 Welcome everyone. I'm Matt. I'm the platform manager for Moodle Alamus. I've been with Moodle for almost a year now but this is definitely not my first Moodle Mood, although for those who do know me I've stood up on stage many times at Moodle Moods wearing a different logo on my t-shirt. And my Moodle journey started probably in about 2010 when the university that I was working with at the time moved from WebCT to the newly released at the time Moodle 2.0 and my job then was as an educational technologist helping academics move their learning into the online space and all of the challenges that that entailed. I then moved on to a major Australian health care provider where I helped them roll out a Moodle system and then use it for the teaching and upskilling of their staff. Sorry you pointed a camera at me, I was small. And then I spent about the best part of a decade working with a Moodle partner where I work with organisations of basically every type who are all at various stages of their Moodle journey and really just sort of helping them solve their problems and get the most out of Moodle Alamus. And after all that time this year I'm up on stage at a Moodle Mood in a Moodle t-shirt and I'm very very excited about it and it's awesome. So where does my role as platform manager fit into the whole thing? Here's my slide thingy, there it is. So you've probably seen this before if you're in Brett's talk so this is a bit of a high-level diagram of the relationship between the various products and services at Moodle and with Alamus sitting right in the middle of it and Alamus is actually managed across two different teams There's my team, which is the platform team and we look after the core of Moodle Alamus So things like all the core subsystems, user management, administration, APIs, security, all of that sort of thing and then wrapped around the Moodle platform like a big hug is the educational solutions team and they're led by Brett Dalton who you would have seen if you went to his earlier talk on open standards and the educational solutions team look after all of the educational components of Moodle so things like all of the courses and activities. Now Brett and I work really closely together and there is some overlap in what we do but I'm the one lucky enough to be on stage today talking about what's coming in 4.3 So just let's get on to that enough about me So Moodle 4.3 is going to be released on the 9th of October. It's not very far away now It's going to have over 260 new features and improvements and If I was to spend about the next 25 minutes talking about each of those I'd have about six seconds per thing now. I did kind of consider trying to do that I know I talk fast, but I'm not going to I'm just going to focus on some of the new things and I'm also going to spend some time at the end giving a small look of the things that we've got in development now that's going to be in Moodle 4.4 So let's start at the main course view as a student In 4.3, we've worked on the presentation of the activity cards. They take up less vertical space, which means less vertical scroll However, we didn't want to limit the display of important criteria and information to students So we've changed the way that we display completion and availability requirements for each activity The completion requirements are now in a drop-down Which just really helps reduce that visual load in activities that have got a lot of things that you have to do before they're complete But you still get that overall clear completion of when they're done We've made a similar change to the availability criteria so you can expand out a box and see all the criteria that's required and With the new layout actually as you work through and complete an activity as we're seeing Now that box will actually just update and only show you what you need to focus on next again Just trying to you know help students focus and reduce that that cognitive load that they have Looking at the activity cards now as a teacher We've made some improvement of some good improvements here to a lot of the common actions for activities Are now more easily accessible directly from in the context of where they're displayed So also into additional where they've always been so things like you can now update activity Activity completion directly from the drop-down that displays the activity completion for that activity and when you do edit them You're only actually presented with the criteria that the settings that you're trying to change no more Scrolling through that entire activity page just to get to completion In a similar fashion you can update the group status directly from the activity card itself And in fact noodle 4.3 introduces some new UI elements That sort of make that easier and you'll start to see that rolled out this video is not entirely in sync with what I'm talking about It all loop you'll get it and Just like the completion The availability settings can be updated from where they are and again with availability You only get the settings that you're trying to change And finally you can also set the visibility for the activity from the context menu And as a bonus and the same as what you've seen with the other ones if you've already got visibility set You can update it from where it's being displayed And these changes I think are really going to just save a lot of time just going through those very common course management Tools and I actually think it's probably my favorite set of functionality in 4.3 If I'm allowed to have a favorite probably shouldn't say that Still on the course side of things but moving more towards activities We've made some improvements in 4.3 to the way the LTI tools are set up and used and if you saw Brett's talk a bit earlier You would have seen some of these so just to go through these in a little bit more detail There's a dedicated page to set up LTI external tools now and on this page You can see what ones you've got set up for your course You can see how many instances are used in your course You've got easy access to edit and delete them as well as add new ones and the way that you create tools for a course Has been simplified. It's just easier to do now and once they have been set up They're actually also easier to use in your course In the activity chooser which displays all your active activities as you're aware the configured LTI tools now display as First-class activities in there so you can actually find the LTI tools that you've got set up in your course And also though if you're a teacher and you don't want all of those LTI tools in there There's only you've set up a few but there's some you don't want to use anymore or those don't want it as easy access to you Can just as a teacher in your course select which ones you want to see and don't One of the things that's actually not in the video, but is very cool if you're an administrator who's got LTI tools set up at a course level. You can now restrict their display by category So in the case where you've got a math faculty that's got a certain set of LTI tools an English faculty There's another set of LTI tools. They don't have to see each other It's just once again, just reducing that load on the teachers and making slides there a bit easier starting Step forward into the mic. Sorry Can't stand still Zooming out a bit now 4.3 brings some good improvements to the activity completion. So at Site level administrators can now set default activity completions for their activities using the site So this is this case of where your organization for example wants to have a completion criteria for Assignment that says students must get a grade before that things before assignments are considered complete as an organization Teachers now learn longer have to go in and remember to do that every time they set up an assignment It just gets inherited Once again, it'll just save us so much time We've also taken this new site admin page Pattern and applied it to the course. So if you want to manage activity completion Defaults at a course level you get the nice new improved page You've seen in this video and in a couple of the other ones the completion settings themselves Also improved they now have a bit more of a progressive disclosure pattern to them So the settings are only shown to you as the as they need and they're only the relevant ones The irrelevant ones are hidden and this was actually an Mua sponsored Contribution so I do thank them for helping make this possible on The topic of tracking student process at progress. I should say we've made some good changes to the gradebook Firstly looking at the gradebook setup. You can there's an improved user interface You can add gradebook categories and items directly from a drop-down Menu and when adding them the settings are simplified and they're also displayed in a modal window And so you're not taken away from the context that you're working in it's everything's done in front of you There's some other changes. We've improved user search behavior So you can easily more easily find your students when you're working in the gradebook We've made it easier to improve and what improved I should say the bulk movement So you can move the grade settings around a bit more easier and also in this video. There is a sticky footer at the bottom of the page and that just displays common actions for the reports that you're in It's always at the bottom of the page. You don't have to try and scroll to find it And look, there's actually been quite a lot of improvements to the gradebook over the last couple of versions of LMS I've just given a little bit of a tease of what's in 4.3 But if you're interested in a more in-depth look I Recommend you go to Barbara's presentation, which is on at 2 30 p.m. On Thursday in this room I believe I'm getting the nod. So yeah, I do invite you to attend that and You just get to see some more great book improvements in depth So feel like I've gone through so much already at Sony so little What was seen so far is broadly relates to like optimizing outcomes for both students and teachers So where these changes for both groups, you know will help them manage their workloads and optimize their time and look What we've gone through isn't even everything in that area But I am going to spend some time looking at some things that are not just limited to courses and activities Now security it's not the most attractive thing in an application But it's so important and we've always taken a security very seriously and LMS But for 4.3 we wanted to do more and just have that dedicated push to sort of get where we need to be Or beyond where we need to be in fact and this slide just got a few of the security improvements They're pretty nerdy, but if you're into that sort of stuff, they're pretty cool I'm a nerd I can say that and look they sort of just basically cover how we manage Passwords more secure more securely how data is secured as it moves around the various parts of your Moodle infrastructure And a couple of examples of how we've also improved the Moodle user interface to enforce additional security patterns and just trying to You know do things like not show keys more than months and things like that And look this is really with the aim of making Moodle LMS the most secure LMS application available And this is something that we're going to keep pushing beyond 4.3 There was a couple of things I did want to specifically mention about security and privacy in 4.3 The first one is around our data sharing when using the YouTube and the Vimeo media players So both these players now have an admin option to reduce user tracking. So for Vimeo it implements their do not track option and When you've got that enabled it basically sends only the data that it needs to Vimeo to actually play the video for YouTube it reduces tracking using their YouTube no cookie comm domain and It still uses some cookies because it's YouTube, but they're not they're not initialized on on Render of the video anymore. They're actually only get initialized when you click play So if you wanted to have something to say if you consent click play you can do that And there's actually a bonus with this feature for YouTube is because it doesn't initialize all that until you click play There's less web calls when you're loading pages with YouTube embedded Another specific piece I wanted to talk about is multi-factor authentication And it actually has come up a couple of talks. We've seen already 4.3 will ship with native multi-factor authentication. It'll work with any authentication method. You're already using it's not a replacement authentication method It's an extra feature It works with some of the common factors that you'd be familiar with like the authenticator app on your phone Hardware tokens, which are really cool your email and a few others This was a joint effort with one of our partners They had a battle-tested plug-in that they've been using in some high security environments for quite a while We've brought that into core. We've contributed some UX improvements and some other user workflow improvements And made it available to everybody and we'll actually continue to work on that a bit more on 4.4 I won't show too much of this But if you're interested in more about MFA or and authentication security in general I recommend you see Peter Burnett's talk in this room I think he's the one after the one after mine and Alexander Bice's presentation which is at 4.15 today in the Trezi point group So something slightly lighter than security. So over the last few years of LMS We've been improving our integration with the Thai MCHTML editor Because we're actually sort of moving towards retiring our own homegrown addo editor Tiny became the default editor in new installs in 4.2 And we've continued to improve it in 4.3 And one of those improvements is actually several improvements is one in one I should say we've made our use of tiny compatible with the tiny MCE premium plugins So some of these are getting very quickly demoed in the video They're like their advanced image editing and PDF export plug-ins. They've got a bunch of content edit plug-ins like Advanced tables checklist footnotes format painter Plus a bunch that I didn't get time to put on the slide And the cool thing about this and to make it a lot easier for admins You don't need to install additional Moodle plug-ins to get this to work You just need a tiny API key and click enable the premium plugins will be downloaded directly from tiny and available in your Moodle instantly We've also made some improvements to the core of tiny and just a couple of those that we now have a Nice source code editor for when you want to work with your your markup directly as you can see you get the nicely Formatted code you get your code colors the editor itself also does like tag suggestion and tag auto completion and and tag closing As well just so to make it easy when you're working with it like that We've included the no link plug-in just in case you want to have URLs in your content And don't want Moodle to turn them into links for various reasons But at full screen button to the nav bar just to make it easier working in that mode Plus more stuff that's coming in 4.3 and all of these things are really in that space around unlocking creativity and helping you just Build better learning content in your Moodle Right, so not only do I not have enough time to go through all of the new things I don't even have enough time to go through all of the major things in 4.3 But there is a few things that I did want to quickly mention 4.3 will introduce a new communication API and a new plug-in type and these are aimed at making it Easier to integrate LMS with external communication Providers and in 4.3 will include the functionality to connect your Moodle course to a matrix instance Which is quite cool the we've improved the Moodle net functionality So in 4.2 you could share single activities in 4.3 you'll be able to share whole or partial courses We've added there's improved functionality in the question bank to assist with discovery and filtering of questions and I actually The question bank work and is on quiz works on ongoing and there'll be more there's more of it in 4.3 That I won't mention. There's some coming in 4.4 I will make a special call out if you're interested in that space in Moodle and improving that space Please come and see Tim Hunt. You probably have all seen before and Luca Bosch They're the kind of people who want to ask they they are the people to talk to and I'm really keen to hear your questions We're continuing to build our report builders There's more functionality and more reports in that and there's some course navigation improvements Including better navigation when using the book activity and there was actually a sneak peek in one of the other videos if you saw those little floating arrows and that you actually would have seen if you use Moodle Academy and Part of the reason I sort of chose to quote these particular features is they did make it easier to share and communicate when using Moodle Which is important when you really want to facilitate that collaboration with your different users Look, there's more stuff coming in 4.3 There'll be some more detail about all of these features plus more in the next few days as we get closer to the release and start to send out some of those release communications But before I start to wrap up I did want to spend a bit of time giving a glimpse of some of the stuff that we're working on now That's aiming to be in 4.4 because guess what the 24th of April next year is not far away and Just like the speed that I'm talking we are not gonna be slowing down So just a few things I want to touch on We're introducing an improved UI and better workflows when adding images and media when working with our text editors And this is just a couple of the slides of what that'll look like It's just gonna be less clicks when doing those really common actions of adding media and images to your course And it's actually part of a larger project to improve the file picker and repository functionality in LMS overall We've been working on further improvements to the course layer and how you can manage activity hierarchy on the course page Now I do really need to point out that these are preliminary designs that haven't been finalized That's why they're in black and white But in the concept you can see here you've got the ability to add subsections to your course So in the image on the right you can see week two's got two subsections one for the week's quizzes and one for the week's readings and I do want to make another call out if you are in wanting to get involved in shaping this functionality Sabi who I'm not sure was in this room today But Sabi and the UX team are running some usability testing sessions across the next couple of days right here at the moot So if you want to get involved in that head over to the moodle stand And they'll be able to give you a bit more information on how to get in contact the team We've got to me improve we've got some improvements landing around how you select to manage your themes in the LMS Just to make it easier to see where the context of various themes are getting used as well as some reporting behind that as well Look apart from being a cool improvement I just wanted to call this one out just to sort of show that we're not working across all areas of LMS to improve things for all of the user types Big list of some other stuff that we're working on tiny the MCA native plugins So they've tiny you've got a community of plugins just like we do at moodle So we want to generic way just to add them from the moodle Admin interface once again. No need to install them in moodle plugins as Brett was talking about There's more LTI improvements on the way So more changes around making it easier to set up and manage LTI tools more places You can use LTI tools as well as long as in addition to the ability just to integrate with more different types of LTI tools We've recently completed a large piece of research around Notifications with sort of the aim of you know getting that right information to the right people at the right time And the first parts of that functionality is going to start landing in 4.4 Some improvements around the task API so the way that moodle runs and manages its tasks And we're going to be starting to some user research around the admin menus and making lives easier for our admin So they'll be look out for some ways of getting involved in that Plus more still so much more stuff And look today. I've really just sort of covered what's happening in the very short term in LMS we've seen some of the stuff that's coming in 4.3 on the 9th of next month There's a very quick look at some of the stuff happening in 4.4. Well, that's really just the start So I do invite everyone to come and see Marie's talk at 430 this afternoon in this room She's doing the last keynote for today and she'll talk about our larger product vision And look finally why I'm up here on stage I would like to say a big thank you to everybody who's contributed to the 4.3 release Specifically everyone from the moodle community. So everyone who contributed in various ways from lodging issues in our track are Taking part in all that user research Helping with testing and indeed to all of our community of developers Thank you to all of our partners who support so many of you with your moodle instances Thank you to my team and the other LMS teams. They do so much of the work every release and finally Thank you to everyone for coming today. Thank you Just before we get started with the next session We've still got some time for questions from that if anyone's Got a burning question. Yep. We've got one over there Barbara, please Oh, we've got multiple While the sorry while the mic runners are doing their thing Just to let everyone know I'm around at the moot all week I'm on the stand for a couple hours on the schedule somewhere And I'm not hard to miss. So if you've got any questions, you don't get to just come up and talk to me Is bootstrap 5 coming to moodle anytime soon? Is it already there? So the short answer is yes, there's already a tracker and the team are doing Polymer only work on it. I don't have the exact sort of one that we're aiming for off the top of my head, but Yes, okay I Understand why from a business point of view it's very helpful to have paid integration partners Is there ever a danger of conflict? So for example tiny mce's business revolves around certain selling certain premium plugins What if we think in our open source way we want that feature as part of standard moodle Can we just is there any kind of impediment just implementing that as a moodle feature and really? releasing it freely So to answer your question directly, um not as like maybe easier to ask in the abstract not a specific Yeah, no, so it's always like it's a good. It's a very very good question And I'll sort of get to the answer of it as well I won't just talk around it But one of the things that I did want to mention because it talks to a lot of the stuff that we're doing in this space is we You know we have to decide we've got limited resources and also some of these things I'll take the matrix integration for example Matrix is a massive company big group of people a lot of developers building a chat platform is Lots and lots of work right more and building a good one. Let's say right not just a one so Where things In the case of that We don't like we don't want to start building one. We don't have the resources to do it It'll be crap because we don't have the resources to do it. There's already a good one So why are we integrate tiny's the same thing? There are You know commercial things around that But there is sort of and I don't want to speak to a contract that I'm not a hundred percent across But in in terms of the ins and outs, but there's no really reason for like for the thing and one of the Exact examples of that is the the code plugin the code styling plugin. They've got a premium one of those We've got one in core