 So it's now time to kick off We start today with a presentation from our CEO and founder of Moodle, Martin Duguy Amos Who will speak to about where we can take Moodle next. Please welcome to the stage Martin Duguy Amos Thank you Paul. Not only is He a good-looking emcee. He is also the product manager of MoodleNet Hi Good morning everybody. You know this Wow, look at this. This is the biggest moot ever So let's have a cheer for that Welcome back after the after Thanos Clicked fingers and we all disappeared for three years It's so good to be back I'm I'm gonna talk today Very broadly. That's why I've put here the big gist I really want to go large with the context of what we're doing but Those of you have seen me before. This is how my keynotes usually start They'll start with a mission Empowering educators to improve the world with the most effective platform for learning I'll talk about the Moodle values Education openness respect integrity innovation and how we're a certified b-corp and all that I Might talk about the conference. We have 840 Moodlers 840 of us have come together here. We have 120 from Moodle headquarters That is amazing last week We all had a get-together ourselves in sitches. It's just down the road one half an hour drive And we did a lot of brainstorming together and it was amazing So there's 120 of the people who make Moodle here plus the rest of you who make Moodle here It's gonna be great. I really like this number We had a only half of the sessions that were proposed that we could accept We had twice as many and 22 sponsors. Thank you to all the sponsors They're all around you'll see them. We're from 60 countries And 113 talks overall. It's gonna be massive Moodle HQ and now 178 people soon 248 Can't tell you how We're all over the place Moodle itself is everywhere. I would say if this was a normal keynote We have more Moodle partners than ever we have new certified integrations We have all this activity going on in products but I'm not even going to talk about that today because The rest of the team are here to talk about that and there's like three days of it so this you know this you'll see everything around the around the venue and and all the sessions By the way, you like this hotel Which pretty nice, huh? It's we're all in a spaceship today so Get around the spaceship and and talk to everyone about this stuff one thing I will highlight We are Moodle workplace 4.0 finally released this week So there'll be a lot on that if you want to get into it. So yeah, thanks If you aren't on matrix yet come join us in the matrix We are using matrix for Moodle community chat from now on and There is some chat rooms there. So this isn't it's not WhatsApp. It's not telegram. It's not Facebook Messenger. It's not Microsoft Teams It's not slack. It's not any of those it's an open system like Moodle that we will be integrating with in the future and There's the QR code to take you to some instructions after you do that you will join us in the matrix This conference is all great news. So go and see all that. So I'm not going to talk about all of that I'm going to talk about our history who knows What that is Anybody Yell it out Sorry a Cell that is one cell One it's actually a mammalian cell in a mammal Quite interesting and complex Cells first emerged at least three point eight billion years ago About 750 million years after earth was formed That picture in the background It's not a photograph. That's a I've generated that with an AI Almost all of this presentation has been generated with an artificial intelligence So I've been using an AI In a number of ways to generate some of this content and a lot of the images Cells came together into multi-cellular organisms around 1.7 billion years ago. This is all of our shared history. I'm talking about here First animals and animals comes from the Latin anima movement, you know animals things that could move around Around 600 million years ago very tiny creatures little worms the first humans Started emerging around two million years ago. The first modern humans homo sapiens is only 200,000 years ago Now you start seeing where the AI gets pictures a little bit weird sometimes But I actually like the weirdness of AI imagery. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's weird sometimes it makes you think So each one of us is a community of around a hundred trillion cells that work together That's what makes up each of our bodies and they're being constantly renewed This is one type of communication between cells between two neurons in your brain each one is a cell and There's electrical signals See that's you may have heard about that, but there are in fact around 22 or 23 different types of communication that happen between cells all types of You know chemical and physical and electrical signals that happen. This one was not from an AI Yeah, I don't want to put too many lies on on slides, but this one was I got a picture of it I think it looks arguably more artistic So in our brain, we have 85 billion neurons There are more connections between the cells in your brain each one of us Than stars in the universe. We have a ton of these cells working together in each of our brains All of that is working together right now. So I'm standing here a hundred trillion cells That's me trying to generate a picture of a speaker on a stage Those cells are all working together right now each cell in my body is pumping out signals It doesn't even know where the signals are going each cell is pumping out electricity and chemical and physical cell communication out Inside itself and that's letting all of this happen in front of you right now that we're all used to So the cells over this immense of period of time have worked out how to come together into an organization That can get things done. I would like you all now Close your eyes and just feel your hundred trillion cells so just clear your mind a little bit and just feel that Collection of cells that is your body working together and now Feel yourself in the space Open your eyes look to the person next to you That person next to you is another hundred trillion cells like you Now what we are We are the universe looking at itself Right. We are not separate from the universe Is anybody heard of the philosopher Alan Watts anyone know Alan Watts? He was pretty big in the 60s Couple of people here Alan Watts talks about the idea that like a tree an apple tree apples The earth has peopled So we've we're like fruit that sort of come out of the earth and The way cells have come together and formed life formed us so moving on we Homo sapiens did rather well against the there's a few other variants of humans at the time the Neanderthals and Homo erectus We moved out of Africa across the world These are the years you can see roughly how long ago we we we got to different parts of the planet and We didn't we we did We did kill a lot of the Neanderthals and Homo erectus in battles, but we also Absorbed them in our in our genes or a lot of genes from those other variants of human They were we were able actually to cross breed But we kind of wiped them out as a and we became a more single species So about two and a half thousand years ago, and this is a funny picture if you look at it too closely There's I was just in Greece actually and I Had the honor of accepting an honorary doctorate from the University of Piraeus and I was very it was very big deal For me because I'm half Greek and because I was in the birthplace of education This is Plato founded the very first school or university All right the Academy the first Academy Akademiya It's called Akademiya not because it was like the area of Athens where he made it That's where Academy comes from But Plato also did a lot of work and Conceptualizing how humans could work together in harmoniousness how we could come together in a society and He's not the only one lots of people have done it since but that was one of the earliest attempts at sort of saying okay How can all these people? Work together in better ways 250 years ago an industrial revolution We became less just farmers and taking advantage of our environment and much more Building and creating machines to do more of our work 80 years ago the very first programmable computers Charles Babbage made some Calculators I don't really count them as full computers. So we're talking about the the first real computers around the Second World War That's not a real picture. I remember these all AI generated. So they're a little off But they are copyright free This one is a real picture because that's a very historical moment. This is 50 years ago. We started the internet a Bunch of total nerds figured out how to send Words and letters across Wires in a way that they could and they are on the phone at the same time typing L. Did you get the L? And they were I think L. O. G. were the first letters they sent Around the 50s also where the artificial intelligence. So we started working on chess playing machines and things like that A lot of you may remember in the 80s and 90s and 2000s that the machine learning that was starting to come up And honestly, I discounted a lot of it. I was like, it's not even interesting to me because it was very Algorithmic very boring nothing like 85 billion Cells working together at all very very simplistic But it was starting to get quite good at sorting your mail into mailboxes and things like that In the last couple of decades, we've moved into an era of deep learning and this is where AI is starting to really become interesting You may remember about 11 years ago also not AI that a Deep mind, no, no it was an IBM had an AI that won Jeopardy the US game show against two of the best players in history About six years ago Google deep mind AI beats the world's best go player and Go was always seen as this very very very hard problem to solve and the way it did it was They trained the AI looking at a lot of human playing got humans playing go and then they made that AI play itself and That kind of self-training is a really interesting thing where the our machines can train themselves to do things by playing against themselves Couple of I think it was about a month ago two months ago Alpha fold another project solved The protein folding problem. This is a very important thing to solve when developing drugs and therapies To know how long strings of proteins fold up into a shape Because once you know the shape you can develop drugs and all kinds of things People would spend their whole life solving one of these things It'd be like your PhD project and they'd spend 10 or 20 years in research trying to solve these shapes of proteins one AI solved 200 million proteins in one go and they open sourced at all Basically every known living protein is now no longer an issue That was like a month ago. So now we have a eyes that can write and understand computer code That you know a lot of developers are using a eyes to write 30 percent 40 percent 50 percent of all their code and it's getting higher They can understand and transcribe any speech. There was one released last week called whisper Which is the one of the best voice recognition systems? I've ever seen it's better than anything on our phones right now It can understand really rough messy Human text and just flawlessly understand it We can create text we can create understand images Remember this is another AI and all AI images in the background and we can create design nearly anything so There and there are new systems appearing daily right now. Let me show you a couple very quickly Is anybody? Not seen like how AI imagery is generated before can have some hands is it you've not actually seen it Okay, there's not many of you anymore. So that's good. I'll do it very quickly So I Won't do a bird in a funny hat, but like I don't know yell out a couple of words I just want some some words and I'll make something you What? bread You're hungry bread And another word and I'll combine them. Sorry Santa okay, let's have Santa holding Well, let's have Santa Santa made from bread I'll do it without any special things or just put it straight in. Let's see what happens Now I'm doing this on a on a website So it's using a server to do this which is not so impressive because you go. Well, I could just use Google search I'll probably find something, you know Let's see how it works out. Oh, there's Santa and some bread But what I could also do is this this is stable diffusion, which is a the same AI running on my laptop 100% on my laptop I can switch off my Wi-Fi and I could do the same thing I can generate. Let's see what let's see what the Santa say holding a loaf of bread So it is a bit mind-boggling that I'm able to download a brain an electronic brain that can conceptualize almost anything I can imagine and that is all sitting on this M1 on this M1 laptop It's not even the M2. Yeah, it's just an M1 and it ran that fast It takes a bit longer if I want bigger or higher resolution, but any image Think how many images they could be I need Let's see here. Let's so I I had here great ways to use Moodle Let's let's just generate some bit of text here. You know, let's go You know write a poem about how much Santa loves bread not Satan Santa loves bread. He loves the smell the taste the way it feels in his hands He loves to tear off a chunk and savor the flavor of fresh warm bread Santa loves bread so much that he eats it every day for breakfast lunch and dinner He even takes a loaf of with him on his sleigh ride around the world to share with all the good girls and boys So if you're feeling hungry this holiday season, just ask Santa for a slice of bread. He'll be more than happy to oblige Quite a nice little poem. It also explained his high carb diet explains a lot as well But That's you know, this is normal stuff now in AI and that a lot of you are in Education and you probably ask your students to submit essays assignments projects Any student can use these both of these tools are completely free with no waiting lists and you can just get in and do it and everyone is building new tools on top of this stuff weekly the T-shirt that you got for the moot. I hope you got your t-shirt Has this image on it, which I generated a couple of months ago It's already looking very simplistic because of the state of the art and how fast this stuff is moving But that's the prompt that I used to generate that the trincades mosaic is a style of mosaic art from around Barcelona around Catalonia and one of our teams suggested it And I thought I'll be nice to have a an earth globe made of that orange. You know, it's the Moodle global and and so we came up with that t-shirt and I thought good to put it on the t-shirt just to remember this point in history because this is the year that this stuff Is all going mainstream So that's why that's there that meanwhile This is going on This is our population all these 100 trillion cell packages We a lot of you in this room will remember when we were back at 3 billion and now we're nearly 8 billion the projections are that we're going to hit around 11 billion and then it will actually level off and the reason is the pink line is showing our The birth rate which and Most people will say the reason our birth rate is declining or the growth is is declining is because of education Education leads to more families being involved in the economy working having less children and as the world Becomes more educated. This is plummeting. So we're actually Tailing off. It's very interesting To think about that whole process and where we're hitting Elon Musk is super worried about it And I think that's why he has so many children But he can probably afford it all these people in the world are Gathering together into organizations all these organisms Becoming organizations They are the new creatures that walk the planet earth the organizations that we build and You know Moodle is one organization all of your institutions and companies are all organizations We've got the the bigger The bigger ones and the smaller ones and we're a huge ecosystem of Just like our cells came together the humans are coming together into these organizations And they're all shapes and sizes and colors Some of them not so nice Some of them a little too focused on Profit generating money at all costs we have you know the big farmer the big oil the Monsanto's That have sort of gone a bit crazy wild about money, and they're actually Causing problems for us. There are a Mixture just in a neat like in any ecosystem. There's a real mixture of types of organizations that we are putting together and these organizations as they stride the earth are Working on systems to connect us even more So Moodle Software one little example one example not that little anymore But think of all of the infrastructure being put into place by organizations all of the obviously roads and shipping and Internet and that kind of stuff, but also all of the cultural connections all of the The art the memes the ideas the the the Structures that we are putting into place think of what you spend most of your time probably doing every day you're probably looking into one of these machines and Connecting with a ton of activity that's out there and All of that is just electrons It seems like electrons, but you're connecting to other people's brains through electrons, and we're wiring up the world We're connecting up the world It's like fungus, you know mycelium you anyone familiar with how much fungus there is in the world There's a great documentary called about fungi. I like to be a fun guy sometimes but This stuff under the surface of the earth all around us is these strands of Fungus that are actually connecting up all the trees Although a lot of the plants the plants actually use that to communicate with each other like an internet for plants It's amazing So we're all we're connecting up the earth more and more a globalizing and we are there's this ongoing process I hope you could see through history of us coalescing and connecting Some of the products we're developing in more education related space to connect wearables right the technology is not Big computers like the 1940s anymore. It's little things, you know, we're all carrying around these supercomputers The black mirrors we're looking through them. We're connecting to everything It everyone's connecting to us as well Even if you don't want it sometimes you have to get very good at managing your notifications Because you're being sucked into the fungus But you know headphones watches VR is coming AR this stuff is is coming. It's been talked about for a long time. But really the technology level wasn't there, but Look at Facebook meta Change the whole company towards that stuff Apple are releasing headsets next year and Rumors are that they they're planning in ten years that they will replace phones Because it is where the phone on her face Know even closer connections. There's Mark The these companies and organizations are going to be moving into this space We're going to be in this space with them. They're going to be super imposing their realities on top of our realities like they do now you know when you look at most things you see, you know advertising and Corporate effects on everything we're looking at. That's you know, that's fine but It's going to be much more visual and much more all the time than ever before and the quality of the imagery That we receive as you could see from the AI stuff. I was showing before this is not AI. This is a unreal engine 5 rendering The quality will be indistinguishable from the real stuff Reality and the internet are going to become So close you can't tell just like the AI imagery look like photographs a lot of it It won't just be flat photographs You know that you can extend if you're in if you can it's not hard to imagine the images I've been showing you extending into oh generate me an 18 hour TV series about this character and this character and that character and they're all doing this You know and you get your favorite TV show coming forever My wife really likes Brooklyn 9 9 and ran out at like eight seasons probably wish I could I have two more seasons Well, I just fit feed the eight seasons in and generate another two seasons of endless comedy, right Then think well expand that to virtual reality, you know, I want to generate a new reality I can instead of typing Santa with a piece of bread. I could say Generate Santa walking around with a piece of bread and you've all got your glasses on and you can see him too And he walks around handing out bread to everybody That seems very very achievable to me. It doesn't seem very far away at all Of course, we can overdo it with the devices That's a pretty weird picture when you look at it too long look at the hand Wow So we're in this world. We have to need to think about the ethics the truth You know, are we all slipping into this fake generated AI? Generated place that's influenced because a Lot of us don't know how to make this technology We're reliant on the people we're connected to to bring it to us and what I worry about is that the world agenda Which is this sustainable development goals They're not perfect, but this is the only roadmap for humanity that humanity has ever made recently Maybe Plato had one but more recently UNESCO, which is every country on earth Agreed on this It's not like an idea. Why don't we do it? This is oh, yeah, everyone's already agreed our governments have already agreed This is the agenda except the US because US is not part of UNESCO But the rest of the world the other 95% have I don't want to call that US. It's not your fault who's in the room, but that's just the fact So here we have huge problems poverty. We have increasing inequality. We have climate change to worry about we have So many problems in the land and the oceans in this little planet that we live on that How can we focus on that if we're all being our same 85 billion neurons from 200,000 years ago, which hasn't changed if if that is In this world of hyper stimulation that I'm talking about and connection how Do we get everybody to work together and focus on life threatening things like this and That's my main worry. That's what keeps me up at night This was an alternate t-shirt that I also I almost had for the moot I Do like this cow. I just I just stuck it in here because I wanted to show you this cute cow I Actually generated that by typing in the word moodle into an AI and I got that so our education needs to step up to Prepare us for this world. This is the world We have been rushing towards for this long period and accelerating now and in a in a hyper growth way and It's coming out of so fast education needs to adapt to this world like now like ASAP now I typed in Something about strength and Something trying to show a strong education system and I got this I I do not recommend education is this but it was such a funny Picture I had to keep it. I just love it Yeah, but you know, this is like education coming. Yeah, we're gonna solve this problem I hope Now to do that we we need an infrastructure that it can enable us to work together better Because right now and I I was in the University of Paris and I don't want to call them out as any different from any other university But what happens at universities in general is the way the system is structured There is some working together there are like EU projects and there's funding that tries to make people work together and academics with a lot of experience sit down and and get into problems and they write papers and they push the papers out into the journals and their peer review and Journals and we have this whole research system to generate and share knowledge and that's very good and companies will Draw from that to produce products and that's kind of how we do things, but there's no overarching Framework there. There's a lot of Nishes a lot of little holes that go on and just kind of and I talked to one academic and I was like he's working on Optimizing Wi-Fi in a city for example, and I was like that's fascinating. When when can we see it? He goes, I don't know I'm just writing the paper. I'm putting it out there, you know, maybe, you know, Huawei or something will come along and use it I don't feel like we've optimized how education works together. I feel like universities should be like More More entrepreneurial and startups like the universe that the students of that university should be hacking the Wi-Fi of that University they should be hacking the energy system of that university they should be solving inequality in that university and and as a hub of Innovation that is pouring out of these universities and places that we that we can then share there are Over 90,000 higher education institutions in the world and growing Mostly growing in the global south apparently in the private area, which is interesting. It doesn't matter. There's a lot of them Imagine if all these institutions work together on something Imagine the resources we would have they would be like the the biggest the biggest Organize the biggest startup ever Now the only way I know that that works together my criteria for how we work together on things like technology is What has worked for Moodle? That's why we're all here the last 20 years. These are kind of my principles for developing Open education technology of ed tech in general number one open source all the main stuff Open sourcing the software enables innovation enables in this room There are so many people who have created such amazing things and you can go and all see each other over the next three days Second after listen to educators And that's you know research and UX and and all of that But if we aren't actually addressing education problems, we're not which shouldn't be there Thirdly engaging developers and we have some things coming up that intended to support our developers even better We don't expect everyone to work for free people. You know, you will have to live So how do we get everybody to be part and making a living also from working on on the stuff that we share And lastly, that's this one is making things Sustainable with revenue we that money is important. We need it to live in this economy, but What we don't want to be doing is pulling too much money out of education and then going oh education is not doing very well It's you know, it's underfunded and it's weak and let's replace it with this app We should be thinking about how we get more money into education and more people employed to work on those education problems In a way that we all share and so that means you have to make it attractive to people to come and be on board and Look at you all here. I'm so grateful you all came to this mood So that's why you may hear me banging on about open ed tech, which is my attempt to try and build a or to try and define a Framework that we can work within to bring together lots of different projects from lots of different institutions and places around the world and It's bigger than Moodle Like it doesn't it's not You know, we could have called it, you know Moodle next gen and just stop there, but it's much bigger than that I think it's a way trying to define a structure that everybody can feel very comfortable in in Their organization joining and and working together a UN of of ed tech We started this some of you are here at our Moodle Moods 2019 and afterwards we had a couple of days of brainstorming and we started the fundamentals of Of that and I think most of these people are all here today if you were here at this meeting put your hand up Can I see if you're here? there you go so We did a lot of good work at that time the pandemic got in the way and kind of slowed things down a bit, but the association is Starting it's I think it's waiting on my final signature. I've been away from home for a few weeks We have to get that going the The association is going to be an actual organization a nonprofit organization based in Brussels it's in and the point is that Everybody who believes in this concept who supports those criteria I mentioned before can be a member and work together on a Vision and I'm proposing a very rough vision here to start with of a new framework and I'm not going to go into it now because I haven't got time, but I do have a session on Thursday afternoon a Workshop Is it Wednesday? I forget what day it is. You want to know someone look it up for me I have a session later on a workshop if you're interested in this and want to dive into this a bit more We have an hour and a half to really get into it and I can Oops, I'm cutting out. So we have the idea of there must be open education resource repositories We must be technology that helps gather and Collect all of the great resources that are around There needs to be educated classrooms in there that the educator owns and I'm I'm very strong on that point I don't think institutions should own the classroom I feel like they're a very personal space and as an educator if you really want to be an educator Not a researcher who's being forced to teach for 10% of my time But an actual educator then you want to have a space you can develop over decades Right, not currently we a lot of people have PowerPoint slides or something sitting on their hard disk And they upload it into different things, but if you have a real space you can invest Yourself into I think that's that's going to be far more powerful and And this part is very important the learner dashboard the learner needs to also have a space all of us are learners Throughout our learning history, which is probably at least 60 70 years now Who knows once we AI's start messing with our genetics. It could be hundreds of years, but We need a place to call our own that we can trust and we can invest ourselves into Because we own it in this space. It's not sitting on Credly.com or some other.com or org or LinkedIn. It's something you own and it's your space with AI's That help you move about in the world help you deal with the world help you be educated and help you connect to Education opportunities and things and lastly also organizations as well organizations need a place to manage their learning Now we we have a lot of activity going on already in Moodle Thinking about how Moodle projects might fit into here, but it won't only be Moodle I think anybody who believes in open ed tech will come up with solutions It doesn't matter if you pick this one from Moodle and that one from edX or something Or learning economies or whatever a different organizations can come up with solutions The key bit is these green arrows that we have a very tight set of agreed APIs and frameworks and standards that let it all work together into the future There are working groups happening on open ed tech global There's a newsletter you can sign up for it's kind of new it's starting up forgive the mess having it also doing my normal job, but this is our This is going to be a big part of the future. I think and I We don't have all the details defined because right now we're getting together interested people to define those details So just finish and say let's have the best Moodle Mood ever And in case you're thinking oh he's thinking about all this future stuff. What happens with Moodle? I see the current Moodle as being The main platform that we're all working on for the next five or ten years There's still lots of lots of things we need to do. We are all doing in that platform But we also need to be aware of kind of the trend What's coming up in the future right like where do we go in the future a PHP application that that Started 20 years ago By the way, there is it's 20 years Moodle's been around for 20 years. So let's have a round of applause for Moodle for 20 years I I really want to thank you all for being on this Moodle journey And I I just want to kind of energize us to take it to the next level right to get to use this enormous amount of people around the world that the Moodle community is to really empower education and Improve our world In all the ways that we can so thank you very much for listening and have a great mood or mood Thank You Martin. We have about five minutes if there are any questions for Martin direct. We have some mics here Thanks, what do you want to? Where are you? I'm not table from University of South Africa. We've been chatting online for a bit. Yeah, hi Hi What are your thoughts around you've mentioned as you're closing off five to ten years? It's a PHP application It's also the foundation of some of the thoughts that you've shared here this morning. Yes Do you see the product evolving away from the current? architecture and stack and Where do you see that going keeping in mind the future? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah, the roadmap of Moodle is something our team are addressing there are so many sessions about that There's a lot of exciting things. I mentioned one already messaging. I think getting messaging more into Moodle We're talking about I don't know. I don't want to jump ahead of everyone else's presentations There is a lot that will happen in terms of making Moodle easier making it more connected with other software but the general structure of Moodle as a kind of all-in-one learning management platform that is really designed as an Analog to a physical institution You know its structure is An organization with departments with classrooms With activities that happen in the classrooms with enrollments You know it has that structure and I think Moodle has played a good role in moving people from a face-to-face brick Or whatever you tin whatever you want to use to build your institution Into the internet like a lot of people understand that transition with Moodle and I think during this past 20 years that was very necessary And I think for the next five or ten years there'll be lots of people still doing that a lot of people are not even teaching online yet, right? We're still expanding and Growing and there's a lot of that to do There is a ton of innovation that can still happen on the Moodle platform and connect with things what I was talking about was really trying to set the scene for some new thing that We would all build together that we would migrate to at some point in the future and We have to do that right we can't just sort of Look at next month next month next month and not be aware of all the trends that are happening in the world and how we connect I think we can add more AI to Moodle Next week if we want to you know a lot of these things we can still innovate and build into Moodle right now So yeah to answer your question don't worry and You know, it's something we're all working on together and we all face exactly the same issues To so we're not gonna there's no big disruption planned It's more of a how can we Plan for the future