 of recording and it's over to you Sam. Okay hello everyone thank you for having me and thank you to Rob for inviting me. Full disclosure so yes we are a Moodle Partner offering this but I am not here to sell Catalyst as the MEC provider and there are lots of people that you could do the MEC with and hopefully this gives you an idea of how to find your local partner to do the MEC wherever you are in the world. Okay so my role is a e-learning consultant but I'm also the MEC facilitator in our office and before that in my life I was a learning technologist and a teacher so when it comes to looking at things like this framework and Moodle of course I had to be one of the first in our office to sign up to do it. As we saw from Andre we have the competencies I'm very excited to see that there is the HE branch as well so it'd be very interesting to see if Moodle do decide to do a HE add-on as well on the end of this. I'd be very willing to help shape that in some form if it is available but what essentially the MEC is is a way of putting this wonderful framework into a Moodle context so with the 22 competencies it guides participants into thinking about how could I evidence that I meet this competency through my use of Moodle. So just to give you a very quick overview it is a brand new version of the certificate so there was another version of it previously this is the new version very much more reflective practitioner based rather than evidencing that you know how to build a tool in Moodle. They're roughly about eight hours for each course so each course is shaped around each area and the program itself are delivered only by premium partners and by people who have gone through the MEC training themselves so regardless of where you are in the world whichever Moodle partner you sign up to do the MEC with we've all been through the similar experience we all have the same resources at our disposal and we all use the same wonderful MEC site which is built on Moodle workplace. So each of the courses a mixture of training materials case studies and you're given some self-reflection assessed tasks and you know it's very similar format from one course to another. Another thing to say as well is it's not for people brand new to Moodle these are for people that have used Moodle before so what we do at Catalyst if somebody wants to do the MEC I send them a link to the checking form and I ask them to complete it and send me their results and we start the conversation about whether or not we think they're suitable. Now for the MEC you have to be at least B1 level and I'll show you what that means in a second if you haven't gone through the checking form yourself but for those that don't quite make the B1 level this is where we recommend they do one of the wonderful learn MOOC courses or the Moodle basics for teachers courses that Moodle HQ already provide. So like I say you've got the six areas that we all know and Andrea talked about earlier and each of the courses are designed around each area. When you do the checking form there are these different proficiency levels so if you do it and you want to do the MEC but you come out as an A1, A2 we feel you're not quite maybe ready to take the MEC. This is where we would say okay please go and have a go at the Learn Moodle MOOC or have a look at some of the Moodle basics teachers courses and that's just to give your sort of skill level and understanding level a little bit of a raise. Moving on if you do the checking and you come out at B1 for above that's absolutely perfect this means that you are sort of beyond you know knowing how to add files and links to your Moodle page you know you know how to use forums you know how to use things at the groups feature and it's a really really good base to start your MEC journey. And then when you're actually going through the course itself and the goal is to reach this B2 level or at least this B2 level of course if you can get all the way up to C2 that's absolutely wonderful however B2 is the sort of benchmark for completing each course. So looking at these competencies you have like I said these six areas with the competencies within them and the professional engagement course so this is all about you know how do you stay relevant and interact with peers and the course gives you some ideas of how you could do that using the Moodle tools both internally and externally outside your organisation and it asks you to reflect on your current practice. Like I said with the digital resources course this is talking about how do you source and create and share resources you know internally externally do you think about like creative commons and moving on from that there's the teaching and learning course so this is about how do you ensure that your learners actually understand the subject matter so this looks about the way you guide your learners through the materials you know things like universal design for learning things like developing collaborative learning activities ways of getting your students excited about your content as you are hopefully and different ways of getting them to sort of engage with the materials. Then there's the assessment side so you know what different types of assessment you can set within your Moodle course how you give feedback and how again looking at UDL elements you know how do you design learning and assessments where students can actually present themselves and present their knowledge in a way that best suits their preferences. So when I was doing the MEC myself these next two were the most trickiest ones for me to evidence and you know it's one of the things when you do one of these courses it's you'll find some subjects that you find quite easy and some that you find challenging but then really really exciting afterwards because you feel like you've really learned a lot and so it's about empowering learners so this is looking at you know things like accessibility and inclusion about personalisation and how you can do this so again elements of gamification which you know we've seen a lot during these Moodle Munch sessions you know a lot of that can come into this course as well. And then finally, is that sorry? There's two Ministers Sam, thanks. Oh thank you and then finally be facilitating the digital competence course so I'm going to do a session at the end focusing on this about using Moodle and Mahara for this but again this is about how do you teach these digital skills to your learners. So very quickly so how are you assessed so through quizzes so for each competence there's a quiz and for each competence there is a book full of case studies examples and ideas and then finally you are asked to do two self-reflective tasks so the first one is about how you would advise a college in a certain scenario a colleague gets a certain scenario and the second one's all about okay in this situation how would you react or how have you responded so again it's the reflective practitioner approach and that's why I love this version of the MEC. So what do you get at the end? Well you get a badge for each course that you complete and as you can see I have my six badges because I did the course but I've also got my special facilitator badge because I am a facilitator and then what you've done all six we the facilitators and pass you on to Moodle HQ who will then review your work review our grading and then sign you off and if everything's fine you get one of these lovely certificates. So that is the MEC in a nutshell and hopefully it's something that you might be interested in doing yourself and there's a number of us actually here in the call partners that are offering facilitator so if you go to Moodle website you can look for a partner in your area and sign up. Thank you very much Sam that was a wonderfully comprehensive overview. It was very quick. It was excellent thank you very much and I think the MEC is a wonderful example of how the Digcom PD framework and support professional learning in a variety of different areas and it's so tightly aligned to the framework I think it's wonderful. Obviously it was developed by Moodle HQ and as you say Sam there are numerous Moodle partners around the world who deliver the certificate program.