 So I want to start by asking a couple of questions because MoodleNet has been around as an idea for some time Can I just ask if you've ever heard you know what it is? Can you just raise your hand if you know what it is? And have you had any interaction with it in the past year keep your hand up Okay, if you got your hand up. Thank you if you don't it's all new again So I'm going to go through where we are what's happening and the future themes of MoodleNet as well So this is the latest iteration of MoodleNet the first thing I want to do is to show you who the team are Just to give you some context of we are small but growing So I'm going to ask there's two members of the team in the room So if you want to talk to us so you know who you are who they are you can see me up here We've got brew brew stand up. Please bruise right here brew is our Front-end designer He is responsible for the look and feel of MoodleNet Which is often loaded as a very nice look and feel the new one Bruiser mountaineer lives in Switzerland based over there, but he's from Barcelona, right? So you can you can see brew out if you have any questions And then Anna Anna is also on the team here. Anna is our education advisor What Anna does is keep us straight Talks about standards make sure we don't cut any corners So Anna is there for this representation from a standards and a librarian point of view I'm Paul. I'm based in the UK, but I've been in higher education running Moodle product suite for over 15 years Techie background developer but an educator as well and the two guys at the bottom there Alessandro and Etere sadly couldn't be here, but they are Italian team They're in Rome and there are back-end devs So that is the MoodleNet team as it stands today if you've known MoodleNet in the past you will recognize only Anna and Alessandro because they were on the previous MoodleNet teams, but brew and I and Etere are all new so We are calling the current version of MoodleNet version 2 although if you've used it in the past You'll think why aren't they on version 5? Really because this is the second iteration that is working so we have released a working version You can visit it right now by scanning that QR code. You can have a look at it It's it's available right now. It's it's only one year old so actually we released it on the 1st of October 2021 even though it had previous iterations and So on Saturday this week it becomes one version 2 It's open source just like Moodle LMS and has all of the same Moodle principles of you can download it And you can install it and you can take the software and make it your own Everything I'm going to talk about is available on whether you install it yourself or you use ours It's the same product although we expect eventually that product to change in your hands We may not adopt everything in the central version, but you may then be able to add on things to your version And to give context even though we're on version 2 we've had 12 releases in the past year So we have a constant release schedule and we don't do that on a timed basis Although we are moving to that with the rest of the Moodle products team, so we will release probably every quarter going forward So Moodle Let 2 is two things On one side you'll see the the button that says Moodle.net. This is our Platform and our vision of an open education ecosystem So this allows anybody to firstly use any resources on that anonymously you don't need an account You can just go search use So it's totally anonymous Now this obviously opens up a lot of users, which is great However, there are some more advanced functionality where you need an account if you want to use it So and also you can install it yourself So as we release we also released to what's called an NPM, which I'm not going to go into But I will just do a techie bit for those non techies in the room close your ears This is not PHP. This is not the same technical infrastructure as Moodle LMS And if you want to talk to us about why we'll do that outside this room I think brew right because it's quite a long discussion. This is Built on Node.js and React and TypeScript. So it's a JavaScript product And an Orango database for those of you that know So there you go. We can talk about that later. I don't intend to cover that today So let's talk about looking at search now those of you that I just saw scanning the QR code there You will see you see the bottom left hand corner You'll see a box at the top of the screen that looks like that where you can search for any resources in the system in The last year since we launched just under a year We've had 500,000 new users looking for resources just to give you a scale Now there so there are people coming to us looking for resources. It's a new system. So we're still building those resources However, we're quite impressed by those numbers of people searching That Moodle net design is designed to be responsive so it should work as well on your mobile as it does on your laptop and Very fast. You don't have to wait for search results You start to type and the search results start to appear as you type. Am I right? Are you trying? Yeah, okay. Cool. Good. Well done, brew You can then sort these search results by relevance by recency or by popularity Let's have a look a little bit about resources themselves In order to publish a resource to share a resource you do need to sign up It's a simple sign-up system to validate your email and once that's done you can get started now on your own Install there is nothing like spam protection or to stop people uploading inappropriate resources on Moodle net There is so what we ask for is five good educational resources and you click a button saying approve that goes into our content system Thanks, Anna and we review those resources and we approve you once you're approved It's public and you can then pop do more you can actually do as many as you like the first It's at least five so you do at least five resources and we approve you and then it's available for everyone Resource can be anything. That's a mime type So it can be a PDF an image a video question bank a full Moodle course It supports anything that is digital Even canvas backup files. I was asked the other day. Yes, it can support that as well Moodle net needs a few pieces of information there to make the resource searchable It needs a title a description a creative commons license We're hoping that everything is just open, but that's fine. All creative commons licenses are supported and If it's not a link that is because links can look after their own Licensing, but if it's an uploaded resource, that's a required thing for that resource Now we also ask for a subject now that subject is based on an I said Categorization thanks Anna for that And whether you would like it to be hidden or visible The only reason for that is you might want to work on something come back update it and then make it public But that's also on there as well You can also add it to a collection so you can have a collection which might be a subject area And you can add more metadata if you wish to we don't ask for this metadata as a required element purely because I've worked with a lot of faculty in my time and I didn't want to put them off from sharing their resources The longer you keep them on adding the resource and required fields the fewer resources you end up with on the system So we will talk about that how we're going to encourage that in the future later and You can do a creation date you'll see from the the resource there It has a license type a type which is a learning IEE learning object model. Thanks, Anna As well as a standard an educational level a creation date and a language Now if you wanted to add any language into Moodle net you can there are resources already there And I think there might be some of these people in the room who have actually provided these resources So thank you. I've screen-shotted those to show people that we have things in Spanish and German and French and Arabic and Chinese already on Moodle net The interface is in English But it doesn't mean you can't search in any language and we will work on changing that with a community too as many languages We can like Moodle LMS does over time Something to add about resources that if you do have a moodle account but eat a moodle net account But even if you don't contribute anything if you sign up for an account It allows you to like resources and follow them You'll see on the resources there on the top right that you have a like button like a heart and a bookmark button If you wanted to come back and look at something later. So that's embedded Does this remind you of any social media system that you've used? Twitter LinkedIn This is what I was saying on the panel before that we use our UX function and brew especially does a lot of research into How can we be something that people already know how to use? so let's remove the blocks of how to learn to use the system and That's what we end up with Then we move on to collections So these are intended to be curations So collections are groups of resources your resources or someone else's resources So that allows you to put together a list in a collection for yourself and for others Collections can then be followed bookmarked just like resources So you end up with a list of curated collections and these are then followable by other people So if you are an expert subject matter expert in your field, you have the ability then to follow this on moodle net Couple of collections there The left is a view from my profile So you can see it as I would see it and the right is as I would look at someone else's profile in this case it's Moodle Academy and I would just say that Moodle Academy have taken all the content from previous versions of Moodle net That was relevant and made it available So if you go to the Moodle Academy profile and you have contributed something in the past, it's there As long as it fits to new versions of Moodle and it's a relevant mime type It's there and thanks to Mary Cooch for doing all of that for us at the time And finally some of the content providers and I know that someone is in the room who is pictured up here because I've seen him around Some are educators some are publishers some are institutions and as I say some are in this room So we're encouraging anyone with some good quality Open Educator resources to create a profile share their work and give back to society giving back is what we're all about We're also forging content partnerships with others for you'll see one there bottom left which is frontiers for young minds who are an open science journal for children and You can follow them and you can basically send their resources to Moodle in a couple of clicks to your course If that's relevant to you We're trying to also include things like you may have seen Lauren Goodman talking about a UNESCO course that they've done Which is totally open that's soon going to be available on Moodle net So you will be able to send it directly to your Moodle course and it will unpack just as Lauren has designed it within Moodle net as well You know these resources have the ability to reach potentially over 42 million Moodle courses in a couple of clicks and Part of the remit I was given when I started at Moodle was that's great We obviously want to integrate with Moodle But we also want to give people the opportunity to use these things in any system in any LMS So you will always find a download to take the resource and put it into your system or a link or something else other than But every resource has a send to Moodle button so you can bring it straight in if You share a full Moodle course in Moodle LMS. It actually starts to unpack it as a full course So you will then have a complete course ready to go in Moodle from Moodle net So That's what we've released so far So what are we working on now and what's coming next? Essentially these are the themes for what we're going to do We received feedback that installing Moodle net is a little bit too technical for the ordinary person who wants to try it And the next presentation I think is going to highlight this with the Moodle user association of Japan So we are going to change that and we have been designing a little bit like Moodle LMS has a step-by-step guide, but non-technical So that's one thing we are actually going to change And we're going to provide a cost customization wizard. Thanks, Bruce for that And the opportunity to use it with Moodle cloud So that's what's coming next you will be able to go to Moodle cloud and get a trial and it will be installed for you There will be no technical requirement at all And we're also going to completely review and improve our documentation for you if you want to install your own instance there As no JS and these environments are quite different to how you might have installed Moodle LMS before The largest part of what we're doing right now is to make extending things easily. We've been working with a few partners Thanks to Burn University Moodle user associations of Italy and Japan And we've received lots of feedback from people like OER global librarians and standards and This is why we've taken this approach in this kind because the overriding feedback And number one our list was to create an environment to let you shape Moodle net to fit your institution I'll give you an example If you use single sign-on SSO if you like your TLA's It your institution which I would guess 99.9 percent of us do Then you need to be able to plug that into Moodle net if you install it for yourself So you're not working with multiple logins at the moment You have to create an account on Moodle net So what's coming in the next version is the ability to pull in and disable SSO Extensions and other extensions what we've done is we've stripped back all of the core things around Moodle net to allow you to Change them and this is just isn't just authentication. This is standards as well. So thanks Anna again We we recognize that we made some assumptions about I said categories and about IE learning object models when we were looking at How do we standardize our resources and that may not be relevant to your institution? Therefore, you will be able to add your own standards into here creative commons may also not be the right licensing standard for you So we're going to you get to turn that off and put your own licensing model in if that if you deem fit okay, so Next we're committed to the developers and watch Moodle Academy We're going to be announcing very soon a developer webinar developer course and documentation For Moodle net just like LMS. So you will to follow through and it will guide you in Developing whatever you need for Moodle net finally Coming up is a better integration with LMS now Some of you may have heard Barry talk yesterday about LMS 4.1 and what's coming in a better integration with Moodle net they called it a stretch goal We agree that is a stretch goes a lot of work And that's why this title says Moodle net 3.x and Moodle LMS 4.0 question mark Because we hope it's going to be in 4.1 And the what this will do is allow you within your Moodle course to share directly back to a Moodle net And I say a Moodle net Because you can share it to Moodle.net which is our service or you can share it to your local instance Now this is quite powerful. I mean we've been working with some partners here who are working with Let's say academies who have 30 different institutions with 30 different LMS's but are required to standardize on certain templates and courses Well a local installation of Moodle net allows you to design your template design your course Share it to your local Moodle net and every institution can then push it back as a standardized course into their Moodle And that's why we're doing that one You could of course just share a course, but imagine be able to share resources and standardized courses and templates beyond your own LMS Your pens who act has access to your local Moodle net. So what's coming later? Well, the first thing is we're going to make finding easier easy hopefully but easier certainly on our radar So we need to work on the quality aspect of what's relevant to the user and bring that to the top of the list As the number of resources grows as we move past 100,000 500,000 resources on Moodle net How do we get those things in front of you? correctly well The current Moodle net search engine works on keywords on the metadata that's in the resource But you can't filter that you for example, you can't filter that by educational level So we're firstly going to bring in those filters so you can filter on any metadata there at all And as the Moodle net content grows We're going to get smarter in how we float these to the top of the top of the list We do this currently by using a system of kudos So every resource that you like is awarded one kudo right now So the more kudos if someone then searches popularity in the filter It rises to the top of the list because it's the most popular resource for that search Now that's a good start, but it's certainly not Immune from being gamed we call it being gamed So you get all your colleagues to say what a great resource you've got and they are top of the list so Thanks to burn university who we work with we have seen them design a full gamification system for Moodle net Which involves all sorts of activities just to give you an example of a few For example, if you upload a resource and you do the metadata correctly and it meets quality standards You gain a kudo if you then use that resource in a Moodle cost you gain one and that is Itemized at almost every level. It's a quite a comprehensive technical system of how do we award achievements in Moodle net Those achievements will then translate into digicomp edu badges Which then means it plugs into your continuing professional development system for your teachers as well Now this will probably be an extension So it won't be on the core Moodle net, but you'll be able to add it in as you wish as you move forward So thanks to burn for that. That's one of the themes for the upcoming release and The big one that people talk about we talked about it for a long time and we are Determined to get this working next is federation Now federation if you don't know is the ability to connect your Moodle net to our Moodle net to other Moodle nets We've had the requirement obviously to connect to us So if you have an open education policy and all your resources in your Moodle net are open You'll be able to link to Moodle net making that open to the world But also if someone searches your Moodle net There'll be an option to bring in the content that we list so we end up sharing and What happens as we add more and more service into this federated network is we develop our ecosystem of Open education resources So that's the big idea here is to get that working We have had the requirement from some partners to say well, you know We want to be open to a certain degree, but we don't want to be totally open So we want to ring fence our resources. So it's only usable by these 50 universities So we're also building into the design of that the ability to connect to other Moodle nets But not to us so you can ring fence your things obviously we'd like everything to be open That's our ultimate goal sustainable development goal number four for UNESCO and that's why Moodle net is there finally I Think don alluded to this in the panel discussion We have this idea that and we've been talking with the LMS platform team with Barry's team How do we embed this into Moodle LMS? So how do we make it smart? You don't have to leave the LMS when you create your course It is no longer a blank page It is smart enough to look at Maybe what you've done in the past in other courses on that Moodle LMS installation And you can use search routines as well to pull up more information But to get you really specific and helpful information to start populating your course from the front page And that will come either from your local Moodle net and its federation or the world That is totally your choice And of course if you scan this QR code this goes to our backlog So every feature request we've received we look at them every quarter to say what are we going to do next? We are starting a new product discovery process So we will engage much more with the community in terms of what's important to you and You can vote you can add suggestions there and we will look at them a lot of them already exist There's just a little word cloud there of some of them But you know for example, there's one I want to send a collection of resources to Moodle as a course So I want to curate my entire list and then just send it as a course to Moodle LMS That's becoming a popular one. You can go and vote for it right now on on there on that system RQR that's our tracker if you know that term You know we've got our own tracker there and you'll see it on the product ideas board as well But this is where we want to know from you what you need How can you get involved? Well? This crew you are code takes you to our community If you go there, you can engage directly with the team We're all in that that community there and you can talk to us You'll see my name and a lot of responses there From people asking questions if you're an educator Get an account on Moodle.net share your open resources give back to society curate subjects their collections on any subject and allow people to follow that Administrators install your own Moodle net and Let it serve your content to your institution and its network We will even help with this. So if you are have a hundred thousand resources and just don't know how to get started We have a few that we will help with as a case study to get you going So come and see me come and see a member of the team to talk about that afterwards and Finally, we're all obviously always looking for funding and fund development there to to sponsor certain things We already have sponsors for Google single sign-on for example But we'd like to have sponsors for things that you need as well So if you want a SAML integration or we have a university who wants to make an extension for Moodle net Which makes it look like LinkedIn those sorts of things We're looking for help with those things as well That's it. If you have any questions, we're all here and we're happy to talk to you. Thanks very much. Hi Paul Yeah Yes, yesterday we were talking about Well sharing resources sharing OER's and stuff. So Moodle net of course was there But one of the main worries that we had with Moodle net or other similar services It's always trust trust in the content because of the quality because if anybody can upload anything It's really difficult to to find Yeah, real quality content. So I was happy to hear about that new improvement in in version three with the communication on the And the badges and stuff But is there any further plans on how to improve the trust in the contents like I don't know and Well, it comes from the community at the end of the day. It's The more interactions we get in terms of liking and sharing the more we know about that resource and if it is quality If it's not quality it won't be used as much and it will be ignored essentially when you have a lot So that's the thing. Yes, you want to add something? Yeah, so maybe like I don't know getting feedback from the Instances of LMS that uses it or something like that. Exactly. Yes. Yeah, we are we're not tracking that yet But we do need to do more analytics to make that smarter. Yes, that's the only way we can do it Yeah, okay. Thank you One I didn't get if the federation is already a functionality or if it is planned for Version three or beyond. It's beyond its version three Probably we're starting to design it now So we're talking to people right now and in the next product discovery phase, which is the end of October We'll be inviting people to talk to us about that. Yeah, and have you a release schedule on your website like Moodle I would love to say yes, but I don't not yet. No Yeah, thanks for it. Thanks very much This looks really great and will be really useful for us on a tingy I also spoke to a brew about this but still I'd like to mention it for us and Somebody who's been working in that the OER environment for a long time Versioning would be very interesting. So the point that somebody takes a course develops it further or adapts it And we can see that and the second point is you mentioned already this exciting thing that you put something on Moodle Net and it might might be used by Thousands of other learners somewhere for many of us that would help also Motivating people to use this service. So are these two things sort about on your roadmap? Absolutely, and I think one of those exists in the tracker, but if you'd like to add one that said Around the encouraging users to do this then yes, we'll absolutely consider that Okay, so in terms of sustainability, obviously the Ultimate form of sustainability is cash going to the people building the content I've been involved in some micro payment staff and all that kind of thing. Have you got any plans? How do you see that playing out? Well cash going to the end user I think is not in the philosophy of what Moodle Net was developed for You know it was for the giving back to society the total open education idea But essentially it's that encouragement, isn't it? I mean, how do you get good content onto Moodle Net and we have had that discussion Do we get to the point where if there isn't something you can use do we hand people off to a service? Or do we pay faculty to add their content? Or do we make an arrangement with an institution to add their content in a certain area? The problem with that is that there's no guarantees that then it will be used out there and And it fits into the gamification system, you know, we need to reward that based on it being used So maybe there is a discussion to have about that, but it's certainly not in the in the ethos This is all about openness and giving back