 Welcome to the Moodle Moodle UK in Ireland 2017, our second time here at this venue. Hopefully everyone has had a good morning so far. I know yesterday there was quite a bit of silence at the drinks reception, mainly to do some sort of silent disco. Who here took part in the silent disco? Okay, that's great. It was great watching you and trying to figure out what sort of music you were dancing to. I did know of some people dancing with no headphones on too, so I'm not sure what music they were dancing to either. But that's brilliant and so thank you very much for coming along. So today we're going to have the Moodle news and updates sort of state of the nation kind of presentation. But before that I'd like to start off with welcoming the sponsors who are helping support this Moodle Moodle up. Just to give a quick word to say hello to you. So if you'd all like to come up. Hi there. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, so my name's Nazmin, I'm from Turner Inn. Come and speak to us throughout the day and tomorrow as well. We'll be happy to speak to you about the feedback studio transition. We've also got a session at two o'clock today where one of our users will actually be taking you through their transition and how that went as well. So yeah, please do attend. Thank you. Hi, my name is Phil Miller. I'm the general manager of Blackboards Teaching and Learning Business, which a big part of that is our Moodle rooms business. We're here just to support you and have a chat with you guys. We'd love to have you join some of our sessions. One of the things that we're going to talk a lot about today is how to make content more accessible inside of Moodle. So that's going to be a big focus for us at this conference. Good morning, James. I'm James Bennett from Erkin and Plagiarism Detection. Thought to leave one in between as you see. I'm here all day as well and tomorrow with a couple of talks one today and one tomorrow as well. We're asked to be very happy to show the integration we have with Moodle. I think I'll leave it to that. Thank you. Hi, I'm Fred Dixon. I'm the CEO of Lineside Networks and I'm a product manager of Big Blue Button, an open source web conferencing system for online learning. We've been working closely with Moodle for five years. We'll be sharing our roadmap for both the Big Blue Button project and the integration for Moodle. So come check it out. Hi, I'm Marc Abador from Leo Learning. We've been doing Moodle work for about five years or so. It's our second full year as a partner. Glad to be back as a sponsor. There's a few of us around. We're doing presentations tomorrow on XAPI Learning Analytics stuff. Please come and have a chat. Hello, Pablo from Weeris. We came from Barcelona. We are the guys who made the mathematical plugins. Well, some years from now we have been doing that. And I hope you join us to see how easy you could create math content and math questions in your Moodle. Please join us at one of our sessions. One is today, 1145. The other one is tomorrow, same time. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I'm Conor Gilligan. I'm the global head of Web Anywhere. So we operate in the US as a Moodle partner in Chicago. The UK were headquartered in Leeds and also outside Krakow in Poland, where we have a development center of 80 people now actually that are building Moodle products essentially for us. Just happy to help everybody today. I think it's our third year here. We operate in the kind of school sector with 3,500 schools but also in the corporate sector. So happy to help and discuss projects with you guys today. Okay. Well, thank you very much for that, everyone. And please do visit them during the coffee break and lunch break downstairs. They have their stands. So we're going to have a slight interruption now and we're going to be going to Perth for a quick word from Martin who unfortunately wasn't able to be here. Audio? Hey all, that's better. How are you all? Good morning. Look, I'm really, really sorry I can't be there in London this week. I really am. My travel and work just didn't allow it. I've been traveling a lot recently. Even more than usual. And as well as many Moodle Moods around the world I've been going to. I've also been joining in with the world conversation at a number of big conferences around the world. Education, technology, standards and business conferences. And one thing I've really realized in the past year or so is that the influence of potential of Moodle worldwide is even bigger than I knew. So my resolve for driving the Moodle project forward is stronger than ever. Not only as a collaborative technology platform but as a force for good and openness in this world that is increasingly being dominated by corporate interests. It's a terrible thing. We're working on a number of initiatives to find good funding to increase our numbers of core developers. You'll be hearing about some of them shortly. I just wanted to say that if you're involved with anything, any projects, but insights into things, when you think Moodle could be involved where it might help Moodle project, I really encourage you to let us know. Talk to Gavin or anyone else there or myself. Really sorry I can't be there. We do have a large number of the Moodle HQ team there. I'm really confident that everyone's going to get good things out of the program for the next couple of days. But right now I want to hand you over to a rock of the Moodle community, our business development manager and general legend, Mr. Gavin Henry. I'll see you later on. Thanks, Mark. Mark will actually see you here, so if you'd all like to give him a little bit of a wave. We have a screen somewhere in the big one. Mark is going to be dropping in during the coffee break to spy on us downstairs, so you'll be able to go down and have a short one-on-one with him, either at coffee or at lunch. Please feel free to go along to the desk and chat to him. He never leaves us alone. Thank you, Mark. Okay, so obviously we have a very busy schedule over the next two days. Rather than the four traditional keynotes this year, we're also doing something a little bit different. So just before I get into the presentation, I just wanted to explain. So this evening we have a panel where we're talking about sort of bring your own Moodle, bring your own device. It's time to get rid of the desktop and sort of start developing courses for mobile first. So we have a few people sort of talking, giving their opinions on that, and they want you to be able to engage and get involved in that discussion during the panel. And then tomorrow we have quite a contentious one where I think I've been selected as the one who's going to be for this, although it's not the Moodle stance, which is that should AI and learning analytics replace teachers? And someone gave me a quote yesterday from a lecturer saying that any teacher who can be replaced by AI and learning analytics should be. Okay, and then tomorrow afternoon the panel will be a sort of community panel where a few of the various teams within Moodle will be up, explaining how to engage with them on that level, be it developer, the community, the learning side, and so on. So it's something which we're trying something new and we will want your feedback, but more importantly, we want your engagement during those panels because this is a community Moodle mood. So your participation and your presentations is what makes this excellent. So quick thanks again to our sponsors and also just there's 15 Moodle partners here from around the world, ranging from Philippines throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and the UK and Ireland. But we'll just like to remind you that these are the UK and Ireland Moodle partners, most of who are here over the few days. So when you're thinking about doing business in Moodle and getting a Moodle service provider, do have a chat to them because the Moodle partners do pay a percentage of their income, which funds Moodle nearly 100%. That's how we exist. But anyway, moving along, our mission. So Moodle hasn't really changed in what it's trying to do with regards to its mission and its vision. As Martin said, it is about empowering educators and we've been refining this and we're seeing how the ecosystem in the world is changing. And we're certainly hoping that you'll see this drive through what we're doing now and also in the next coming years. So it is really important that all of our team within Perth and around the world about a third of Moodle HQ is based outside of Perth. We all strive to meet this mission and sort of keep these values and keep this vision alive. As Martin said there, it's about empowering educators about doing good in the world through education. And these are our values. So these have been on our website for quite a while and they haven't really changed. We've changed the wording on them a few times and probably are aware of people often do go through a lot of different iterations in their values. But for us, this has been quite consistent and it's very much all about working in an open way. It's about being education first. It's about having integrity, about innovation and very like where Moodle can be used in schools and in colleges for education to help this sort of risk-taking behavior from a learning point of view and innovation point of view, we're doing the same again within how we operate. Moodle doesn't exist in a void. There's a huge learning ecosystem of different apps and different systems out there and one of the key things that we've been doing over time and are working on now is more of this integrating and working with all of these systems to understand where Moodle is. We don't base all of these but it does exist within this within that learning ecosystem of every single institution and organization and this is where it comes down to for us. Moodle is this platform that's a bit like the hub and sits between all of these to create that learning environment for your students and your learners but it's not trying to replace it and it's all these courses and users and different parts that make Moodle work with all of these systems including the student management system and so on. If you look at this you'll see that it is very much a plug-in architecture as you would be all aware that you can integrate with lots of different other systems in this way and that is the core of how we see Moodle and also as an organization work. We have our Moodle partners, we have the MUA, we have the Moodle community and in some ways our community and the way we operate is mirrored within how Moodle itself operates within the whole ecosystem and in these courses they've got their own parts as well they've got their own different plugins and activities and a series of experiences because that's what learning is it isn't just here's a course with stuff in it it's about experiences and sharing those experiences between the students and students and that's where the learning is happening it isn't really, it isn't that here's a SCORM object or here's a PDF it's about what happens in and around that as well and the actual assessment that might be taking place and as you can see here Moodle is accessible from two ways now there's some presentations and obviously the mobile session later we look at well how much is mobile and how much is access to web systems changing there's some people here saying that 70% of their students are students access is via mobile device how many people here would be seeing say more than 50% from tablet or mobile are you looking? because it is actually amazing how much now is changing and that's where responsive design and so on has become very important but actually if you check online and the standard stats both in Europe and in the US you'll see that of of digital content consumption about 90% of it is via apps rather than just through the web browser on the mobile device so it's something you have to think about and Moodle obviously has a free mobile app which you can use and connect to Moodle and I think in 3.3 it's like 98% complete with all of the activities I think one lesson just has gone live and as Martin said Moodle it is a true open source project we're all here we're all involved it's enabling sharing and science that experimentation in learning and in teaching because you can choose how you want to use all those tools that are in Moodle enable saving so we can focus on the bigger problems what I heard from a teacher there recently was Moodle does the heavy lifting in administration so they can just get on with teaching it takes in all those assignments it also scores all those quizzes so the teacher can do other stuff higher value learning and higher value teaching but Moodle exists within a world not just within the learning systems where you have all of these other things getting involved accessibility everyone's talking about accessible content Phil mentioned that they have some presentations on accessible and protocol ally which actually is really revolutionary because it automatically sorts all of this stuff out for you in the background but accessibility is important but also then you've got the whole economics around it and the costs that are involved in what they mandate you've got stuff like REF and how it affects teaching and learning you've got the community you've got privacy there's a big privacy changes in Europe although for I think about two thirds of people here that might not matter in two years time I was I was standing in Ireland watching the British parliament vote away my right to live in Dublin because I'm British so I'm with you on that one it's very interesting that all of these things impact Moodle as well it's not just about technology and about learning it's all of these things as well and it's really important that these are dealt with and Moodle engages with you the community and the partner network to make sure that these are taken into account upon accessibility for example we have a new a new plugin for a video which works really well and enables that sort of better accessible and that's really what we're talking about there Moodle HQ is at the beginning curating and managing all of these requirements but yet working within the overall community and that's very much where the final panel will be focusing on so we build the software we look at Moodle Core we look at Moodle Mobile and Moodle Mobile really is just an alternate interface to Moodle it has infrastructure to the community both are Moodle.org how many people here are registered on Moodle.org? that's great that's 60% you'll have 40% after this session go do so but within that then you've also got the documentation Moodle docs and you've got Mary and Helen here who help curate that but the community creates it you've got our Learn Moodle MOOC which is a free online course you've got our general promotion of Moodle and of its usage and also conferences like this and all of these you've got being funded by partners, you've got Moodle Cloud you've got the association and also if you need a custom mobile app where it's branded and so on customized your institution we also have that too and these are things that although it's open source people do need to engage for professional services but the community do your half of this relationship you know you're using it, you're integrating it you're experimenting and you're also giving us feedback and news so good stories about usage or about adoption you're supporting each other so those on Moodle.org how many people here have that particularly helpful Moodle.org badge this is a badge where the community recognize other's contributions by ranking their posts as being useful and answers as useful so it becomes this peer support network where recognition is the reward I think that's really important I think it's an essential aspect of the community but then you also support the existence of Moodle through working with Moodle partners and then you have the MUA and Custom Brand so this whole ecosystem is sort of like all working together so Moodle Core although 3.3 is about to come out for most of you I understand you're probably going from 3.1 or 2.3.1 or 3.2 depending on what you're going for a long term view or not so let's have a quick look back at 3.1 which came out just at the beginning of last summer there were some pretty major features there how many people have already gone to 3.1 here wow okay that's great so they can tell you how wonderful some of these are in these it is really great so you've got this whole competency based education this is a company based framework system where you can then build custom learning plans and assign them into courses and activities and have people upload prior evidence to even claim that hey I'm actually competent at that already from a course I did last year and then the teacher would be able to use that as evidence so it even works for recognition of prior learning so RPL which I'm not sure is very good in the UK but I know across Europe RPL has been really gaining a lot of traction and in saying that there's 31 countries represented in this room from around the world it's the most international Moodle Moodle we've had one of the other great features was the new grader system but behind this was a thing called UNO-CON which also converted that word document into a pdf so you could mark it up like this while you're grading now yet that's a bit of a beast I mean think about it launching the Microsoft Office every time you want to open a word document and save it as a pdf takes a bit of grunt in the servers so it does require that however that's if you want that feature you have to go ahead and deploy it but it was again a great step forward I know people have been asking for this kind of feature for quite a while and then came 3.2 and just so you know you're going to see Blocky around later to end he's lonely and he wants photographs so talk to one of the Moodle HQ team who are here and go and take a jewey is that what a double selfie is called or is it something else I'm not sure but Blocky is going to be around so we released 3.2 and in that we had boost which is a new theme and it's the first step in a new interface designed for Moodle less blocks, more simplified navigation cleaner interface cleaner management access and we're going to be doing massive improvements in 3.4 working in all of this usability area we have a new media player which I'm presenting on later VideoJS which enables uploading subtitles stuff directly into Moodle you've got prettier graphs we updated a graphing engine LTI compliance the messaging and notification lots of people have said what about those little icons at the top of a screen you know if I get a message it shows up directly there so that was help funded by one of the universities in the US and then user tours which is that onboarding guide for new users on the Moodle site and competency, import and export lots of other stuff there's a lot in 3.2 and it's certainly going to be very interesting to see how people adopt these different areas and I know boost has had a lot of discussions going on about what the next steps in improvements are going to be so with boost one of the big things was what you can see over there on the left where you have this hamburger which just toggles off that whole left side of blocks and navigation especially on small screens, that nav block and admin tree took a lot of space so you can just hide that, it's gone now so it's really a major step forward and it might be something which you can certainly look at when you're upgrading and I know some people stick with bootstrap for the time being but that is a really huge step forward of where we are going and do get involved in giving feedback on this and what other changes should be there because as a community that's how we develop these features and this came from feedback from you so as you can see here that's it when it's unhidden then sort of as we go through so messaging and notification so they were sort of tied up together and now they're a bit more split out so every time you get a message you can directly get it at the top of the page just like you can within the mobile app, it's much more accessible and also the messaging interface has radically improved very much more like a telegram kind of messaging app or WhatsApp, do any of you use telegram or anything like that for chat? Okay, four install it, it's cool it's what we use at HQ and it's something where I'd use many systems before I started off back when the internet was beginning but telegram is very good then of course you've got user tours so who here has already deployed to user tours on their sites? Okay, so there's some really good stuff where you can literally have when a teacher goes to an assignment, create assignment page for the first time, it talks them through the steps on the screen when a student goes to the dashboard for time it points out what the calendar is and stuff on the screen they may not need it and they can just get rid of it but for the ones who have deployed this and a few institutions have, they've really seen a reduction in support queries so again something cool but actually the outcome is just less work for you and the media player plugin, I'll be presenting on that later it is really quite cool although I'm not sure my presentation is as cool as the actual technology itself but it is great, everyone here know what a VTT file is? You will after my presentation and so for graphs so some of the Moodle graphs were looking a little bit old so we've introduced a new graphing library, one of the really nice things is that where you had a graph before underneath it now you can actually see the raw data as well, you can expand that so you can actually look at the data behind the graph as well so that's something again, it's about increasing the accessibility and usability of things even like just graphs within Moodle and Moodle 3.3 so who here is planning in the summer to go to 3.3? about 12, maybe 15 okay so Moodle 3.3 has some major major jumps forward so the first one is a new course overview so Steve, where are you? oh, you're hiding there so Steve, I'm at the MUA he'll be doing a presentation later about what the MUA have been doing this year and I think Gemma our project coordinator is here as well, yes? yes, okay pardon? oh, over there so this is a new course overview for Moodle so when students go in, they can see as you can see here it's actually an assignment that they have to submit and they can just click add submission directly from their dashboard so you can see it's basically their task list of what's coming next and so there's been a lot of work going on this is a project that was initiated by the MUA and that's the real user association funding that's what it's for however it is something that there we go it's something that the community then has been thinking about this for a while so there's feedback from elsewhere on top of that we also have a listing of your courses so in progress, future past, if you have that concept so it's something where if you have multiple semesters, you can look at maybe customizing this to handle your semesters so I know a lot of institutions have already done stuff like this but we're putting something into core as a baseline that you can maybe then base what you have done in the past on so it's less custom and more coherent within the overall view and then of this, of course every one of these UI changes gets replicated within the mobile app so if you see there again it's a more visual sort of pleasant interface in that respect so let's go back to some of the other aspects in here as well which I think is worth noting is the integration so who here uses 365 or G Suite at their institution not integrated but just at all so they use Gmail or use Hotmail okay so about a quarter so now from 3.3 we have a base level integration so before there were some plugins that you'd install and it was a little bit complicated and clunky to set up maybe now it's going to be there out of the box so you'll have this more fluid workflow for people wanting to submit a Google Doc as an assignment for example so that's going to be there and it's already up on the prototype site that you can play with and have a look and see how it works and feels so that's really good the file storage plugins and this is about if you're having a cloud environment that you can build a special file plugin so it's more technical but the key ones there are certainly the dashboard and then the integration but as we go towards 3.4 we've been doing a lot of big feature changes recently and not just improvements so what we're going to do in 3.4 is change tack the one where we're really focusing on let's polish what we've got so there's bugs, small little feature requests around usability around really thinking about how do we improve the calendar, how do we improve that file repository system and think about as a whole so this is where you're going to become really important as always in this test get involved in the tracker contribute, this is an issue that needs addressing, give us the information behind it we do have a usability expert now on board since that September and hopefully you'll have seen some of those that impact of that different focus and development in 3.2 and 3.3 so he's also reaching out to the community asking for volunteers to get involved in improving usability so I think there recently he was just doing a call for assistance on the calendar to get feedback on how people are using the calendar so then we can look at the specification and how it's working and how people want it to work and think about how that is implemented so you're an integral part of the designing of Moodle in this respect so you really do need to make sure that you follow us on Twitter get involved in the Moodle.org community forums and then also get involved in tracking comments on things some of the recent developments had hundreds of comments from people around the world so please take part in those and one of those areas one of those areas is Project Inspire so who here has heard about Project Inspire okay wasn't there more people at my presentation yesterday during the workshop maybe they they went I've had enough of Gavin so Project Inspire is about learning analytics now unlike the stance I'll take tomorrow just so we have someone arguing for it we're not trying to change teaching as Martin said there's two kind of educational companies in the world and he's tweeted about it and talked about it before there's one which is trying to help fix education by supporting the existing infrastructure the existing teachers and their support system and the others are trying to fix education by replacing all of that by going you know we can do this better we can automate it we'll have a tutor who will take them through their course without any human interaction they'll get more accurate more timely responses they'll be able to track about her they'll be able to identify students at risk faster and they'll do all of that for you and basically replacing people with technology and Moodle isn't about that as a learning management system it takes a teacher to run a course in Moodle yes you could do a self-paced course but it's designed around social constructivism where you are engaging in discussions and reflection with students and teachers and students and forums chats and that's where Project Inspire comes in. Project Inspire is about looking at how we can use machine learning and how we can use learning analytics to actually support teachers and students in that learning journey to improve their learning experience so it's been the idea is that we're going to build a brain sounds scary but we're going to build a brain inside Moodle and right now we're doing the research phase where we're asking people within the community to contribute completely anonymized versions of their Moodle sites you get the plug-in to anonymize it you get to do all of that full NDAs and stuff in place as well however it is completely anonymized and then we will teach that brain with machine learning to actually understand what a good course is the different interactions that students have and we already have a number of organizations and universities involved but this is very much something which you all need to think about can you get involved is there any way you can share your anonymized data with us and there's full information on the Moodle.org course about this but this is helping drive that within Moodle then the teachers will get prompts and the students will get prompts which the institution has approved of but based on this collective knowledge and once you deploy that brain on that within Moodle within your own systems then it starts continually learning just about your organization because every organization here is different in how they use Moodle and part of that is why we need to understand contributing their data but once it is deployed it will learn more about you and we'll keep learning and learning how your courses are best what are the best learning outcomes for your students in the way that you teach so please do go and have a check on this if you are thinking about learning analytics it's of interest if you're not even reading through it might be something that you want to take part in so Moodle Mobile focus on mobile as you have noticed and we have in Stan's downstairs we have two iPads and two iPod touches and you have Juan and Bert and Garnet and others will be at the stand throughout the next two days if you haven't tried Moodle Mobile yet it's free you can just go and download it you can try it out down there and there's a course showing quizzes and different activities on that so go down and play with it on the iPad the reason for that is it very much is a different interface and it's about having it on the go this changes things in so many ways there was a full day master class or workshop yesterday on mobile learning from everything from image size through file size through being able to access things on the go and we've done so much in the last few years we started off and started catching up with all the different activities that were in Moodle and Juan leads the team in Barcelona that seems to be that tech place within Spain where we've been catching up on all of these features and it's just, I think, lesson and what else went into 3.3? Juan? Okay, so database, feedback and lesson are now all available from 3.3 onwards and even if you're on 3.2 you can use the extra plugin to get those features but it is very much trying to give the students something to do with mobile in their hands because that's the way the internet has changed it's the way people consume has changed about learning and of all things this is the biggest change in Moodle is really making sure every new feature we deploy we're also doing in the mobile as well as catching up and I think we're about 98% there on the student based features within the mobile app now which is amazing and for most institutions that's more than what they use in the standard profile and again you can turn these off so someone said it's got messaging there we don't use messaging within the interface on the admin side in Moodle you can turn off what features you don't want so it doesn't have to be everything or nothing you can just tweak what you want in that respect and you can also rename them as how they appear and this is just a quick overview of whether you can browse whether you can submit so how many people hear you use SCORM objects or learning objects in their teaching like the storyline and stuff so there's quite a few so that can now be played completely within the mobile app but also can be played offline and that was funded by a charity who wanted to be able to play these SCORM objects in a Syrian refugee camp where Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity is at a low so you might not be out in the middle of a desert you might be in an area or you might be on a bus where you don't want to use your data connection or your students don't want to use your data connection or if you're on some of the trains if I remember the Birmingham London train there's no connectivity on it anyway so that's where the offline features are really important and being able to go in read the content that you've downloaded already and even reply you can do your forum plies and when you get back online and that's all the features you can see there systematically we have been just getting rid of any of the gaps that we have in it and we're going to continue working on that and it is being driven by demand so institutions are going hey we really want this area sort of that so we're hearing from you we're hearing from the partners and then plans team manages that roadmap of what features are going to be rolled out but with the free mobile app you can also make it look pretty okay so that's CSS only using the free app you can style it and make it look really pretty but equally what we mentioned earlier you can actually get a branded app so that's where we publish it for you you can of course publish it yourself and there's some here who have done some really funky stuff with the open source mobile app but when you do that you don't have to look after things like notification servers and publishing with your own accounts if you can do that, that's great if you can't, there's no alternative and what we do is we just go through literally I think there's six people here, six organisations here who already have their branded app and I always look for Mark Mark where are you hiding? so Mark will be able to show you the loop one so it's branded, it's called DCU loop looks like their logo and so on and it just makes it easy for the students because you don't have to add a mobile site so you can figure it out then we've got Learn MoodleNet so how many people have taken the MOOC on Learn Moodle? okay so in the summer, early summer we're going to be doing a 3-3 Learn Moodle MOOC so you can certainly just sign up for it, it's four weeks Mary yeah and you learn all of the basic features of the current version of Moodle and we run that twice a year in English so it's something that you can very much just get your staff to go in there and take that free course and we have thousands do it every six months some of them keep coming back and helping out again, very much that community thing being sort of co-facilitators in that respect and engagement on it, it's very interesting to see that it is something where there is a lot of activity the whole way through because people are there and one thing I found was interesting about 50% of the people who who were finishing it in one of the iterations actually didn't do any of the assessments in it, they were just actually there looking through all the content and participating but they didn't feel the need to do any of the assessment aspect so they didn't really complete it but they stayed the course so you do it in your own way then we've got Moodle Cloud so Moodle Cloud with all the partners they offer full services they do hosting support training integration development all of those services and some of them offer more as well within the learning ecosystem but we have now I think we have 20,000 active sites and all of these are small little free sites we've also then got some Moodle for school packages but it is, this is about again empowering educators to change the world and do good so a lot of these are maybe the free ones are up to 50 people only in the Moodle site but they can just go on and within a minute they can get that account and so you teachers and schools who have no funding for an LMS will go in and set up a Moodle site just for their class it has virtually no space as well these are just really sandboxes for you to play in or if you're just one teacher to do something and then once you grow you can then move through these various but these are all small because in the end once you've got to a certain stage you really do need that full service so for those who don't know me I worked as a Moodle consultant for various Moodle partners for six years and then my own consultancy before I joined Moodle HQ two years ago and it's really important that once you have this incubation cycle that people want to try it out without having too much skin in the game and then once they're ready they can then go okay now we need full training to integrate it with everything so this is what Moodle cloud is about and it's why it's such an important part of our mission and it isn't something that's suitable for long-term production for virtually any any site except really small ones which are just maybe still in the trying out phase and we are looking at how we change this we've added a few plugins into it and you've got where it's spread again big blue button is integrated with it out of the box he's hiding directly in front of me hidden so you can actually try it out that out straight away so these are the kind of things which again teachers are looking for to be able to explore and for schools they get a theme out of the box to customize version that we had produced and of course there's a sort of training course for them or an introduction course to go through then we've obviously got our Moodle partners which introduced and there is 15 from around the world here this week but we do have 85 Moodle partners worldwide we do all these services and part of my job is actually telling perspective companies up which there's I think two or three soon-to-be Moodle partners here I'm not going to identify them and please don't identify yourselves but it's telling them why should they work with Moodle and part of it is because they're giving us that revenue it is to keep the Moodle project going but it's also something where it's being part of this family and an official part of the family and they give us a lot of feedback on what we're developing and making sure from working with clients like yourselves that we're doing the right thing that we're implementing things in the right way and the right priority so it really is all that feedback from everyone is really important and Moodle plugins another essential part so how many people here have developed a Moodle plugin okay so that's about 40 that's cool that's more than 10% so Moodle plugins are an essential part of Moodle quite a lot of Moodle now started off as plugins that other people had created and then eventually ended up into Moodle core but we've been changing our interface and doing some improvements on this and if you have been to it recently you'll see that we actually now when you're navigating it it isn't that you are looking for necessarily a question type you don't need to know the technical name of what you're looking for to open the top left the actual first drop down now is how it's used if you want to look for something for assessment if you want to look for something for instruction for collaboration or communication and again this is trying to refocus rather than this plugin database just being there for technical people and administrators we're trying to make it more approachable and usable for teachers as well because when they go looking in there they don't go hey I want to restrict access they're looking for a filter they don't really know what they're looking for but they are looking for something to help them teach so that's what we're trying to do here is trying to help them and so again if you want to provide feedback on this please do so in the forums this was the first iteration so there will be more improvements on it as well and that's the breakdown of how many different plugins in the different formats there are and what their focus is so you can see assessment is huge and it bends Moodle to how you want to assess how you want to teach and so a lot of the plugins are hey we want to have a peer assessment which is slightly different to a workshop or we want to have them where they upload a video and see what these integrations with assessment tools out there as well and also once we're completely built within Moodle and I know that at this Moodle and Mootana prior ones as well various organizations have presented so do go and have a look if you haven't there's some really interesting ones in there and we are blogging on Moodle.com it's about some of those interesting ones I think Mary Helen and some of the rest of the communication the community team focus on sort of sharing those on a regular basis so please check that out so the Moodle User Association how many people here are members of the MUA not enough so the MUA is one of the ways of helping impact what is happening in Moodle and also to help fund it so it is a global organization is growing and I won't steal Steve's thunder for later there are different memberships you can either be an individual member or as an organization in a university you can be higher members as well and basically for each membership level you get a certain amount of voting points and what the points make features so at least some people have so they know the TV reference from the 80s there so you are all showing your age TV shows like what do points make prizes but in this case so people within the MUA they will propose ideas and then they will vote on them which ones they think they should get Moodle to focus on and then Moodle comes back and say right that will take this amount of funding which then is what the membership goes for just really straight forward and then exactly how it ends up it's Moodle MUA and community just finalizing and polishing things and then it ends up in core so we have the course overview we have that calendar one coming up next so it does take some time but your membership is very valuable so it's another way to help getting features and help funding Moodle just the same way as working with Moodle partners and you can decide which one is more suitable for your organization and that's the dashboard one proposed by Gemma and Gemma you're presenting on that at the end of the day as well so basically after the final panel the MUA are going to have a meeting downstairs in the Plaza Suite and everyone is welcome well you're all welcome but you'll be standing if you all go in so there's room in there I think 80 people so they'll be going through those projects and how it all works and then doing some workshops as well so yeah? actually if you want to just very quickly explain what you'll be doing you've got a catch box here yeah Gemma is going to be talking very briefly about not so much about the proposal the dashboard project because you can go on to track it to find out about that but quite a bit about the proposal process and how she engages with the MUA and how that helps her get that project through because it's quite amazing really it's quite a big thing that got developed and it's quite an expensive thing to develop and for what would say a hundred dollars Australian that's what the membership for that cost and that's what you've ended up with so she's going to be talking about that and then I'm going to be doing a workshop which hopefully quite a few members will be there because I don't think I think there's more we could do with our website and the possibility of doing things like a mobile app for the MUA so I'll be doing a bit of a workshop to get some ideas about how we could improve all things and I will be talking later on yeah you will be this morning about the process of getting involved with the MUA and what we're planning to do to grow it thank you very much Steve and the Moodle community as well so the Moodle community as it exists you've got Moodle.net where you can share stuff you've got Moodle docs, you've got Moodle.org well we're changing, we're going to innovate we're going to come up with some new aspects within that Moodle community and how it all hangs together from looking at things like the MCCC which is the Moodle course creator certificate and how all that works and how the community can get more involved and how teachers can get more involved because Moodle.net has content shared it has tours shared and other things about getting more involved in that respect and we have a major project going to kick off in and around that to look at how to better work with you the community so again keep your eyes peeled for that and very much to keep saying that your involvement here and your ideas are what's going to make this different so Karen if you want to break right and Paul if you want to break left so they're carrying catch boxes you know those soft microphones so you've all of these different areas in the core platform we're open towards but what is the future what is the future what area should Moodle be focusing on right now so if you'd like to speak please put your hand up and you'll be thrown the microphone or past the microphone this is over to you we want to hear it this is something we're doing in all of our Moodle moods now so there was a bit of discussion yesterday at the dev session about and their future I was just wondering if there's any opportunity from an HQ point of view to clarify the future of Blocks and where they're likely to be going because there was a little bit of confusion I think okay well for this part let's talk about that at the community session tomorrow and this one is more about what sort of like major feature or functionality but yes there is confusion about Blocks especially with the way Boost came out so but this is more about what features we should be looking at next should we be doing more on accessibility should we be doing more integrations with video platforms or what what's the major next steps so there's one over here Paul I think it's really interesting Moodle's got this really valuable ecosystem of activities for students and staff to deliver one of the places we're always patching is how that fits in with administration and things like that and I think there's a lot of work in there that Moodle can help with the administrative running of the teaching not the actual teaching and I think that's a really interesting area to look in there's some stuff which is starting to look really good for that but there's definitely more in that area I think that more around the admin and integrating back into the student information systems those kind of things some of the process run much more elegantly than they possibly do at the minute okay what I would like to see for example you want to move forward and gain could say an advantage would be nice to say focus on the learning outcomes as a feature and develop something like theory, applications innovative thinking and then use wizards to actually create quizzes questionnaires and assignments that they are based on the learning outcomes so you can monitor how much of these learning outcomes has been delivered and how then how much is actually being given back as a good result from the students yeah absolutely I think that's another there's a kind of ideas we're looking for that's actually usability of course personalization is something that everybody suffers would be nice to have a role based login screen so an administrator, a teacher and a student should see what they want okay well you do have the dashboard for that but certainly so what we're going to be doing is collating all of these and then starting to discuss them with the community as a whole so next we've got Paul thanks Gavin, Brian really love the new dashboard the question I think is how terrible it will be will it support plugins, will we be able to reorder things that appear in the dashboard to rewrite it because it's going to be I think everyone will want to tailor their own version of it but it's an amazing step forward I think it is a step forward as with anything when we put a new feature out there the amount of feedback we get then the next iteration goes again and I believe there is already ideas about the next version of what it will have so those are the things which will keep going but absolutely it's about that roadmap it's it's not really a change it's not really something I see but maybe the pace of change to slow a little so rather than try to put lots and lots and lots of things in every release concentrate on one or two things but get them absolutely right because I think with 3.1 the assignment and the grade mark feature that was fantastic really good but there were still a lot of issues with it and I think that I don't know whether anyone else had problems but after all that certainly with the unicorn thing that did not work and that took a lot of time to sort out and I think there's still a lot of that change to go so I think what I'm trying to say is I think it's really good but the moodle is in that kind of marketplace where it needs to be solid on the release and we have had that feedback and that's why in 3.4 there isn't a new feature is it about getting it much more polished because that's what we want to do we're being driven by the community to add this add this and more integrations or more features and then on the other hand we're being given that sort of feedback but it is really important so that focus that is our primary focus for the second half of this year completely just usability and polishing what's there Hi, just reflecting on that last question it occurs to me possibly configuration management might be an area that could benefit from some attention as well so we have all these features which are great and the pace of change is amazing all the new features lots of useful stuff but being able to sort of manage configuration for a staging site where you're trying things out and then you've got a live site where everything actually runs for real and just being able to manage that more easily maybe as simple as an import export for configuration settings but something along those lines there is a plugin for that I believe Bingo it's always the same so here in the middle Karen then you I think we could probably do with a bit of commercial infrastructure for plugins so right now a lot of plugins are in the sense that sports people are amateur and sports people are professional a lot of the plugins that we rely on are actually supported via partners or via people who develop them independently but in institutions I think many of them require better support and better certainty that the plugin is going to be maintained through the versions of Moodle and so I think we need to work more to provide infrastructure for independent companies even to allow their plugins to be proficiently maintained and supported I believe absolutely it is an area I mean we do support our partners in doing that and we are aware that there are other issues that play there which we are trying to find solutions for but plug in certainty is important second last one otherwise coffee is going to be a very quick coffee go I would like to think about how Moodle could integrate what the power of technology to make learning completely different and some of the ways in which technology is enabling learning I was interested in what you said about a kind of AI engine in Moodle but I think that you know we have already embraced a lot the kind of visual and multimedia and interactive features that technology can do to improve learning but I think what would be more exciting is an area that isn't quite yet so common to find is tools that learners can have to do more complex things so I'm thinking of big data visualization as a kind of a tool that you can put in the hands of students so that they can find their own views of a subject and also that we design things for Moodle that also kind of take on board the neuroscience of learning what we're finding out about what happens in the brain when we learn and smart tools to make learning more efficient faster and get put the tools in the hands of the students to do more absolutely I think there's plenty of scope for that and so thank you for all your ideas actually we'll just cut it at that otherwise you won't have time for copy so thank you very much for your time please do chat to any of the Moodle HQ staff if you want to there's 10 of us here and obviously talk to each other don't be shy this is all about sharing practice and sharing ideas thank you