 Hello everyone and welcome to Moodle's YouTube channel. My name is Abby Fry and I'm the communications manager at Moodle. And today I'm really pleased to welcome our head of Moodle LMS, Sonda Bangmar, to this interview. Hi Sonda. Thanks, Abby. Great to be here and welcome to the people watching. It's going to be really good to talk to you today, Sonda, about Moodle. As many of you know in our community, Moodle LMS is the heart of the Moodle ecosystem. It's literally used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. And Sonda's role is to oversee the product strategy and development of Moodle. I think it's a busy job, Sonda. Yes, it certainly is. It's a big product and it's used worldwide. So it's a fantastic role. So Sonda, today we're going to talk about 3.11, which is our latest release. And I'm also excited that you're going to reveal a little bit about Moodle 4.0, which is planned for release late in the year. But before we do that, I'm imagining that some of our viewers might not be that familiar with Moodle. So for those people, could you explain what Moodle is? So Moodle is an open source learning management system and it's used worldwide. It's primarily used in higher education, but also in schools. It's used for vocational training. It's used in the corporate setting for professional development, as well as by governments. And it's a platform where educators can go and create courses for their learners and for their learners then to log on and take those courses. And these courses can be built with content and interactive activities to create a rich learning experience. The benefit of Moodle is that it's highly flexible, very customizable. And it's a place where learners can interact and work with each other as well as with their teachers. And it's ever-evolving Sonda. I know that the minute you finish one release, you're getting set for the next one. So what does it actually take to get a new release of Moodle into the market? That's a good question. Moodle releases a new version of the LMS every six months. And that's always a big job. And every six months, there is new features and new improvements. And we work together with the community as well as Moodle partners and various other stakeholders to look at which areas of the platform we should be improving or should be expanding on. And then in particular for the big new features and new improvements, we go through an extensive discovery and research phase. And that helps us to determine the requirements together with our end users. For each improvement that we build into the platform, we go through multiple levels of review and testing before we then include it into the platform. And the nice thing about each release is because it's open source, every release will have a lot of contributions from the community as well. Wow, that's a lot of work. And I can imagine everyone's really busy getting set for 4.0. But before we talk about that, I think it would be great if you could give everybody a bit of an overview or a recap on some of the highlights of Moodle 3.11. 3.11 was released in May of this year. And we've included some really great improvements for everybody, regardless of whether you're an educator or a learner. And one of the projects we included in 3.11 was a project around improving the activity completion information that is displayed to students. And this is a project that we did together with the Moodle User Association. And what it does is it displays additional information around the activity that's relevant for the students on the course page, for example, whenever an assignment is due, that date will be shown on the course page as well as particular requirements you need to do to submit the assignment. So it really helps students understand what they need to do next. And another great improvement that is worth mentioning is the collaboration that we did together with Brickfield Education Labs. We introduced the starter version of their accessibility toolkit in the platform. And this is a tool that can be used by educators to check the content that they've created for accessibility concerns. So it checks whatever's been created and it flags whether there's particular accessibility problems with that content. We've also seen some really great improvements from the community in this release and a really nice one, or several nice ones actually we had around the quiz and the quiz questions. And one example of that is the ability now to add a plagiarism detection tool to the submission of essay questions. So when the student writes a response to an essay question, we can now check whether there was any plagiarism involved there so we can check for the academic integrity of that submission. Well, there's something for everybody, really. And I really love the student activity completion feature because I remember what it was like, you know, when you're studying multiple units, either as a school student or at university, and so many things to remember, so many deadlines. So an awesome way for students to keep on top of all their requirements and assessment requirements. Now, on to Moodle 4.0 Sonda, there's a lot of anticipation about this release in the market, I think. Why is that? Absolutely, and we're excited about it as well. It's a project we've been working on for over a year now already and we're really targeting some bigger changes for Moodle 4.0 and it will all be around improving the user experience, the interaction of students and teachers with the platform and making that as nice and as good as possible. So we started off doing some extensive research to, you know, starting with surveys, workshops and testing together with users to understand what were the common issues that they were facing. And based on that, we distilled some patterns of the big picture items that we wanted to change. So really focusing on that user experience for students and teachers and the first big pieces that we're tackling there are navigation, which is important for every single user of the Moodle platform, as well as the course creation experience for teachers and also the experience for students as they're doing these courses. And some of that we already saw in the 3.11 release with that student activity completion. When we zoom in, for example, on the changes to navigation, we're really focusing on making it easier for the user to get where they need to be, reducing the cognitive load. So not showing everything, but showing only those things that they need to see and making it quicker to navigate around. We're introducing a new feature in the courses for that as well and it's called the course index. And that allows you to quickly navigate to any particular section or any particular activity in a course. For the teacher, then we've been working on improving the course editing features. That's also a little bit based again around the course index and it'll be really easy to move content around as you're editing courses. But beyond that, there'll be a range of other UX improvements and there's gonna be a fresh new look, new designs, new visual styling, and we're working also on some new icons for the activities which will give it a really nice new look and just generally updating the course page which will give quite a different experience for both teachers and for students. Thanks, Sonda. I hope our viewers have enjoyed looking at a few examples of our new prototypes. It's very exciting and I'm really looking forward to seeing the release later in the year. We have a few questions that we regularly receive from our community and if you're comfortable, Sonda, it would be great to go through a couple of those with you. The first is something that regularly comes up and it's about preparing for a new release. So the question is there are a lot of changes ahead with 4.0 and I'm an administrator with a college. How do I prepare for the new release? It's a really great question and we do hear that more often. So one of the benefits of Moodle, of course, is that it's open source. That also means that all of our development happens out in the open. So we have an online issue tracker, the Moodle tracker and you can follow all the latest developments there. We also regularly make new Moodle prototype sites available where you can have a look and you can try out some of these new features. But perhaps the biggest tip is as we get closer to the release, it's a good point in time to start thinking about the customizations that you've done or any plugins that you've built and using the latest versions of the code to check whether they still work or not and where the areas are that you might need to make some modifications and to help with that, we'll also be providing some more information in particular around changes to the theme and any API changes that are up and coming. So we'll create some documentation pages around that. Thanks, Sanda. Some great tips in there. And I noticed you also mentioned open source and that is the theme of our next question, which is I'm looking at some options for LMS for our university department. I understand all Moodle is open source, but what's good about that? Well, yeah, so one of the first benefits we, I guess, already covered, it's all the development happens out in the open so you can follow what's happening and you can also actually have input into that development so you can provide suggestions or you can provide code contributions and they'll be reviewed and included in the platform if they're suitable. Of course, one of the other big benefits is that Moodle is downloadable. It's available for free so you can use it and then you can customize it. You can build on top of it, but we also have a really large database of community contributed plugins. This is a really nice added benefit of the Moodle LMS because there's over 1800 plugins contributed by community developers and they've spent time building out some additional features or custom themes or other types of improvements and they're now available for everybody to use so you can go on to our plugin database and access them and use them for your platform. And then finally, because we have such a large community of people looking at Moodle, helping it evolve and contributing back to it, we have a lot of different pairs of eyes looking at Moodle's security. So the security of the platform is at a really high level and we've also built an extensive feature set to deal with privacy legislation, such as GDPR, which are all fantastic benefits of the open source platform. Thanks, Sonda. Thanks for answering that in so much detail. Well, my final question today is for our viewers. I'm imagining there may be some people out there who are working with Moodle, but perhaps on an older release. So Sonda, how would people go about upgrading to the latest release of Moodle? And also for people who aren't currently using Moodle, but are interested in getting Moodle, how would they go about doing that? Yeah, so there's a number of ways to access Moodle. Firstly, you can go to our download pages, download.moodle.org and download Moodle yourself there and install it and start working with it. If you're more looking after a hosted solution, particularly if it's a slightly smaller organization, you can use Moodle Cloud. This is a hosted Moodle site that's ready to go and up and running within a couple of minutes. And that's suitable for sites up to a thousand users. But if you're looking for a little bit of help and you're a larger organization, then it makes sense to reach out to one of our Moodle partners. Moodle partners can help with hosting, customization and other types of support. And we have over a hundred Moodle partners worldwide who can assist you with any sort of requirements you may have. Thanks very much, Sonda. I really appreciate you spending some time with me today. And thank you to all of you for watching our Moodle YouTube channel and please subscribe to stay up to date with upcoming news and events. Or follow us on one of our social media platforms. Thanks very much. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Abby.