 Hi everybody. I know probably about at least 60% of these faces here. It's good to see you back. Thank you for coming all the way across to this side. As you know we've had many years of moots and we've never had one over this side before and we knew it would be a little smaller because of that but I think it was just worth it. Just for once I wanted to have it here so I kind of really pushed that through. I'm really happy to see you here. Who do we have here? We were trying to kind of extend some of the things. How many people here are in higher ed? Kind of with some hands. Still we're still sort of about pretty high I guess 70%. How many people here in K-12? Okay look around for each other because not as many of you so you might want to hook up. Anyone here more sort of corporate learning that sector? Okay a few more of you still got another sort of 10-15%. How many people here are doing everything? Still 10-20 people. It's good. Okay good. Well it's really really a pleasure to have you here. Very nice to hear Barry talking about this because it actually leads very nicely onto what I was going to talk about. That's where I grew up right out there. Was it the one-way people? I think? And that was my classroom back then in Western Australia. There were kids spread over that sort of an area which is Spain. It's the size of Spain for one classroom and Australia's world renowned for distance education as probably Canada would be the only other place in the world that's so well known for it and maybe it's not an accident that Moodle came from here. That was one of the places we lived. My parents are actually over there it's their fault. This is Warburton which is right near the border of Western Australia and South Australia and Northern Territory that three-way border. It's not very big. It's pretty empty. And we had homework coming on aeroplanes and we had short-wave radio and that's how school was for me. It was mostly an Aboriginal community where we lived. One really nice thing to do out there is camping. Has anybody been camping out in the desert in Australia? How many of you have? The rest of you should get up off your arses and get out there. It is beautiful. It is so beautiful and so uniquely Australian and the sky will just blow your mind the stars at night. And one of the great things to do out there and I love fires. I love building campfires. I have a fire at home. I'm kind of liking there a bit of extra cold weather we're getting this winter because I can keep running the fires at home. And I really like building fires. I find fires to be a fascinating metaphor for a lot of things. When you make a fire you have to start with kindling. You can't just go and light a big piece of wood and expect it to work. You have to start small. You have to get sticks, grass, whatever. And then you add some bigger pieces onto it. It gets a bit bigger and it starts to catch. It starts to get a bit of a life of its own. Then you put in a bit more oxygen. Maybe you bring in bed grills or not. Put some more sticks on it. You've got to really pump up the fuel and get to the point where you can have a really big fire that actually starts getting a life of its own. Once a fire gets to a certain point you can throw wet wood in that thing. And the power of the fire is it will dry the wood before burning it. You can throw metal in there and it will burn. It gets to the point where the fire is re-burning its own smoke. It really has a life of its own. And it's hard to stop a fire once it gets going. I now live in the hills here in Perth. Just over the road is a national park. Last summer we had a bush fire coming pretty close to the house. Quite scarily close. That's when Gavin was here last time and I said sorry, Gavin got to go and had to drive home to start watering the property. So fires can be quite dangerous but what I'm really interested in is this process. This is exactly how I run online courses. In the first online courses that I did with Moodle, you build the framework, the kindling. You get that structure going. You just have the basics and content, some direction that you're setting. Once you have people in there, you start throwing in the sticks. So you start throwing in discussion items to talk about. You start throwing in dilemmas. You start getting people engaged. You have assessments and so on. But it's not until you really get the feedback loop going where students are feeding each other, when students are reacting off each other, when students are waking up in bed in the morning, reaching for their device to see what happens last night. What did people respond to what they wrote earlier? You've all felt that. You've all probably done something on the internet and you check straight away what happened. What did they reply? It's that feeling you want to get. Once you get that feedback going, that's the fire is catching. Once it gets going, you don't really have to do very much. You just throw a log in every now and then. Moodle.org is one of my original online courses. It's still going. It's burning away there and it's very active. I built another fire, which is sort of caught on a bit. Moodle is now all over the place. I just got back from Brazil. I was there last week where 90% of everything, all education, is using Moodle. I was at a distance education conference. It was about 2,000 people there. It wasn't about Moodle. But when I asked everyone to stand up and then I said, if you don't use Moodle, sit down. Only 10% of people sat down. It was like just all Moodle. And it was really, it's really amazing. And that's the third biggest country. Australia, where it's the, in terms of raw numbers, I think we're at number seven. And there's incredible stuff happening around the world. It's really interesting to see how much doesn't change when I'm traveling around. Same issues, same sort of politics, same problems. Moodle has this weird place in the world where it's a free piece of software, which is really lets it spread and gets used and people pick it up. And then it gets denigrated for being, oh, it's just a free one. Right. Oh, we've got money now, so let's spend it on something expensive. And it's, it's a very weird sort of dichotomy that we're free. Moodle, of course, now is surrounded by lots and lots of education tools that are going around. Education technology has exploded in the past few years. We're now, or Moodle's been going for 14 years, none of this was around then. We didn't even have, these didn't exist back then. This slide looks really messy because it is messy. If you're trying to set up something new right now, it's very hard to make choices. You've got choices for everything. And they all do a few things. So how does Moodle fit into this environment now going forwards? Well, let me just explain how Moodle looks from my perspective as a tool. And it might be a bit clearer how, how relevant it is still. Moodle has a core learning platform. We'd like to call it a learning platform, not a learning environment, a virtual learning environment or a learning management system, because it's actually a tool with which you make those things. You take Moodle and you make a learning management system with it. And so in Moodle, it has really core concepts, basic, basic concepts. It has courses. So anytime you want to teach a bunch of things in some sort of order, in some sort of period, you know, that's a course. It has users, it has students, it has people. It has competencies now in 3.1. Very basic concept that we probably should have had earlier. But the fact that somebody knows something, we can now actually record and track. We can put people into groups. We can give them roles. You can have multiple roles depending on your context. Maybe you're a teacher here and your student there or maybe you're a teacher and a student in the same place. We have administration for administering all this. We have APIs, which are application programming interfaces so that other software can talk and remotely control this stuff. And we have categories and courses. All these sort of structures are very basic structures. So that's the core learning platform. And it hasn't changed significantly really since we started Moodle way back. Now around Moodle, you've got plugins. And the plugins sit on top. And some of them are the gift functionality of their own. So forum, plugin, quizzes, and some of them are connecting to other systems. And those integrations are really a huge part of Moodle. That Moodle can integrate and connect with other systems. So when you have all these plugins connected on Moodle, then you can make courses. And courses are just some of the internal plugins and some of the external plugins. And you bring them together in a protected environment where you have courses. So that's the basic structure of Moodle. It's pretty, all of you probably already know this. But I just want to explain it from this point of view because we're not looking to interface how it looks or anything. This is kind of the basic philosophy of it, I guess. Then you access Moodle through devices. Now, mostly in the past, we've used desktops and laptops and the web. More and more. In fact, more than that now, we're using mobile devices. And so we have a mobile app. We've got responsive design and things like that. And we're also working on all the other new display technologies and interaction technologies that are coming along. So virtual reality, augmented reality. Screens themselves are disappearing. We are talking more and more to computers and they're talking back to us. So in the future, these sort of screens that will disappear. They've only been around for, what, six, seven years. So they might be gone another six, seven years. So why Moodle? That's Moodle is a kind of a description. Why is Moodle still relevant? The fact that it's open source is really, really important. It's a true open source project. It's not, oh, open source. It's open source. We're not pretending or anything. We run things openly. You can see every line of code that's going on. You can get involved if you want to, to as much as you want. And we are open. We have a mission. Moodle is driven by a mission. It's not driven by money. It's not driven by VCs. It's not driven by investors. It's, it has a mission. We, if we make any profits in Moodle, they all go back in the next year to pay more developers so we can grow. So Moodle has this mission. It's the same old mission we've had for a while. It's a bit wordy. Maybe we should probably slim it down a bit, I was thinking, but it's still very valid. We support teachers, number one. We love teachers. We're not trying to get rid of teachers. Some software is trying to get rid of teachers. It's trying to automate things to the point where you don't need teachers. I don't like that whole world view. We love teachers. So we're just empowering teachers to do a better job, to be able to do more with what they have. We support learners. We integrate everything for courses, like I explained. We're open, which gives privacy. And as we start thinking about data more and more, the idea of owning your data is really important now to know where it is. We're accessible from any device. We want to be flexible. We don't know how somebody wants to teach. So we need to be very flexible. We want to scale. If you are able to teach 100,000 people something, why not? If you can do it, that's all the better for the world. And lastly, it should be a place where anybody can contribute to global education. If someone in Brazil does something cool, why shouldn't it help Australians? Why shouldn't it help people in Trinidad and Tobago? It should, right? I mean, everything should work that way. Really importantly, and back to the fire, is Moodle's a platform for science. Education is rife with theories. There's lots of theories about how education works. It's really interesting now with the rise of neuroscience, that neuroscience are looking at how brains actually learn and they can really get in there, that some of these theories are being proved and some are being disproved. But if you're thinking in a scientific way, we're led by data, we're led by results. So if somebody somewhere tries something to, something new with online education to teach people remotely and it works and they can prove it through data, then we've extracted a tiny piece of truth from the universe that we can now share and spread and use everywhere. So in this case we've got a teacher trying something amazing with all the students looking. That could very well be one of the students standing on that desk showing something to the fellow students or that could be an administrator at a university showing a really great learning environment for that institution. It works on lots of level. But it's about data and we have to get more focused on proving our assertions. And I know there's some really great talks in this program and I'm really looking forward to seeing them because I'm going to learn a lot over the next couple of days and I know a lot of you are interested in this as well. Another reason why Moodle is still very relevant is it lets us focus on bigger problems. So a lot of people talk about various learning tools against each other, this one or that one. This is better than this one. I reckon the differences between them are not as, not that great. I mean a really good teacher can use email and teach successfully if they know what they're doing and they're dedicated. For me there are much much bigger problems that we should be focusing on, not this button or that button or little details. These kinds of things. I reckon the things around Moodle in a particular implementation are probably 90% of the problem. You are not going to get good online teaching at a university unless you value teaching at a policy level. If you don't pay teachers appropriately, if you don't give them value and make their job a valued thing, you're going to get bad teaching. If they're getting research point, if they're more interested in the research because they're getting points for it and publications and that's how their career is determined, then the 20% of time left they have for teaching is going to be just, well I'll just deliver the same old notes I've done for ten years because I don't really care. I had the opportunity to sit with the coordinator of K-12 education in Helsinki. I was in Moscow, name dropping a lot, sorry, two weeks ago I was in Moscow and I was with the Marjo, I can't remember last name, who coordinates education in Helsinki. Finland is often held up as like this amazing model where teachers have a value. I asked her how did that happen? How did Finland get that? She said it actually started back in the 60s and there was a couple of really motivated individuals who were really pushing this idea that we should change the culture. So they were in dire straits back 40, 50, 60 years ago. It's taken that long to build the culture up to now where teachers are paid so highly and rated so highly that they stay in teaching and their kids end up being taught by maths teachers with 20 years of experience. I mean wouldn't you want your kids taught by someone who's a career teacher in a subject who's involved in the research of it as well but also they're really engaged, they're motivated and that just leads to lots of better outcomes. So like things like policy and economics are very important, much more important than the tools you're using. Rights, who owns things on the internet, who should be able to do what. There's a lot of outstanding issues that probably most of you have dealt with the copyright agencies. It's kind of a fundamental disconnect between copyright law and the physical reality of digital technology which is that electrons can duplicate anything for free. It's just like this disconnect. We still haven't fully worked it out. What integrations are there? So you know you shouldn't have to have more than one password at an institution. It should just be, it should just work, right? Everything should be integrated, everything should be single sign, etc. You want things to be very smooth. What else we got here? We got the community. What does the community that Moodle is in, how does that support that implementation of Moodle? Are people behind it? Are people helping to improve it? Are they empowered to improve it? Automation. We are building robots all around us. It's quite scary once you start to realise how many robots we're building. It's software and hardware. We are slowly replacing a lot of jobs. We're replacing a lot of activity. Where's the line? Where do we want to draw that line? Who wants their job automated? And you know what things does it make sense to automate? We've got to kind of direct that process, I think. Not just let it happen. And you know all the processes, what are the processes? What is the learning experience for a student? So not the user experience of a particular product, but what's the learning experience of them choosing to learn something and then coming through, being involved in an institution and all that process through, right through to graduating and working, or maybe they never leave. Maybe they're part of that institution on the long-term basis. You know, all these sorts of things. I just, I see a lot of people saying yeah, we're having problems like this and the solution is we'll change the LMS and they'll spend six months changing the LMS, whether it's to Moodle or from Moodle, it's not really the issue, but it doesn't solve those things. You still have the same problems, right? So I see these bigger problems out there. So how the Moodle project works. We've got Moodle HQ, we've got a community around us, as you know, we're all here. This is not very new to you, but there is some new things in here that I want to show you about how we're changing. Moodle HQ builds the software. We're responsible for integrating changes and building Moodle Core and Moodle Mobile as two major open source projects. Moodle Mobile is becoming as important as Moodle Core. We provide the infrastructure for the community, the sites, databases, the brand. We communicate about the projects and we have a new communications team now in Moodle HQ with a lot of new people who are actually around here at the conference and I'm really, you'll see a lot more from us in future. We're very bad at communications and marketing, I believe in the past. We have to create sustainable revenue. This is something that Moodle Project has really focused on, I focused on from the start is that things have to be sustainable. You can't be run by dumping a bunch of money on a project one time and then nothing happens again. You can't have grants and things. It's got to be sustainable models. So we work a lot on sustaining the project and keeping it going as long as we have. It's been 14 years or so and we're still growing. We've just been doing that. And lastly, research. We take on research. We now have a new research team. We've got two people in this team who are focusing on analytics and we have a new UX team. Can you believe Moodle never had a UX team before? Probably you can. We actually never really made it that a specific role. It was just everybody did it. So now we actually are doing user research, user testing and this has also started fairly recently. I'm really, really happy for that because that's a major focus of the core. So a few things about what we're doing in Moodle core. 3.1 came out last May. We are in our heads thinking we're almost at the end of the 3.2 cycle which is coming out in November. But we had some big things there. Competencies was finally in core. Better assignment grading interface, long term support and LTI publishing. So this is what the competencies look like if you haven't seen them. Is anybody here on 3.1 already? Anybody some hands? Not so many yet. So this competencies is it has interfaces. It has ways of defining competencies, creating learning plans, connecting learning plans to people. And then you have to you have evidence such as things that happens in courses that get attached to those competencies. And so you slowly prove that you can do things. It becomes part of your each individual person's personal record. However, because it's a core information structure in Moodle, you can write or anybody, any developer can write new plugins to implement new interfaces. So if you want the competencies to be automatically determined or changed or connected to external systems or particular interfaces, we now that now is possible. So the developer community of Moodle can work on new competency interfaces and supports a real almost any framework that's out there. The assignment grading interface, this was something that a lot of people wanted. And we finally got it together in 3.1. It's more of a one, one page grading interface that you flip through a lot of assignments. And the content of the the thing you're grading can be a lot more file types now. So Moodle will convert different file types into something you can see on screen and and markup. The LTI stuff is really interesting. Is anybody here doesn't know what LTI is? It's okay. It's okay to admit ignorance. We're all friends here. LTI is learning tools interoperability. It's a standard. It's one of the few standards that I like because the trouble with standards is everybody invents a new one. But LTI is learning tools interoperability and it lets you connect a learning activity into a learning management system. So you have a course here and the students jump out to this other thing could be on another website. User information is sent there. They do something. And if there's any assessment, the grades are sent back and they go into the learning management system. Moodle can now publish LTI as well as consume LTI. So you could take an activity or a course and publish it as an LTI module and it gets included in another Moodle course or you could take another learning management system and include Moodle stuff in there. So that opens up the options for a lot of different structures that we couldn't do before. And that's working really well. There's some improvements even in 3.2 for the versions of LTI support. So they're all being brought up to the very latest standards. And that's something we'll be committing to keeping up to date. There was a little project called the Recycle Bin, which came from the Moodle User Association, which started at the beginning of this year. And the Recycle Bin lets you undo when you delete something, you can get it back. So that lets you, I mean it's a nice feature in itself, but it has the effect of letting people be a little bit less worried about deleting things because you can always get it back. And there was a bunch of little things. This is one of them. A small thing. You know when you post to a forum and it usually comes up with a confirmation screen and you have to continue and then it goes back. So that little confirmation screen is gone everywhere in Moodle. What it does now is it goes straight back to where you were and it just puts the same text in the green up there as a notice at the top of the screen. It's a tiny thing, but imagine how many clicks it saves across all the Moodles in the world for all those students and all those reloads and all the server load, etc, etc. So it really adds up. And there's a lot of other little things. Some of the stuff will be talked about in other sessions of Moodle. Now at 3.2, these are the main things we've been working on. The first one is a new default theme called Boost. It's based on Bootstrap 4. It's aiming at simplified navigation, a much more modern look. I'm not going to show you a screenshot of it because we're still working out all these details, but it's really intended to so that your initial experience with Moodle out of the box is, wow, like we wanted to have that really modern feel. For developers, there is a new CSS framework, Bootstrap 4, which allows a lot of new ability so you can actually do some really nice buttons and pop-ups and menus and things like that in the content, in plugins that just really add to the overall experience. Messaging and notifications is now completely cleaned up and it just looks like every other system you've ever used. It looks like LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. You have messages and you have notifications. They're mirrored on the mobile devices as well. I'll show you. Actually, I haven't got a screenshot, but the messaging looks like, I don't know, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, any other thing you can think of pretty much. They've all converged. They're all alongside the identical now, if you haven't noticed. So, Moodle messaging actually looks like that. LTI has been improved. We've made it easier now to add LTI links to other things. There's more compliance. There's a new graph library. So, you know, when you look at a report of maybe user activity and you can see all the logs and there's that really crappy graph at the top, which is the one that I probably made back in, like, 2000 and 2000. That's gone. Thank goodness. I don't know how it lived for so long. It's survived, but it's gone. It's now a really nice HTML5 looking swish graph. You can zoom in on things. It's got, it's sort of dynamic. And all those graphs right across Moodle have been replaced. They look nice now. There's another feature called user tours, which is, I'll show you a screenshot of that, too. We've got it's a simple thing, but when you first come to a page, you know, sometimes on some systems, you get a little pop up saying, this is what this bit's for and this is what this bit's for. Little dialogues that pop up and you're next, next, next, and it's done. You never see it again. So Moodle can do that now. Those little tours can be written by an administrator. So they can write their own. They're very easy to write. You just say, for this block, I want this message to come up. This area is messages to come up. Those sets of instructions are called tours, user tours. They can be exported and shared and they can be imported. And we have a database on Moodle.net where people are collecting these. And we already have 100 or so. Is that right, Kevin? How many? Probably user tours? Quite a lot. You can share them how you want. You can write them any language. You can write the multi-language as well. And it's just a really nice way, I think, to onboard people into a system because your Moodle is not going to look like your Moodle. It's not going to look like your Moodle. You may have customized it greatly and you can add these little tours in to just onboard people. We've also done a lot of core activity module fixes, some low-hanging fruit, some long-standing problems like a database editing of templates and little things that annoy the heck out of me and you. Lots of little fixes. So we're really focusing on UX. The last thing is IMS caliper. I'm not quite sure if it's going to make it, but that's something we really want to get into core as well. If not, it will be a plug-in in the community. And that's a standard for analytics, transferring analytics information between systems. That's what the messaging menu looks like. Apologies for the icons there. But that's like the menu at the top. You can see there's a messaging one and then there's a notifications bell, just like everything else you've seen. Improved settings for notifications. So your notifications, you can send them to your apps, devices. You can send them off to mail. You can send them off. All this was kind of in Moodle before, but the interface was so bad that nobody ever used it. Now it's good. Now going forward, our direction on core is simplifying UX, UX, UX. It's all about UX. We really want the slick interface, the modern feel that everyone wants and that everyone usually implements on their own sites. Core activities are a big focus and the dashboards. The second big piece is interoperability and that includes IMS standards. We're now going to actually start taking active-handed IMS. So I went to the IMS conference in San Antonio earlier this year and got involved with their working groups. We've been an IMS member for years, but we've never really led anything. We're actually going to start driving some standards because everyone can make a standard. So why not us? Google and Microsoft is, you know, a lot of people are using them Google apps, Office 365 for documents, for calendars, that sort of stuff. There's integrations floating around the community written by different people. We want to get those into core. So ideally, a student writes a document in Google Docs, for example, and they submit it to an assignment. It should automatically be made read-only to them because you don't want them changing that document after the due date. But then the teacher should have access to scribble all over it. And so that's sort of level of integration where Moodle's permissions are affecting the sharing of the documents. That's the goal. And we're working with Microsoft. We're working with the consortium of universities around the place. And if you're interested, let us know to define those better and get them in core. The mobile feature set is a big focus. I hope, I think, in fact, I'm fairly sure that by the end of this year, the mobile feature set is going to be good enough so that about 80% of students don't need to use anything else. They never even need to go to the website. They just use the app. The reason it's 80% of students is it kind of depends on what plugins you're using and what functionalities you're using on your courses. But we've got a lot of coverage already. I'll show you in a sec. And the last thing is, for me, the most exciting thing about analytics is not just the thing most people talk about, which is finding students at risk, which is a good thing to do. But where I would love to see it go is get to the point where Moodle is an active participant is continually suggesting things to you that help you be a better teacher, that help you be a better learner. So you should get a little notification on your phone saying there is a discussion right now in this forum that is happening. It's got really hot right now. The fire is burning. Chuck a stick in there. Here's a link. All this student has done an amazing job and has improved. Give them a call. Here's their phone number. So that kind of stuff, that computer aided teaching, computer aided learning, that's where I think we can go. And the new analytics research team has got some really great ideas, which I'm very excited about. Now Moodle Mobile is the other second big product we work on. There is some sessions about Moodle Mobile that were yesterday and there was tomorrow, sometime next couple of days. But if you haven't looked at the app in the last six months, go and have a look again because it has evolved a lot. It's really going fast now. The new platform, which is HTML5 based with native apps, is really working out very well. So since January, we've got support for forums, quizzes, SCORM, wikis, glossaries, assignment submissions, competencies, link support between activities. So if you mention an activity in a forum post, like in a hyperlink, that even works on mobile now. So when you read the forum post on the mobile app and click the link, it goes to the equivalent thing in the app. It doesn't jump out. Sounds simple, but it's not. Remote plug-ins. So now you can actually have Moodle plug-ins that provide Moodle mobile interfaces. Guest access to courses, more translations. There's now a rich text editor. So you can actually do HTML and rich text in the mobile app. What they're working on now is improved synchronization. So the main point of the mobile app is to give this offline capability. It's easy to forget that probably 90% of the world has really bad internet. And I travel a lot. Hey? Yeah, Australia has really bad internet. Tell me about it. I've got three and a half megabits max at home. I'm gonna leave it in Perth. It's really bad. So offline capabilities is a big focus of this. And the idea is, and this already works and it's getting improved for performance, is you just synchronize a course. You download it here. You do stuff, reply on forums, submit assignments, do all the things you need to do. And later on, connect up and it synchronizes back again. And that enables Moodle to work better in India, in Africa, in Perth. Everywhere. Even like I was in Brazil and they have Wi-Fi everywhere, but you connect to it and it just cuts out every five minutes. It just stops. I don't know why, but it's just really, really, really bad. So yeah, so that's the kind of things that are happening there. This shows you the next release coming out for the mobile app 313 is in the red. And you can see it filling in the gaps and functionality for all the core activity modules. And we're slowly getting, well, not that slowly, the mobile team is amazing. We've got one of them, one of our developers from them here, Pow, who's over there. The mobile team's based in Barcelona, our team. And they're doing a great job. Now the nice thing about their mobile app is you can customize how it looks. And you can provide a CSS file and get some way so that when the default Moodle mobile app connects to your site, it will get some colors and CSS and it will look a bit different. But we have a new thing that I wanna tell you about, which I'm really excited. We've set up a whole program for producing branded Moodle mobile apps. So if you would like your own version of the Moodle mobile app that has your icon on it, your name is in the stores listed as your institution and that when the student opens it, it doesn't tell them what URL to connect to. It already knows. So they just put username and password and get straight in. You can now get that. So it'll be updated every couple of months with new releases of Moodle and it's available now. So you can just go to any Moodle partner, start that conversation and once it's set up, it's an ongoing process and it'll be made for you. We've already made a few and we're really happy with the results. It's really going very well. We only started this last month. Quite a new program but if you're interested in this, talk to your Moodle partner. There's like a setup fee of $5,000 and then there's a annual recurring fee of $5,000 which is not very much if you think what it would take to do that yourself. But our team will be really working on streamlining that process and making it really smooth. So you can really change the look of the app. You can really customize it quite a lot. We also at Moodle HQ, we run a MOOC and we just finished the last one in August. We run them twice a year. This is a four week introductory course for teachers who don't know Moodle at all who just want to get a little leg up into using Moodle. We run these free MOOCs. There's some statistics of engagement over the five week period, really high. Normally when you see these graphs for MOOCs, they start off really high. You've seen them and then they go down like that. I'm really happy to show that graph and just show that how much engagement activity there's been all through the MOOCs. So people really get into it. Has anybody here taken that MOOC? Has anybody? Got, yeah, about 20, 30 people. It's cool. It's always been improved. Mary Kuch, who's the main facilitator is here. The blonde British woman over there. So, yeah, if you want to meet Mary, if you had her on the course and wanted to meet her, go and see her. Mary is also the voice of the videos if you see our release videos as well. So if you want to hear those dulcet tones right over there. Moodle Cloud, the Moodle Mood last year, we launched Moodle Cloud, the Australian Moodle Mood in Melbourne. Some of you may remember. Anybody here have a Moodle Cloud site now? Still? Yeah, we've got 30 people. We have roughly about 14,000 active sites. This number goes up and down if you're seeing any of my other talks and it goes up and down. It's because we always delete unused sites. So if someone hasn't used it for 90 days it just chunk gets deleted. Well, we do send you a warning. But that's a lot of Moodles being running now and it's really running smooth. It's in 183 countries, 137,000 new files a month getting uploaded into this system and it's active. And I'm really happy how it's been working. We added the ability to take off the ads so you can pay a little bit of something per month to get the ads off the free sites. And a few months ago we released our first paid package there. So this is to, they're very small, limited packages deliberately. They're very, you know, they're constrained. We don't want to get into the position of support, Moodle HQ. We don't want to be doing support. That's what partners do. This is a way to try Moodle to get to know it. $250 a year, up to $1,000 a year. I'm so glad I don't have to translate the currency here because I'm usually translating that currency to things. Up to 500 users. And Moodle for school looks different. This is the theme for Moodle for school. It's what you get out of the box and you can change all that carousel there on the top and do a lot of customizations. But you can't add new themes. You can't add new plugins. It's limited. But it's going very well and there's more to come in that area. Now, the Moodle community is the rest. What does the Moodle community do? Well, they're using Moodle. They're integrating it for local use is what you're all doing. You're experimenting with online learning and hopefully sharing that knowledge with the rest of the community. That's why we're here. Giving feedback to us, supporting each other and supporting Moodle HQ financially through Moodle partners, through Moodle users association and the custom branded apps. So that's what Moodle can look like. That's what Moodle can look like. That's a Moodle. That's a Moodle. So people really take Moodle and bend it in different places and I love seeing how that happens. We're up to 85 Moodle partners now worldwide. That's a lot more than we had this time last year at the Australian Moodle Moodle. There are three in Australia, including one new one in Australia. So we're E-Creators, Moodle Rooms and My Learning Space and they're all here. So good to see you guys and they're all in that room. But these are the most important part of the community, the Moodle partners. They're the ones who are actually paying for everything. So using them supports the project, of course. We're currently up to about 1,244 plugins in the Plugins database from about nearly 700 community developers. That is a lot of stuff. We're improving that plugins interface to make it easier to find plugins, to review them, to see what other people think of them, so that the high quality ones bubble to the top to make it easier to choose them. And there's a lot of work happening on that. You'll see it very soon-ish. But this really shows that Moodle's a learning platform. It's not just a particular system. It's a platform like an operating system people are building on. Elizabeth did a bit of analysis on what the community are producing, what sort of plugins are being produced. And this is just an initial analysis, but you can see how much the blue ones there are assessment. There's a lot of things related to assessment that people are producing. And they're filling gaps and they're producing quite unusual things. For those, there's quite a lot of communication. Amazing, the green ones there. How many are about planning? Helping teachers and students plan their work. Which is great. It's exactly, I think it really is what was needed. Then there's content and navigation and so on. A lot of question types, too. How many people are members of the Moodle User Association here? Got some hands? Okay, a few of you. I was, last year I was talking about this as something that would happen. It is now launched. The User Association, we've got about 150 members growing. There are different levels of membership and the membership money goes into a big pot. And then the members go through a twice yearly process of proposing projects and voting on them and producing a recommendation for a particular project that they think the money should be spent on. And that's for Moodle Core, really for Moodle Core development. The first big one is this one. This is just a little screenshot from inside the Moodle User Association website, which is a Moodle site. And it's about the dashboard, about progress bars on the dashboard so you can see the progress of your courses, what are old courses, what are future courses, how far you're through them. And behind that is a lot of work on making activity completion in courses much easier to use. So just out of the box when you make a new course, activity completion will be on. It'll work with sensible defaults, automatic settings. So you don't have to go and set them all up one by one and all that stuff. So that's what's happening there. There is a meeting this afternoon. Michael Sankey, are you the highest ranking member of the MUA here? Yep, so what time is that MUA meeting? Five, five-fifteen? Okay, so if you're interested, even if you're not a member, go along. I think everyone's welcome to come in and talk about that and what's happening going forward. And you know, if you aren't a member, we really love, if you were a member, think of your institution joining up. It's not that much. The higher level you are, the more votes you have, the more swing you've got. So think about it. Moodle Moots, we're at one. I don't need to tell you about Moodle Moots. But we now have official Moodle Moots. Looks like next year we might have seven, I think, Gavin said. Seven that we're running around the world. There's a South African one. There's an Indian one. We have maybe US, maybe Middle East soon. Even Russia was coming up as a possibility, so yeah. What we're trying to do with these is, you know, we have this big Moodle sign here. So the videos for these go up onto YouTube. And what we're trying to get to is a point where there is a constant stream of Moodle keynotes and videos coming through that you can tune into your stream. You can sit in the lounge. If you've got an hour one night and you feel like watching some Moodle videos, you can crank it up on the TV. And it's, you know, it's going to be something watchable. And that's where we're going. The US, if you looked at the last US Moodle, unfortunately we had a video recording snafu. So we don't have very many from that one. But I think we're, you'll see a lot more coming from the Moots like this one. That's Charlie. It was a great talk from last year. So what are the future? Because I should probably get off the stage. Yeah. Look, technology is always evolving, right? I'm using probably one of the oldest ones, which is speaking right now. You know, we've got writing books. The thing in education is every time you add a new one, a shortwave of radios or televisions with people reading to bears on them, for no apparent reason. Or computers or tablets. You know, every time, and this gets set again and again, education, ed tech professionals go, this is going to revolutionize education. It's going to be the thing. We're all going to use that. And every time, what happens is we, education just takes it on as another thing. And we end up using all of those things. I mean, we're still using whiteboards. We're still using books. We're still writing. We're still talking to each other. Maybe, not maybe as much, but anyway, we still are. So, you know, virtual reality is a very big interest of mine. And then some people are going, oh, virtual reality is going to do everything. Well, no, it won't. We have a VR room at Moodle HQ. We're experimenting in there. And it is pretty exciting, but this doesn't change. Right, we still have this lump of meat. We still have a hippocampus, which is processing all this stream of information from your sensors is going through your hippocampus. You've got like a 15 minute, 20 minute recording buffer in there, like the short term memory. It's just sitting in there. And if you don't use that memory in that 15 or 20 minutes, it gets deleted. And if you do something in that time with that new information, that's how you consolidate your memories. It becomes new links and synaptic links and the brain gets embedded. These things don't change, right? So that's why new learning technologies don't take over the world. So that picture I showed you before of Moodle's core structure doesn't change. It won't change. Maybe it's run by different people at different times through different media, but it's not going to change. That picture is still very valid as a system, as a platform. It's still very useful. The idea of a course being a sequence of activities will not change. And the way you access it may change, but the key idea that you have a device or something to access this stuff somewhere else will not change. What is really exciting is this augmented reality of the future. The VR helmets we're playing with now are going to be dropped in favor of really just light sunglasses that you put on. And this screen doesn't have to be a little tiny projector screen there. If we were all wearing the sunglasses, I could have just flicked one up. 20-meter screen here, and we would all see it. And it would be just like it was here, but we're actually seeing it on our glasses, but we're all seeing the same thing in the same space. This is coming. This is a few years off. It's not very far. It's not gonna change everything, though. And I think in this environment, I think Moodle will still be the learning management system. The learning management will still need to be done. You still need to go in and out of experiences, capture assessments, pipe them to different places, have people with different roles. And that's really exciting. So if we're looking at the far future in the next five, 10 years, that's where Moodle will probably still be very, very valid. Worldwide, through open source, we can do anything. One last thing. If you wanna build a fire, this is my recommendation. You first plan the experiences you want people to have. You start there, forget the technology. What's the experience? What's the brain's gonna do? Then find the tools to make those experiences happen. And if you build feedback loops everywhere, if you let the participants feedback to the people making the course, and you let everybody give feedback to each other, you end up with a fire that burns by itself. So once you're all to go out, build a fire. Make it the best fire you can. And I hope to see some new fires coming out of this conference. Thank you very much.