it just works. That's how open stuff works. Open stuff drives everybody forward. So, in my opinion, these projects show how you can support and nurture and improve everything else. Email didn't really replace anything, but it supports everything. Right? And so that's what we want to do also with Moodle. So very briefly, this is like my dream. This is my dream of what an empowered educator looks like. An empowered educator is one in a world where quality education is seen as a basic human right. Why shouldn't everybody have a university degree? Why not? There's no reason why not. We could do it. Why couldn't it be that the very closest school to you is the best possible school that you could send your child to? Why not? Why couldn't teachers be like gurus or doctors or politicians or celebrities? You see so many celebrities on posters everywhere and they're just actors, right? So they're good at acting. They're good at pretending to be someone else. But they're not... There are so many teachers who have a deep, deep effect. I think in this country actually there's a bigger tradition of this with so many leaders who are well known. But people who have a very good picture of the world who are able to communicate, able to teach and bring people along. Why aren't they more in the public, in the media? Why aren't they more mentioned on the news? Why aren't they more talked about? So these teachers would get there if they were supported properly. If they were given firstly they got to be paid well because if you're not paid well as a teacher you'll find something else to do. And in a lot of countries teachers will... They're young kids, they come out of university, they're all great, they want to get into teaching. They get into teaching, they find it's really hard work, the pay is very low and after three years they realize, well I could get a lot more money if I go and work in the mines or join a company or get into a business or something else but in a lot of places the teachers are all very young people in Australia, I'm thinking of Australia particularly here and you rarely, you only get very committed people who are willing to stick it out and be a teacher for 40 years or something but that should be normal for much, that should be being a teacher should be like a really respected profession where that happens and to do that you need to be supported with good content, good professional development all the time and so on now lastly, I think in a quality education sense we should be thinking global if you're at a school you should be connected with people in other places around the world other people in around the world should be part of your education so that you have this global perspective so that you can speak more languages you can talk to more people you can understand how the world is really in many ways the same and also different and that's how we can solve big problems alright, I've done enough lecturing but that explains I hope what the mission and the vision of Moodle is and why, what we're doing here and how important I think it is to support that we have values the values of Moodle are things that make sure we stay on the right path and that we are 5 so the first one is education so this is an education situation every conversation you have with somebody is an education situation so recognising that's everywhere openness, obviously we want to be open we want to be transparent we want to be very open with the team, with the community because that's how things that you didn't plan start to happen because everybody is working on the same things respect it's very important to respect other cultures, other languages to understand that people who are blind have just as much a right to education as anybody else everybody everywhere and even competitors I don't want to see making saying bad things about other products necessarily just because they're different if they have similar goals to us great, good, right if they're trying to attack education in some way or control it in some way then yeah, not so good but it's not about them, it's about the thing they're building integrity integrity means doing the same thing every day as you do at work, at home etc and lastly innovation we want to be a place where it allows innovation and I know in this room there are a lot of people who innovate on the Moodle platform and innovate obviously in other places as well and this can be innovation using it as a teacher but also could be developing new software new plugins, developing new businesses around it etc so we are currently just about at 95,000 Moodle sites and this number is climbing rapidly we really have to have a big celebration when we hit 100,000 registered sites if you haven't registered your Moodle site, please do because that's how the only way we know that who's using Moodle these numbers are the minimum because a lot of people don't register is anybody brave enough to admit they never registered their Moodle site okay what come on I'm not pointing you exactly but please register so go ahead and do that this afternoon so India is here on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, number 7 on the list isn't this like nearly the biggest country in the world now so I'm sure I'm sure that's going to go up quite fast I did some interesting little statistics looking at the registrations and comparing it to the size of the population of the country so the biggest Moodle using country is Andorra which is a tiny, tiny little country on the Mediterranean I think they probably only have well how many Moodle sites they have 31 Moodle sites in Andorra but the population is so low that it makes them the first but probably one of the major countries that's a large country is Spain and we have one of our developers from Spain here Sara at the front so say hello to her when you see her she's part of our team in Barcelona and we're probably growing our team in that country so that's a very big Moodle using country you may have also seen some other news that we found an investor so Moodle has been growing for 15 years basically in a straight line like this and I've never been in debt Moodle has never been in debt every time I get more developers and we get more people but as you're about to see we have a real need to go a bit more like this and grow fast and that's because this open project is competing against Microsoft Google there are many big players in the world now and we need to be we need to keep up with the technologies so I've been looking for about 2 years for an investor somebody who A had money to give us but B had to be the right kind of money it had to be somebody who believed in the mission and somebody who was not interested in the profits because we are not about profit we don't have profits really in Moodle so a few months ago we finally closed after a long time of discussion and so on we had this family that comes from France and they are the right kind of people for this project these are people who they've said to me look, we're here for 20 years we believe in you we believe in the project we want to support everything you're talking about in your keynotes so we took $6 million for us because that lets me hire a lot more people to do some things so these are the things I want to talk about that we're working on it's time to make Moodle a bit more amazing now there's some problems first before I talk about what are the problems with Moodle well, Moodle is often seen as not easy to use or not pretty and I think a lot of you might be familiar with those reactions and there are a lot of reasons for that it can be made easy it can be made pretty but it's not easy or pretty to make it that way teachers often don't drive it very well and because they come they're usually just thrown in there you go, here's Moodle, go there's an LMS and most people teaching have never been a student they don't really understand what it's like to be a student and so they do the simple things they do quizzes, the obvious things they put content and they stop so and that's usually because educators don't have enough support and lastly, Moodle is not like a super good it's not super good at being in the places where we are all the time on social media on these devices it's a website it's a PHP application it's a bit for students it looks a bit old fashioned in a way so these are problems we can fix these problems so the solution is we have five big projects and I'm going to go through them the first one well what I'm going to say is in two years will be Moodle everyone will call that Moodle because they all work together these five projects but there are five pieces and they all help each other and they all make the new system so firstly the Moodle learning management system this is the thing that you're familiar with the one you download and the one that you run the PHP application it's it is an old piece of software it is 15 or more years old but it doesn't matter because the way we run applications now is getting more flexible so there's not really any need to rewrite Moodle we can deliver Moodle differently now you have virtual machines and virtual machines and virtual machines it doesn't matter the age of the software Moodle has a very good mental design I think still it has a structure that makes it very flexible and very expandable and you can make it as small as you want or as large as you want and that's all we need our main focus, number one is on usability making it usable and that's the user experience and when I say usability I don't just mean how pretty it is because you can make Moodle very pretty with themes what I mean is the usability is about the work flows so one workflow is the assignment date has just finished and as a teacher I need to go and grade all the assignments so first of all I have to know where they are I have to go in I have to go through the assignments and grade them and release the results to students so that's a workflow that's something I'm going to sit down and do take two hours and that's my job to do now in that little workflow we can reduce the number of clicks we can make it easier to get the information and so on so that's a one example in Moodle there are hundreds of work flows little things, jobs you have to do how do you find information how do you do something in response etc the second one is integrations we're working a lot on integrations and particularly we want to work on integrations with open systems because I want Moodle to leverage other open projects and I want other open projects to influence Moodle so we have to connect with other things that are out there some of it is through standards and some of it is through integration plugins the third part is about consistency across devices currently the experience you have on the Moodle mobile app and I don't know how many people here know we have a Moodle mobile app most of you okay I didn't ask you the other way around I didn't want to embarrass you but there is, if you didn't know we have a Moodle mobile app now this is designed for these small screens but the experience is slightly different to the one you get on the website and it shouldn't be it should be the same, it should feel like the same system and when you are halfway through something on this you should be able to put it down and finish on the other device and lastly there are many advances in the world of computer science with artificial intelligence with statistics and analysis we should be Moodle should be an active participant in the learning process by which I mean it's a you have computer aided teaching computer aided learning note, I am not talking about Moodle becoming a teacher we are not about disrupting and replacing education systems we are about empowering so if a teacher if Moodle can talk to the teacher and say hey you need to focus on this or this is happening in an intelligent way that actually makes it like an assistant then you can handle more people, you can teach a thousand people or ten thousand people because you have the assistance of the system so these are the main focuses going forward as I was saying Moodle itself doesn't need to change, the basic structure of plugins and integrations works well but what is changing is the devices that we use to access it so we have computers, we have mobiles obviously and tablets but in the future there is more and more virtual reality augmented reality in about five years a lot of us are going to have, I predict phones probably some device that you carry around and a screen which is a glasses that you put on and a lot of what comes through here will appear on your glasses and they may be very light and they may be built into your normal glasses but the digital world is now connected with the real world and so I could create a giant Taj Mahal here on the stage in 3D and we can all see it because we all have the glasses and they're all connected to the same experience this stuff already exists it's just not everywhere yet it's not cheap and it hasn't got everywhere we also have voice interfaces you can see a lot of them around a lot of the big players are building voice interfaces and they work when they work well they're actually really fast it's much easier to say hey Moodle how many students haven't finished their assignment yet and Moodle go oh there's still three students who haven't it's the same three who were late last time do you want me to send them a message and you go yes send them a message and it will send them the message that's a much faster interface than press press click click click but the I don't see Moodle as being in this augmented reality space or Moodle doesn't need to do the voice stuff the other technologies will do that the devices will have that Moodle just needs to interact with them and it needs to be the place where grades end up where experiences are launched and then grades come back and things like that we can just leverage those other technologies so it's very achievable so we just released Moodle 3.4 it's got a lot of cool new features mostly about usability we didn't add a lot of new features we are focused on making Moodle work better not not making it do more because it already has so many features so one of them is the calendar now operates more like web calendars you expect drag and drop you can change dates of assignments or quizzes activities you can just move them around we fixed the participants page with enrolments it's a lot better now it still needs more improvement but it's a good solid step forward it's now a lot easier to control the people in your course or at least whether they can get in or not analytics the new analytics engine we've built which is the foundation of the AI stuff I was talking about this is how Moodle will know things through this there's a machine learning engine and it's connected to looking at the data in Moodle and from that it makes insights and decisions about what it sees and it learns and you're going to be teaching it eventually you're going to be saying no you're wrong or yes you're right more of that less of that and in making it improve so this is now in Moodle core 3.4 and as I said going forward the big things on 3.5 we're looking at user experience we've got some very good user new user interfaces coming soon we've got integrations as I said open stuff in Europe there is a big push towards the GDPR which is the general data protection regulations this is a good initiative it forces software makers to think about the protection of data and privacy and it has many things in it for example people under age should have appropriate protections when they put their data into a system another one is that if you leave a system you should be able to ask for a complete collection of your own data from that system imagine I say quit Facebook you might want to dump all of your photos and all the stuff you put into Facebook just have I want a copy of that it's mine I put it in there I want it out so it's forcing all systems to have that functionality and so Moodle has to do these things too now the other part of Moodle is the Moodle mobile app and if you haven't seen it lately it's really evolving and becoming very capable so it looks nice it works well and this is what the next generation might look like this is some of the UX work that user experience work that our team are doing and you can see it's getting much more attractive it's working really well it has I can't quite see it so clearly but you get an idea it's really improving and we've now hit the point where the features in the mobile app are 100% of the Moodle features for students so students can spend 100% of their time just in the app and they don't need to go to the website at all which is really cool it's actually not only what most students probably want anywhere in the world but in lots of places this is your only computer so like you rely on that to work and the app of course has the big feature of working offline so when you connect to your courses when you have internet you can download all the courses including SCORM including quizzes including forums, assignments everything and you can work offline you can reply on a forum you can post an assignment you can do a quiz you can do a SCORM and then when it reconnects to the internet it synchronizes back and pushes everything back the feature you can actually have the app branded to your university or company so if you want it to look not like Moodle mobile because the app is free you can go to the app stores and get Moodle mobile and you get the orange app but if you don't want it to be orange, if you want it to be your colours and have your name we have a system for doing that so you can come and talk to us Moodle.com and we can make it so that you have the orange app it's updated every two months it's always updated it's the login is easier you don't have to put the site you just put username and password and you're in so if you're interested come and talk to us we also have a version of the app which works on desktops so windows, mac linux full screen but it works on a desktop on a laptop the last thing I want to say about Moodle the product itself is that if you're interested in the future of the features you can have a say on the core features of Moodle through the Moodle users association so your institution can join there's a whole lot of different membership levels very very cheap about the price of one meal in this hotel to a lot more and you take part in the association on deciding what Moodle should do next and the project for example the calendar work making the calendar more modern that was Moodle users association project and the association takes the membership money and pays developers to make those features we also have a foundation coming it isn't the last thing wrong I forgot this one more we're starting a foundation in 2018 it's being based in Europe but if any of you are involved in research around online learning with research projects or you have PhD students or grant funding or any kind of projects like that the foundation is going to be in the middle of that world organizing projects being part of developments more integrated with other open initiatives etc and that's going to be a really exciting thing because a lot of this stuff happens anyway without Moodle being involved Moodle is used for about half of the education projects in Europe and people just download it and use it and they never talk to us so alright I'd better move on because I think I'm running out of time probably when do I have to finish by Tom? 15 minutes so I said there were five things and I'm going on a long time and I'm just ranting here I want you to talk more to me for the next two days but right now I've got a lot of information I want to get out so I said there was five things the first one was just Moodle core itself the second one is Moodle cloud it's very popular in India we have who here has a Moodle cloud site actually can I have some hands? okay we have about 20, 30 people here so Moodle cloud is our hosting system we have about 25,000 Moodle sites on it and all kinds and it will continue our purpose is to make a cheap, effective Moodle for everybody a lot of those sites are free but some of them are cost a little bit more and we're going to be developing that over time to make it more cost effective have more solutions there and be a really good place to try Moodle a really good place to also even if you want to try the latest version of Moodle just demo it, you can go and get a site on Moodle cloud and try it because it always has the latest version if you're at a university actually how many people here at universities I should get an idea of who's at a university or involved with a university okay I'm guessing about 15, 20% okay how many people here are in schools so everything K to 12 okay you're all on one table hello okay and a couple of you over there how many people are involved in companies or have a company that does work around Moodle actually just some work around Moodle okay about 30% how many people are in a company that uses Moodle like for training just internally like you use it as a product Moodle okay look at that what are the rest of you anybody got something else you want yeah I'm sorry Academy for languages okay great excellent anybody else in like a special academy or other education institution oh yeah okay from the business school okay great all right better idea thank you all right that was number two it was learn Moodle Moodle clouds number three out of the five is learn Moodle now I talked to the before how a lot of the problem that we see is that people don't really use Moodle very much they might have Moodle but they're not really using it to its maximum and they're not creating quality experiences and there's a lot of reasons for that there's no blame but I think if we had the availability of training and courses that people could have to learn how to teach online this would help us a lot and so we have a curriculum that we've been building to learn to teach online with Moodle now the leader of that team is Tom Murdoch who you already met this morning so he's there Solange sitting next to him is also in this project and is keynoting tomorrow and there's sessions this afternoon as well so I'm not going to talk too much more about it because they're going to cover it but I'm just saying we have this project it's very exciting to us and we really want to make it a global multilingual thing that has even certification infrastructure so you can get certificates and we'd also like it to be included in university curriculum somehow to have accreditation so that having your Moodle certificate is credit towards a bigger education certification I'm not even going to go through this because you guys are going to talk about it the next thing number four is Moodle services so our job at Moodle is to we are between the people who need help who are using Moodle and may need help such as teachers and administrators and there are many people who provide services who have expertise who can do assist people and it may be training it may be consulting or development or making themes or making content or all these things and our job is to connect Moodle users with people who have services so the main plan we have right now is the Moodle partners and we have all three Indian Moodle partners here at the conference and I'm really pleased to have them here, Iyabias Ballistic and Vidya Mantra and we also have integration partners for particular products so technologies that work well with Moodle we have partnerships with them as well and we're going to be growing that with a lot more integration partners so we have a plan in Moodle for our team who handles all this to grow and to be much more effective at driving this services and making sure people have help when they need it so I won't go into the details of that but that's a big focus for us to improve that whole system now number five and this is the new one this is really new this hasn't existed really properly before and it's called MoodleNet I can't show you any screenshots yet because it doesn't exist yet but we have a team that are already working on it and we have a lot of great ideas and I just want to explain it to you and I think you'll understand what I'm getting at so I talked before how teachers need professional development it's not only how to use Moodle how to teach in general they need content they need support, they need friends often a teacher in an institution who teaches one subject is alone they're the only person teaching that subject in that institution so they may have many other professional associations they can be part of to find friends but wouldn't it be great if Moodle hooked you up with other teachers that were teaching the same subject at the same level and it was very easy to find them so something like LinkedIn but for education imagine if that was integrated with your Moodle site so you're looking at your Moodle course and it's empty and you're just starting and you're new and on the side was need help go to MoodleNet and you log in and you start finding people who can help you and not only people to talk to but you also can find content to get you started whole courses or maybe just pieces so we want to connect all the open education resources into this so you can find them easily you can search them all quickly we want to make systems that let people build Moodle courses and share them now we had an older system we still have it called Moodle.Net which I started it must have been 8 years ago it's a long time ago and we never really got it going but the idea was about enabling course sharing this is a bit different because what we discovered was if you just make a place on the internet and say hey everybody share your stuff it doesn't work because there's no reason for people to give away what they worked on very hard you need to give them a motivation you can't put your school courses out on the internet you're not allowed to the institution says that belongs to us you can't do that so what we want to do is build a way for people to get paid to build stuff so imagine a teacher says look I'm actually really good at teaching you know let's say French to native Hindi speakers and that's kind of a niche thing but there might be a lot of people who need it and that's someone who is very good at that is in a position to build a course for the other people who can do it but they're not going to do it for free in fact they shouldn't do it for free because people's time is valuable we shouldn't be asking everybody to do things for free we should be finding a way to get people paid for their work so one way we can do that is a little bit like Kickstarter like a crowdfunding thing so that teacher can say ok I will make a course for teaching French to Hindi native speakers but it's going to take me a lot of weekends I have to be away from my family I have to make sacrifices and they come up with some price and they say if we can gather some money for this and MoodleNet will facilitate it then I can deliver it and if everyone who wants that course likes it then the money is released from them to the creator the content goes in there and now MoodleNet has a piece of Creative Commons licensed content so the next person who comes along and they have to teach French in the Hindi context and they go I need some help they find a whole course waiting for them so they can just download a course and now they can play with it and tweak it and make it their own but they get a good start so that's some of the basic stuff there's a lot of other stuff in here but basically MoodleNet will be connecting Moodle users between sites and it's really important to us that MoodleNet is something that we can all trust it can't be a Facebook it can't be a LinkedIn it can't be that sort of system it needs to be something more like email or like HTTP it needs to be something built for the long term and designing a system like that is much harder to do but that's what we're trying to do and we need everybody's help it's got to be open it's got to be safe it's got to be private it's got to be connected and transparent that's the only way this thing is really going to work beyond a couple of years it's got to be something very big so we have a lot of ideas about that alright I'm nearly there at the end I did say already that Moodle HQ is moving a lot of our focus into Europe and we're building up the team in Barcelona to be part of Europe I don't see any reason why we can't have more people in India also but we're working even more globally than we were before so we're going to be very busy I'm going to very very quickly go through some ways that you can be part of Moodle as a contributor so how can you join in first of all you may want to get a branded Moodle mobile app it's not only for the feature that you have it's good for your students to have your institution in the app stores but you are contributing towards the project and helping to fund everything we're doing secondly you may want to join the Moodle Users Association if you haven't looked at it have a look at it you have a voice to actually help decide new features you can use Moodle for research if you are doing any online research or at all Moodle is the best platform to do it on because you can leverage data and so much of a global perspective that you can do the best research if you need a quick small site just use Moodle Cloud that's why we put it there if you need any consulting or hosting or any other services talk to our partners Vidya Mantra, Iyabias or Ballistic Learning they are experts in Moodle they've all been using Moodle for many many years and they definitely can help if anything I've told you is you're starting to have ideas and you're thinking hey that could be something just come and talk to me or Tom or any of us if you've got any grant funding going on and it involves Moodle anyway just drop us a line because who knows you might be able to use that work it could affect Moodle core and instead of just helping one school or one state or whatever it is you could help the whole world a bit maybe you want to join our team we're hiring a lot of people so I expected to be crushed a bit after this one but anyway come and talk to us and last thing I want to say I think supporting open practices is one way to support the UN sustainability goals and I hope you agree because this is what we're all trying to produce here these sorts of people so thank you very much thank you