 So to be quite honest with you, we don't have a lot of plans for this session. We have other scheduled times to talk about particular products and presentations. This is pretty much a Q&A session, so we're just going to see what we can do with it. We're going to have all of the product managers here, and we have some chairs coming. We'll just have a nice little conversation, and we'll see how long we can go for. I hope you're all coming to the party tonight, and I hope you've heard that it's a 70s party. So if you can't dress 70s, bring a 70s mindset. It's going to be a very good party. Old-fashioned house party. I think we just need six, Lee Goldsworthy to the front of the house. Grab a seat. The bright lights. The bright lights of success. How's your day going? Ever had a good day so far? Yeah. I'll back to personally apologize for not attending very many sessions, but it's because every time I walk 20 meters I have to talk to 10 people. So it's good. It's a good kind of problem. So we have here, are you being Lee for now? You're just keeping your seat? What? I'm going to hang around here. We'll call you if we need you. There he is. All right. So I'll just pass the microphone down, and everyone can introduce themselves and what they do a little bit. I did it this morning, but let's hear it in their own words. So over to you, Sonda. All right. Thank you very much, Martin. Hello, everyone. It's been an amazing day so far. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I have. My name is Sonda. I'm the product manager for the Moodle LMS. I've been with Moodle for just over two years now, which has been an amazing adventure. And it's always very inspiring to meet the community and have conversations with as many of you as I can. So thanks very much for coming today. Hey, I'm Doug, Doug Balshaw. So I lead the MoodleNet project. And every time I come to a Moodle, I've been working for Moodle for two years. I'm just amazed at the amount of passion and energy in the rooms I'm in, the amount of interest that people have. I've been to a lot of academic conferences, a lot of tech conferences as well. And it's no right to say that Moodle Moods are right up there with my favorite conferences. So I really enjoyed the energy. So thank you for bringing that energy with you. Hello, I'm Emilio Alfano and I'm the product manager for Moodle Workplace. We have had a very busy day today with the presentation and two workshops. I hope you have enjoyed them. I don't know if you have time to attend, but if you have any questions about workplace, you know, I'm here. I'm the late one. My name is Lee. I'm the product manager for the Moodle Cloud team. I'm the one that brings Emilio and Sonda's products to market from our hosting perspective. And that means if you have questions about how we have it in production, then I'm the one that's closest to the actual customers, which means I have a slightly different set of experience and exposure to the other programs here. Hola, Juan Lever here. I'm the app's team lead. So we are a team of six people and we develop the Moodle apps and also the funded Moodle app service. So if you have any questions about the Moodle app, Moodle app, Moodle work place app or funded apps, I'm here for you. And I have, as I explained this morning, sort of recently joined the guys more directly in terms of, you know, we six are running all the products together and we're being very coordinated. All of these products, I view as one product, right? It's the Moodle platform and they're all parts. They all fit together. They all will be even more seamless over time as they become more connected and they form one big platform. So has anybody got any questions? Someone kick us off. Someone got a burning question. It can be very specific, not so specific as, you know, MDL 39642. I made a comment last week and no one's replied. We don't want bug reports. But let's try and keep it strategic. Bearing in mind that these guys are not hands on developing their products so much. Yes, and you need to call over the microphone so we can be heard. So who's got a question? All right. Cyril over there, I think. And please introduce yourself as well and tell a bit of your story so we all know who we are. Okay, I don't know how much of my story I'm willing to tell to this assembly. Let's start with when you're a child. Okay, I will go one step further. First of all, thank you all for being here. Thank you for your feedback. I'm Cyril. I'm heading EDUNAU. We're a French-based Moodle partner. The team has been working on Moodle for years now. We have 300 customers on Moodle and a couple of other solutions. I see more and more education at large going to something that is hurtful for some academics, which is headless institutions. In other words, I've seen that I'm seeing the first schools where basically there are no teachers, but they're still schools. And the model I have in mind that I've mentioned to a few of you is the school where basically a guy had run five businesses, they all collapsed. And he decided that he needed to know more about code. And he found someone to teach him code. And basically the two of them created a coding class. And the coding class about a year and a half ago is now a school that has 2,000 alumni. He's recruiting tens of them every week. And he sets six people's sessions wherever people want to meet. No teacher, no school, no office. He charges between 350 and 500 a month. He provides the certificates after 11 weeks. The first week is the 12th week that is for free to start with. So basically it's changing all the teaching and learning protocols that most of us know. And I think in a way it's the future. I mean, MoodleNet is in a way expressing this. But my question is, as a group, as six people in front of me consider education, teaching, and learning, I feel we're going towards partly what I would call a learning communities management kind of organization for some of the existing or new coming institutions. I heard someone, Jeff Rubinstein from Culture, I don't know if he's in the room, telling me that he read in Forbes a study that in 2030, which is basically in 10 years from now, there will only be one third of the existing attendance in American universities. My question is, what is your vision regarding this headless education? Well, Martin says the overall vision, but I have some specific answers to some of the things you've talked about there. So for example, that specific example that you gave, that might be going well. But there's examples of some ex-Googlers in California who sell up a school, massive attention, huge amounts of money poured into it, algorithmic curricula, all this kind of stuff, shut down earlier this year. These things get faded by the press, especially by the capitalist press as being this massive new deal there, the future of education. But the future of education is whatever we decide it's going to be. I don't know how many of you are parents in the room, but I'm not going to send my kids to a school like that at the end of the day. I'm going to send my kids to a school where there's human interaction, where there's a humanity to it. So I can't speak on behalf of all of us, but I think that we recognize and value the humanity in education at the end of the day. There might be these little pop-ups that get lots of venture funding, who get a lot of attention, but we're in it for the long haul. We're not trying just to respond to little things that pop up here and there, which is why we're investing long term in things like MoodleNet. We're looking many years out rather than just what's possible with the latest technology just now. We're using new technologies from MoodleNet, but that's based on scalability and what's going to be working long term, not just for little fads in the market. So we can stand up on stage and make some cool speech for as long as you want about the trends in education, the future of education. People like Audrey Waters write about this all the time. The future of education is whatever we decide, not what someone stands on stage and decides, and it's up to us as a community to come together and decide that all together, and we don't let anyone else tell us what to do. I would say at the end of the day. Very good answer, Doug, and very good question, Cyril, as well, to open us up. I sometimes, and just to follow on, I sometimes talk about this sort of three big movements going on that are fighting. We have, our mission is about empowering educators to improve the world, and the educators is very intentional because that's what we are doing. We're not tackling any other things, and the reason is exactly as Doug said, it's a way we think should happen. With 8 billion people in the world, if no one's an educator, what's everyone going to do? Who's deciding the future of humanity? I sometimes say it's three big trends. One is the traditional schools and universities, and there's a huge system already worldwide, enormous infrastructure that has works. We are all educated, we all, here we are, we went through that system, and we have memories of some very good teachers. I'm sure everybody can remember one teacher that inspired them. One mentor, somebody who really helped you become the human that you are, and I don't think you can find that in other methods. The second one is this, the Silicon Valley kind of approach where, hey, we have an app and it's direct to students, and education systems are failing, teachers can't do the job, this is the usual rhetoric, and we have an app that will replace that, it's more efficient. I was at a conference in Israel where unusually, I went on my talk, I had 20 minutes, I decided to not talk about Moodle. I actually talked about the importance of public education. In the audience, because I knew, there were 2,000 teachers, all the other speakers were exactly that same pattern. Education is failing, we need to replace schools with my app, and all the teachers were like, horrified, right? Actually, that's where I met education for the many who became an investor in Moodle. The third trend is the online social media peer-to-peer thing, which is great, and I use YouTube as much as you, if I need to fix a car, and there's a specific route thing I need to know right now, just in time learning, it's very useful to find the right video or the right web page or whatever to do it right then. But if I get cancer, I do not want my doctor learning on YouTube. I want them in the first system, and so there's a place for everything, I think, but we are for the first group. Does anybody want to add anything? What's good? All right, who else has got something? Got a question? Yes, Marcus? Giving the Marcus phone. Everybody in the room should look up the name Audrey Waters, as mentioned, and read her blog about the history of the future of education. If you want to know what's going to happen, read Audrey Waters. She knows the answer about what's going to happen. W-A-T-T-E-R-S. Audrey Waters, she's a blogger, what do you call it, industry pundit author. Interestingly, I've never talked to her. She's never reached out. She kind of ignores Moodle, generally. It's kind of not her radar. Have you noticed that? I don't know why. I'm even pinging her on Twitter, and she never replied. I know. Everybody pinging her on Twitter now, and we'll see if she calls. Who's got a question? Or a comment? Or a story? Or a very bad dad joke? I've got a Moodle-related dad joke. Not really. What's orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. You're welcome. It's just very generous of everybody for that one. I'm not going to pretend to have a bad dad joke, but if someone has a question, as Man said, yeah, please step forward. Hey, Kibilalios from the University of Helsinki. We've been Moodle users since 1.6, and I recently have been working a lot with the Faculty of Medicine in Helsinki, and I've noticed because they have their own, like, pedagogical conference scene, the medical educators. They go to their own conference and so on. It's an interesting parallel universe because there are slightly different trends there than other pedagogical conferences and so on. One big thing at the moment is curriculum mapping, and I would love to hear thoughts on how competencies, framework-related features are going to be developed in future versions and what are your thoughts on curriculum mapping in Moodle? I have some. Is that the university where Flea 3 was invented? Do you remember Flea 3? F-L-E-3? It was a learning platform for about 10, 20 years ago. Not sure. So curriculum mapping. There's two things I want to say about that. The closest we have to those things in Moodle is obviously the competencies framework, which came mostly from University of Montreal, and we brought into Moodle with a bit of work. We worked with them as a kind of first effort. They've done further work on interface and so on, and they're asking us to bring that in as well. We've looked at it. We're not sure it's quite ready yet. I feel like we have a big project there that we need to involve the community to make sure it's really suitable. The second thing we have in Moodle Core is badges and representing the results of particular curriculum items somehow for recognition, and they have just been connected in Moodle Core, the badges and the competencies. You can get badges issued on competencies, and I think that's the start. I think we need to look at a coherent system in there and make the interface better and better. The other thing is that if the open ed tech, this is one of the topics for the conference later in the week, because I feel it extends out of Moodle into other systems and all of the curriculum mapping systems that are out there, open recognition projects, there is a new project being started by Concentric Sky called Open Taxonomy where they're trying to make a regular way of representing taxonomies of subjects and breaking it right down into curriculum levels. There are a lot of projects out there. It's kind of very big and there's a lot of players in the world, and I feel like the open ed tech space is a place where we should bring all those players together and try and make that happen. So we need experts in that to get together. If you know of initiatives that are similar, find them and bring them to this, that would be helpful. Can I ask a question of the audience? So I did a bit of consultancy on top of Moodle and when I go out to clients who are already using Moodle, I find quite a lot of them use badging systems as well as the Moodle badging system. So I was just interested in a show of hands. If your organization uses a badging system alongside Moodle, could you just put your hand up now? Just interested if anyone does that. Okay, so we've got a couple. Okay, and then if you put that down, and then anyone who uses on a regular basis in their organization, the badging functionality inside Moodle, like Moodle's core badging functionality. All right, just a sprinkle. We have some work to do. Thank you very much. Yeah, there's clearly work for you, Sonda, here. Thanks, that wasn't the way. Does anybody else have a comment on that topic, actually? Sorry, I think you've got the microphone next, is anyone got another comment on that topic, or is an interest in that? Salonge, I think? Well, tomorrow at 12.20 in this very room, we'll be talking about the Moodle Educator Certification Program and in terms of curriculum mapping, some of the digital competences and the modules that we have in there are also going to be a language of collaboration. And so we'll talk a bit more about that tomorrow, but I think that's one way to start thinking about this in terms of what does this look like in teaching and learning practice, and how can we find ways to curate some of the common activities that we use in Moodle and how we approach different subjects and content areas across diverse sectors. So that might make some sense tomorrow as well, and how it can connect with what you're doing. Does one of those 22 modules address competency mapping in Moodle? You can use it as a framework and as a structure for mapping the content that you're doing absolutely with more teaching approaches, and then each of those approaches, and the rest you can hear tomorrow, or come and talk to me, and we also have a brochure, but there are a lot of ways that you can use it as a framework as well. Hello, I'm Lokesh from The Restick. So basically, Moodle is now being used by corporates now. The challenges that we are facing with corporates is that they do a lot of audits on top of Moodle, and sometimes it becomes very difficult to convince them that Moodle being an open source is very secure. The recent audits that have been done on top of Moodle for one of my clients was that Moodle is not using best practices in terms of the coding languages. And the response that I got from your team was that they also agree that Moodle, I do however agree that the best practice dictates that they are passed through post-request rather than get request. And one of the response that I received was that they are planning to set up as security best practice improvements in near future. That was emailed to me six months back. So I need to understand whether there is any tracker that would be opening up where we could dissolve all those audit issues that are happening. I also had a discussion with Joanne because regarding that Moodle mobile app, audits are also being done especially for our internal clients. So there are a lot of issues that are happening. So how what's your take on dissolving those issues in near future? Okay, if I answer that. So while Sunder is the product manager for LMS, he's been here two years. I have more history. Yeah, so maybe I can help with that one. Firstly, I completed this idea of get versus post. I don't think this is in itself a security problem at all. We're not going to change everything just because someone wants that to happen. However, there has been many security audits of Moodle over the years because every time a corporate or a bank wants to use Moodle, they do security audits and we get a lot of bugs coming in. Sometimes we fix them and we change things and a lot of the way the Moodle code is structured is that a whole classes of security problems can't happen. So for example, you cannot write bad data in the database to overflow SQL requests and so on because we have a database layer that you have to use and that just removes that. Cross site scripting is removed in many cases because of the way we handle our forms and so on and our texts. So I feel Moodle is very, very secure and I also disagree about the corporate use. So 60% of the revenue that comes through Moodle partners is from corporate users and these are big. These are Shell, Google, Cisco Academy runs on Moodle. We have all the military users Moodle. They're interested in security. So Royal Air Force in the UK, the Australian Defense Force, etc., etc. Airlines. This goes on. We have thousands of corporate users and they're fine. So I don't think there's a real problem. One thing we had talked about and I mentioned it so we had a really nice discussion together on Sunday to put in our roadmap is to have use bug crowd. So crowd source security researchers and give them a bounty and say find bugs and you get money as a regular annual practice so we can show reports that might help actually if you need to show them. But I think if anyone can demonstrate there are security problems actually not just I'll get versus post but actual security problems then we want to fix them urgently because it will affect a lot of users. We do get a lot of these security audit reports sent to us from time to time as well. We do go through them and a large number of the issues that we find are false positives. If we do find real issues we do have a set up security process in place and we'll tackle them and the bugs will be fixed in the next minor release. So we take it very seriously. We do want to be more proactive about it and this is where the bug bounty and those sort of thought processes come from. We do need a little bit of time to sort of implement those things but we take it seriously for sure. I don't want to ask another question I want to add from the point of view of the Open University. We're one of the organizations that commissioned a security review of our Moodle site and exactly that. You have a look at it from the consultant's point of view. If they fail to point out something that might be a problem and you get hacked they're in big trouble. If they raise lots of false positives and then you have to go through explaining you know they're covered. So you've got to see where they're coming from. Their favorite one that I've seen in these reports is they will say Moodle doesn't have cross-site request forgery protection and Moodle puts the session key in the URL and both of these are bad. No, you don't understand. That thing in the URL is cross-site request forgery. So sometimes the false positives you get are pretty disappointing. It's like why are we paying you this money for this audit if you think that. So and again I mean having observed Moodle development for many years yes security is taken very seriously and as Martin said there's lots baked into the architecture to just make it essentially impossible to introduce security holes. If you want to see a list of all the recent security fixes go to Moodle.org slash security and you'll see all the latest fixes. They're all registered with CVE numbers. There's a common vulnerability exploit. So they're reported globally. Just as another non Moodle HQ addition here in terms of security another perspective here is our experience having worked with Moodle HQ for a number of years is in the instances of there being a security issue a bug of some sorts. The communication is very very responsive. It is very it is done well. People are given transparency and ability to mitigate security issues as quickly as feasible and we are given the ability to communicate things to our clients in a way that we've never seen duplicated in the other open source projects. So I mean to sort of highlight potential architectural changes I mean if you pay IT people to review someone else's software and point out the way it should have been done differently you will always get you know a large document full of quite conjugated opinion but certainly Moodle's track record for security and acting upon any any issues that arise is top shelf. Hello I'm Daniel I work part-time for the HQ and part-time for Moodle partner in Brazil and I would just like to show examples of what people already talked here. We work with banks in the Brazilian army and really really most of the reports are false positives because they are they get in it from automated tools. Yeah and now speaking from a part of view of computer scientists that is my formation people really get paranoid about security and we have reports like you can't add have anything with admin in your because it's a security issue when it's not so we have we also work with the central bank of Brazil and clients like the Santander bank and they are pretty strict about security and we didn't have any problems with security in the last two or three years at least. One of my favorite security reports that comes up again and again is if you're an admin you can delete users in the slide. I have a question about usability or ease of use you know passionate about pretty interfaces and you can make Moodle look like not Moodle no but when you turn tenant editing on there it is again so what are your thoughts about the future for doing it much more easier for the teachers to instead of that clicking and trying to find the stuff there in a pretty difficult way thanks. Yeah thanks for that question you know I would totally agree with you and very much aware of that and looking to make improvements so improving the user experience is is very much part of our focus we've got some stuff in the pipeline for 3.9 where we're looking improving for example how the activity chooser works and work from that will flow on in improving things like course editing and the course formats for the course page. We've done some extensive research as well in terms of how the navigation works for teachers around the course because some great ideas on how to improve that it's it is a matter of finding the right time to sort of put that work together but we're certainly very passionate about it and want to have a major focus on improving the usability especially around those core components of Moodle that everybody uses on a day-to-day basis because I think I think it's key. Look further to that UX is one of our highest priorities it's difficult to do UX in Moodle to change the usability because of all the layers of software and the structure of the architecture of it and it's very easy to make a theme to change things that's by design but to make changes that affect every single institution in the room affects everybody's themes it affects everybody's training and documentation and right so we have to be more considerate and one thing we had a dedicated UX team with a UX lead the UX lead left and we were kind of left in inside Moodle HQ we were left in a bit of a hole with a team who didn't have a strong leadership and this year there's been like that we are currently looking for a new X lead and we want somebody who understands the complexity of building a system to make systems and we want somebody who is passionate about the user experience for teachers and students particularly and we want somebody who's very good at managing a team of people to get that work done and not only a team internally but that team to manage the whole community in a process with a cadence so what I want to see is like an initiative so okay we are looking at navigation across Moodle so a big project across all of the modules across the courses across the nearly 2,000 plugins in the plugins database because all those developers need to be included and informed to upgrade their plugins and we look at navigation and we fix the navigation things and then the next project is let's look at the forms or let's look at the the what okay so the quiz so Tim Hunt is here he's the quiz maintainer he will tell you he has perfect usability he shook his head so I think you need to talk to this this lady over here she she will help you so it really helps when you have concrete suggestions it helps more when you have even user testing to prove that it's a better interface to make the change worthwhile and I think we just need to we will have a UX lead I really I want to stress this I had meant to mention that this morning I had some slides to show the jobs that we have available at Moodle headquarters right now the number one job is the UX lead so if any of you know somebody who might fit this description who already knows Moodle somewhat this will be a huge advantage we want that UX lead soon so please help us and if you're watching on streaming that includes you as well contact Martin at Moodle.com or you can even go to our jobs page and this is the easy way we'll not be applying for that job thank you yeah it's a doozy it's it's hard a little bit of you I envy you like facebook designers because facebook is super simple or twitter super simple they're big big systems but the use of the actual complexity of them is nothing compared to Moodle so I just wanted to kind of follow on to her comment to say that one of the problems that I'm seeing in the United States is canvas and canvas is gaining market share obviously through marketing but also because it looks pretty it does I mean in a way it does it it's it's catchy it's a shiny nice little toy and I think that you can underestimate a the attractiveness of an interface in terms of first impressions who are continuing to want to use it and it being appearing to be up to date and also consistency so I hope that whoever is doing you know whoever takes us over will make sure that within the different activities that we start to get a sense of consistency so I think indeed that's that's one of the the sales pitches for canvas it's one of the reasons why I would like us to focus in on those core activities and components of Moodle and make them look consistent and work really really well and be easy to use I think one of the limitations for canvas is that yes it's it's nice and consistent but there's also limitations to what you can actually achieve at the platform which is then one of the strong points of Moodle in the past few years if you go back and look at like Moodle 2.9 or something and compare it to today there's a huge difference like there has been a lot of UX improvements with Boost if you're not using Boost as a base theme please fix that because that's the future Bootstrap 4 for designers it's all Bootstrap 4 now so don't do anything else you can put Bootstrap 4 in your content as well to make nice content fancy buttons and carousels and all kinds of stuff you know I've seen some Moodle sites that will put any other LMS to shame because they've been designed for a particular purpose most of the most of the what you should be doing with Moodle is turning off things turn off the things that you don't need right if you're a student if your teachers are only using four modules and you've decided that's how you're teaching and great use four activities and turn off the other stuff so you can make Moodle very usable with a little bit of work I don't see that UX and technical aspects are the main problem I think we should take our hands to our own nose and have a look on how we are constructing courses I see a lot of courses with poor deducting if I go into university I see lots of courses that are cemeteries or files from going into corporate systems I see so much system that only using scorn packages but this is not a good pedagogy and this is a question of the concept that a teacher or staff is deciding that they want to use and if they want to know what they want to use they can use Moodle and but this should be the first one and this is something that we have to organize as user as Moodle an internal process of developing this culture of thinking about digital learning but if I can add just another example we at Adapta the Moodle Partner in Brazil we just migrated a big client from canvas to Moodle and we did a big beautiful work with designing layout and they migrated from canvas to Moodle because they weren't able to do everything they want with canvas and now they can and they do math classes for children so it's a very colorful Moodle website it's very good content so yes we can do it I just I just want to point something what in workplace we are aware that sometimes it's very difficult when you you know start from scratch in Moodle you have like the white canvas and you have so many things that you can do it's sometimes it could be difficult you know to start configuring your site if you don't know anything about Moodle and that is something we're doing with with workplace we're actually like turning down some things we're really like creating a dashboard a new specific course format to start creating a like Moodle flavor so it could be it could make easier you know to to do this first step in with your new Moodle site so I think that's something we could improve not only workplace but also in Moodle elements make it easier to use right don't have any questions for well or Lee I just thought while we're still on the user experience type topic there's a question that I've had for a while and I I'm sure there must be a really good reason for it I just this has been nagging me for quite a while but there's no right click in Moodle it doesn't seem to be any functionality that UX is via the right click and I was thinking back on it there were times when I've heard of rumors that turn editing on is going and it's going to be replaced by something else and I thought well maybe that might be the emergence of the right click and you can't right click on touch screens though right you can't right click on touch screens they hold and click right you tap and hold so that's the and max don't have a right button but they do have the I'm not answering the LMS questions some things are right so so I'm just wondering why there why that's not there and for example also in the mobile app one of the great things on mobile is mobile phones have cameras but there doesn't seem to be a camera part of the Moodle app yet or using the gyroscope sensors or the motion detection sensors or the other the other sensors that maybe the mobile app could really capitalize don't seem to be there and I'm wondering is this going to come in through plugins or is there no plan to bring that in or what if you want to see the mobile app using a camera and video then big blue button has it integrated really really nicely but there are still slight limitations I think so well I think that the mobile interface is in a way like more simplified one with less options and direct to the point for users so maybe it's like for some kind of institutions they are like primary schools they heard some cases that they prefer to use the mobile app that the web interface because they can they can do less things with the mobile app with that with the normal web interface there is less options but there are only the most use options so this is something that you can do with mobile regarding these gestures things like that sounds like a good idea but the problem with that is that if you enable by default these kind of things that depending on the person who's using the device he can start things moving around or things that he wasn't expected expecting to do so and then you need to create like a configuration tool or thing like that so you can you know it's like with my computer that you can you know with gestures you can do this and this and that and that complicates things because it will need for mostly advanced users that are really interested in using the mobile app in in that way so so for that we always try to apart from this gesture thing we always try to make things simple at possible but at the same time we need to be consistent to the web with the web interface so users in any moment they are familiar in the both two different environments so it's not easy to find this balance between usability accessibility and then consistency between systems and this is why I think that uh this new approach for UX that Martin mentioned about having someone looking cross products to have like consistent interfaces and functionality and the way we think that everything should work it would be great because a lot of great things can be done you can maybe think about you are writing a form post in the web interface that you go back to the app and you have the drafter so you can continue things like that and it's something that we want to explore but right now I think that we need this cross UX view among products to be try to be consistent in not only in the appearance but also in the way the users can use the different functionalities um so just uh because I have more history here the the philosophy I always had uh that this is a web application it's a web site uh in websites you don't right click and get menus name one like it's just you know you don't go to cnn.com and right click when you right click you get a browser menu the browser thing has opened a new tab it has save as save image as it has all the browser functions and that's what you expect under a right click um if you start putting in your own menus you're messing with the browser experience and you know you have a problem and secondly accessibility um if you're hiding important functions in a in a right click not discoverable doesn't work with accessibility if you're blind uh or other things you're in trouble too so that we I kept things basic for a reason on many levels even I even kept the coding basic it's very fun I knew about object oriented programming and when I started Moodle but I avoided it largely and went with functional programming because a lot of the people writing code were just you know teachers who had learned a bit of programming and they could hack on it much easier without needing a computer science degree so that was my general philosophy and my name is Gido I'm from Germany I work in e-learning research since 1999 and make my living with Moodle since 10 years and um Martin you said switch off the things you don't need please put in the config php switch off creating blocks and courses because and it's documented in config dist how to do that but why not switching them off constantly and if someone needs that he can switch them on that's one why if you make crowdfunding for um buck bounty you could do some crowd crowdfunding projects for makes the most beautiful Moodle course for 2020 2021 and so on and always put this in the distribution so you'll have one beautiful course inside always and you can show people that this is possible and will cost no money because it's crowdfunded and I think these things are very easy when we talk to um companies who want to adapt Moodle you always find people in the HR they have used Moodle in the university and they say oops this is ugly we don't want to have this in our company and you can convince them by showing them easy changes with nice themes or course changes when um maybe you should put some exhibition invite artists and do more loud things about beautiful websites and if you are and if people would be very ugly to Moodle they would say there are a lot of old white men sitting on the stage and arguing why we can't do UX um look I think there's some really great suggestions in there so thank you very much for that and I think the reason why they're not in there at this point in time is simply because we haven't got around to it but I think there's awesome suggestions for us to put some showcases into the platform that people can see it can look nice yeah maybe when the Moodle net integration gets going maybe one of the first things you can find is here's some showcase stuff well you know a lot of people complain about Moodle loading up old bunch of content who who would like Moodle to start off with a demonstration course who would not like it who was using their phone and didn't notice my question so a lot more people wanted it I think so that's good sorry I'm going to lower the tone with quite a technical question for the Moodle cloud people I believe that Moodle cloud currently some of the stuff it uses to host Moodle data in the cloud has not yet been shared with the community you guys kind of put some hooks into Moodle core but some of the backend code that actually lets you store Moodle data files in blob storage hasn't ever been shared would you like to the decisions on that one are slightly before my time Martin I might sling this one your way actually make up an answer just make up something um so you probably actually know more about me Andrew but I think uh well give the microphone to Andrew down here I was under the impression that was shared but maybe not I'm not sure about your changes but we shared our s3 storage file system the catalyst is a public you I'll talk too about it after this yes yes there isn't there isn't much that makes sense outside of Moodle cloud the changes we've made are to make Moodle cloud work with 32 000 commodity Moodle sites um incidentally Moodle cloud does have a demonstration course in the content when you get a new one um but yeah the changes like that are very specific to Moodle cloud currently John is from Switzerland working for the Moodle since 2006 here yes um I think you made an amazing job organizing this Moodle Mood global it's the first chance to meet people from around the globe to to talk about Moodle um I saw a lot of interesting presentation today and I just thought about these plugins which are developed in different countries most of some of them are kind of similar and wouldn't it be great to have an opportunity to kind of crowd fund and share and work together for developing even better uh plugins so a question probably to doc would it be nice to have a kind of a a Moodle net for plugins where we can contribute as an individual user or as a as a small university who cannot apply or cannot deliver some development or a big amount of money to a development but some hundred dollars wouldn't mind I feel like I planted the question thank you very much for that um so one of the things that Martin actually suggested I think last year was that there's all of these sites like teachers pay teachers and all these places where you can go and sell your your courses and your your content which is actually really problematic I used to be a teacher and I had to get special dispensation from the local authority to work with a publisher because the local authority owned me even at the weekends if I publish anything to the education so what man's idea was and I don't know why I'm saying man's idea so man's saying his idea but instead of people selling their content why don't we crowd fund things into existence so here's something which needs translating or localizing here's something which we wish existed as as a resource or a quiz or whatever it is and why don't we crowd funds like pay people all of us together however many people are interested to crowd fund that into existence so that is on the Moodle net roadmap now how quickly we get to that we're given the list of features we've got um it might be like 2021 but um it's certainly on there and on the slides I put on today crowdfunding was was on there so it's a great idea and something we'd really like to get to but it depends on the other kind of resourcing um so further to that um that we actually had on if you go to if you google Moodle crowdfund you will find a bunch of crowdfunding we already did on Moodle.org also the MUA is a crowdfunding organization as you know for core and can create functionality but then I have a new plan the which I did talk I raised for the very first time at Moodle Dach Moodle Dach conference in Vienna a couple of months ago and I had a session on it and we had a lot of useful feedback and I think this is going to fly so I call it the Moodle plugins service and I too go to Moodle Moots and I see people presenting wonderful new modules they've worked on or plugins they've worked on and I think the teachers who go educators or people like us who are at the conference they go oh I would love that but I have to convince my admin to install it and it's a whole big hassle so how do I get that especially the French Moodle Moot actually almost every single presentation at the French Moodle Moot is a university presenting an amazing new module they've researched and designed all year round so Moodle plugins service so imagine this all the plugins in the plugins database are installed on a special cloud system that we build and you could imagine a server in the cloud and it had nothing on it but installations of let's say questionnaire is my church would hear still maintaining questionnaire right so imagine this had just was just built to host questionnaire and imagine from inside Moodle as a teacher you go to your activity chooser and you see the activities that are installed and then you see Moodle plugins service and you go on there do a bit of a search oh yeah I want to ask questionnaire module you click on the questionnaire module it creates a new instance of the questionnaire module in the cloud and it serves it back to you with LTI right so your users go to that module the data comes back into the grade book it appears using your own theme it appears to be part of your local installation but it's actually running out on the cloud and then imagine to have access to the service you paid a subscription so something like Netflix maybe you could buy a one-off for a dollar one questionnaire instance for a dollar or but maybe you have a subscription maybe it's $12 a month or something to have access to all the plugins so anytime somebody comes up with a new plugin they the developer signs up with a Moodle plugin service and it puts it into the system all right the money from the subscriptions gets shared part of it comes to Moodle HQ to pay for the hosting service and part of it goes to the developer so now the developers of plugins have a constant revenue stream encouraging them to improve their plugins support the plugins you know they are now in touch with the users of their plugins and the whole community could build up about let's keep using questionnaire as an example you could have a community of users around the world who are paying you Mike and are you asked to looking after it right sort of yeah yeah okay anyway so uh this is a possibility I really think this is a flyer I think we can do this so looking at putting it on the roadmap as soon as we get everything else done we have to finish like now ish no Diego is like chopping my head off right now um one more question one more question so we got one more thing I have a fantasy that involves me becoming fabulously wealthy cloning Moodle and removing all of the things that people just don't use and so it's a much simpler thing to use and it becomes enormously popular and then I become I know I've already become rich haven't I yeah um um you must be aware there but there are things in Moodle almost nobody use I suspect is my suspicion correct you know quite like one under one percent of people installations ever use some of the features this would be a terrific thing to to give to the UX lead as a research project so disable it not not remove it just disable it so it doesn't give you things that you're probably never going to use yeah well I couldn't agree more I don't have specific numbers around this at this point in time but uh those are the things that I would love to explore because I think a lot of people would benefit from a slim downstream on platform and I work mostly on managing Austin so I do a lot of management of Moodle and what I see is that what I would love to see is a way to connect easily to the rest of the IT world you know I think that you know you see yourself as a single platform I would love to see you as a single experiences that connect with something else to make a platform you know which which is different which is a different story you know and there are parts that maybe you don't need to develop inside but you just need to do the right API or the right way to connect an example came out today and when I spoke seeing the people in the Moodle workplace regarding the reporting which actually is pretty interesting the way you did it and I say well great database of the results which is always up to date you want to see and go inside that data and similar and so so people say oh well you know maybe I should buy a filter you know a Ripper builder like somebody in the in the competition does or maybe you just connected to Grafana ready so this is Federation you keep the control of this vision there there's a lot of extensions and plugins and integrations already available within Moodle I think for many people Moodle is part of their ecosystem they use other systems as well for other Moodle sites it's it's a self-contained unit so I think at the moment Moodle is trying to find a balance between between being the two of those but there's certainly already a lot of possible existing integrations with external systems available hundreds hundred most of the plugins are integrations to other systems all of the sponsors here have Moodle plugins that connect their system to Moodle it's very common we have an invented databases we use MySQL and Postgres and we rely on dozens of other open source projects to make Moodle run you know it is libraries of other projects inside the code that we distribute with Moodle that we haven't written yeah it's it's already happening I think a lot and open ed tech or advertise one more time on Thursday and Friday is all about these relationships too but when you say the development you always see the development at the UI level you are not showing the the way you are developing at want to reach for the API level for example go to docs.moodle.org slash dev and look in there and you'll see all those APIs so many of them so just one example is Moodle so Moodle all the plugins right to a log API and then there are many many many plugins that determine where you store the logs all sorts of external systems and local so that's generally how we work we we write a framework and an API and then we allow plugins so that you can choose who you want to connect it to yeah we should finish because beer all right have fun and you'll see at the party we'll be at the party all right