 Hi everyone, I'm Sonya Trivedi, communications manager here at Moodle and we are at Moodle Mood Global 2023. Today I had with me Robert Schrenk, deputy head of the department for IT services for schools at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Robert just presented a very interesting case study on the Austrian Federal Educational Portal and how Moodle has become part of the Austrian e-government strategy. Hi Robert, how are you today? Hello, very fine, thanks. It's my first time at the Moodle Moodle. Absolutely, great to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Could you please tell us a little bit more about the project and the role of Moodle in the whole e-government strategy? Yeah, so first of all, the project in this case was not about making a learning platform. It was about making a portal for every citizen that is somehow connected to schools. So it's for students and teachers and for their parents as well. And we also don't differentiate between different types of schools, so also private schools, public schools, they can all participate in this education portal. And the main vision was to reduce the amount of platforms that people have to visit to get the information they need for the next days, for example. So we wanted to create a portal that collects all information from various applications that are used by the respective schools so that everybody has a personalized dashboard. And on the other hand, to do so, we implemented an Educational Technologies Hub that controls which application can access data of which school or use interfaces on behalf of which school. So we as a ministry, we make contracts with the companies that provide those services and then the schools can decide which product they want to use and the Educational Portal controls all the exchange of data. And the third tier is that we also implement e-government services in this portal so that schools can, for example, make digitally signed documents like certificates or something like that. And we are also building an archive for those documents because in Austria they have to be kept for 60 years in certain cases. And so we want to put that from the schools to us because schools would not be in a manner to store all those digital documents for such a long period of time. And we are also implementing a dual delivery service that means that when schools make a delivery of digitally signed documents they can be delivered digitally when the people enrolled to this kind of delivery and if not, then there is a fallback mechanism to deliver them physically. And we also implemented a digital ID card for students recently so we released it in September two weeks ago and these are also part projects of this Educational Portal. Really interesting and it seems very vast, right? I'm curious to know a little bit more about the impact you mentioned during your presentation that Mudo has a history on the Austrian market, right? I think since 2017, am I correct? No, it's even more. The schools started to use Moodle the first time around 2001 or 2002 and the ministry recognized it. I think in 2004 they said they would make an initiative to support schools in using Moodle and then they built a system that was called EDU Moodle and each school had their own Moodle instance and we also had a Moodle community in Austria so teachers that were interested in the topic and came together two or three times a year and discussing how Moodle could advance in Austria and there were some ideas that we implemented in this new individual platform that was also introduced by my colleagues and this platform was developed since 2017 and we switched the platform where each school had a single instance to this multi-tenant instance where all schools are together in one Moodle. Okay, okay. And if you can share a little bit more about the results you showed us some really good numbers like how many students, how many schools are using that kind of thing? The education portal or the learning platform? Both. So in the learning platform we have about 1100 schools which is a fifth of all schools in Austria and it's more the higher schools that use it so in numbers I think it was 400,000 users that we have and in Austria we have about one million students in total so it's a good number and with the education portal we just released it this summer and we are now building everything up so it's an incremental advance so currently there are not so many users but it's an e-government service that every citizen can just activate for himself or herself so I think it will grow in the next month and years. Okay, great. And if you don't mind sharing with us what were the main reasons why you chose to work with Moodle? Yeah, so I myself, I like Moodle because I was a teacher before I got IT manager and I used Moodle as a teacher for more than a decade and I was also part of this Moodle community I just have so much experience with Moodle and not only me, myself, it's also our team the team in the ministry, the team at the schools that we have so everybody knows it and we also have our network of developers and technicians that maintain the infrastructure so when we say okay we make a new portal and we use Moodle, more or less everybody knows what we have to do and we can start developing from scratch without many efforts and also with Moodle you have a good technical documentation about the APIs and everything so when a new company comes to us and you have to develop for us a certain plugin with a certain functionality and we just have to tell them okay you need to make it Moodle compatible here is the documentation from Moodle, how it works please develop it that way and then we also have our reviewers to check if all the APIs are fulfilled and that also makes the quality assurance easier Brilliant, thank you for sharing and last I would like to ask you if you can share a little bit more about the next steps for the project and how do you see the platform evolving of course all the things you can share about it First of all as I mentioned it's a growing platform now so we started the base technology the base interfaces for those widgets that we integrate in the dashboard for example and now we have to get our partners to integrate the widgets because now we only have the signal sign on and only one or two partners already made such a widget and the sense of the dashboard is that every application has at least one widget in this education portal so this is I think the most important next step because then also all people that log in to the education portal have more benefit from using it and if the people are using it then also the schools have more benefit when they make deliveries for example digitally and sign documents digitally so yeah it's a hand and egg thing you know these are the most important tasks in future So much going on right? We should expect more updates from you in the near future I'm sure Thank you very much Robert I wish you a great time at Moodle Mood here Thank you very much Thank you for the interview Thank you