 Hi everyone, I'm Sonya Trivedi, communications manager at Moodle and we are at the final day of Moodle Mood Global 2023. Today I have with me Andreas Ripo, head of National Competency Centre in Education Austria. Hi Andreas, how are you doing today? Fine, how are you? Great, thank you very much. Is it your first Moodle Mood? Actually, no, it's my third. That's amazing, so you have a lot of experience, right? Yes. Today you had a really interesting talk about e-education and e2-video, an Austrian success story and I'm keen to learn more about it. Could you please tell me more about the project, when did it start, what are the specifics and everything that you would like to present? Sure. So, we've been experimenting as the rest of the world with different learnings, management systems and digital solutions in the past 20-30 years. But we've come to a situation that this has been reduced to several platforms in use and the biggest installation of Moodle we have one centralized installation is called Individual, which is hosted by the Federal Ministry of Education itself and one of their server farms. And today I tried to emphasize on the second aspect, not only technology, but that we have a framework of teachers participating. We have a total of 6,000 schools in Austria and 78% which is a little over, let's say 4,000 to 4,500 schools participate in this e-education network. So, 78% of all teachers and students are in this network and they can access all these materials, platforms with sort of a single sign on and access all resources that are available within the system free of charge. Sounds really impressive, 6,000 schools. How do you plan to grow the number in the future? Do you plan to add more to the network? Well, actually it has become quite stable. We are of course concentrated on Austria and let's say the schools that are still missing are sometimes often related to primary level where sometimes a principal takes the decision not to take the digital path right away. So that's perfectly okay for us. So where we see the potential at the moment is of course trying to sort of onboard every teacher in each school because that's yet a different story to take a look at how many people within an organization actively use the tools and then also have possibilities to enter the idea of digitalization and education at a low level and then show the development. And this is then classroom work and rather the steps to take and also further teacher education that is related to this so they will be able to manage. Okay. So you touched a little bit about the topic but I want to ask you more like how does the platform help schools provide more and better learning opportunities if you can tell a bit more about the benefits. Of course Moodle being a system that offers on one hand many different ways of how you can work your pedagogy how you have your didactics and many reflection possibilities also then reaching back in the past seeing how a development is done for a learner. This is everything no other platform I know of does it this good way and this is where we can show the perspective what a teacher can reach but also giving them an entry point so they're not overwhelmed and but then of course it's of great use especially if you address competency based education because then it becomes a very clear structure where you position yourself at the beginning of your learning process and to which direction you have to develop and then you have all this full rich functionality of Moodle that helps enhance and display this and show where you are on your path. Okay. Great to know that and you already mentioned a bit about the benefits and how the platform is helpful but do we have some concrete results that we can share? Have you measured the impact? Well we do have our numbers and we see in general a big improvement in alone schools participating in our network and seeing how teachers tackle new situations like for example AI. We have two big yearly conferences one is in March one is in November and in March we had we concentrated on AI and it was so easy how the teachers found solutions and ways of using it interactively in their teaching that you see that there is a very high standard and if you have all these teachers of this network communicating with each other of course and also seeing problems and how do you tackle this problem how do you solve this and that this is just a great development and they help spread this idea within their organizations as well. Okay. Thank you for this and last I would like to ask you a bit more about the future outlook like how do you plan to develop this platform in the future? Yes. So we talked about digital competencies of teachers that they have to obtain to be able to use technology in classroom situation. And then this is actually and then we have a third part which is the organizational development itself. Does the organization of the school provide not only infrastructure but also the idea of a certain degree of openness so a teacher can use all he or she wants. But the main point is then the classroom work itself and what we found out is like the expression content is king. If you already have prepared learning scenarios that a teacher can use right away then that's a very good entry point. And here we have the so-called ITAPAS concept which are small learning nuggets and we try to emphasize on this. So the teachers themselves become producers of these ITAPAS and shared with other teachers. So actually it's an OER initiative and that's our plan in the next step to get this content this didactical content to all teachers for orientation purposes but also for using classroom work. Thank you very much Andreas. It was really lovely to meet you today and I wish you a great time Modomo Global and thanks again. Thank you.