 Thanks for being here. We have three presenters in this session. The first two are from Open University and they will talk about how they redesigned Moodle. Actually the first ones why they redesigned Moodle and the second how they did it. And the third will talk about how make it easier to comply with the assessment and feedback policy for lecturers. So I won't take much time in presenting them. The first team is from the learning and teaching solutions team at Open University. Luis Olney, Tammy Alexander and Sharon Moni will present. We will make the presentations first and questions at the end. Okay, so thank you. So as Joel said, I am Luis Olney and I'm head of online student experience at the Open University. This is Tammy Alexander and Sharon Moni who are product development managers at the Open University. We all work in LTS which is learning and teaching solutions which is really like the main production house of the university. So it creates all the assets for the module websites and we are business owners of the VLE, so our module websites. Now last year we ran a program of work to review and assess our current learning systems and really to look whether they had the capability to deliver what we needed them to for our learning and teaching for the next five to ten years. And one of the main outcomes of that was that we needed to really look at our module websites and update the user experience. So today we're going to take you through a journey of why we've updated our module websites and then in the next presentation our IT colleagues are going to take you through actually how they did that and how they've redeveloped the OU Moodle theme. So a little bit of background on OU using Moodle but I'm not going to say too much because Jenny Gray is going to cover this in the keynote later. But it is our 10 year anniversary of using Moodle at the OU. So before Moodle we had an in-house built CMS and really that's what we used to deliver a baseline for all of our modules. But that was really based around print pedagogy and about delivering files and documents online. So as demand for online learning has grown we decided at the OU to adopt Moodle as it was a much more scalable solution for us. And as Tammy will show you later in the presentation this really is the most significant change we've made to the user experience at the OU. So changes in the approach to pedagogy, changes to user expectations have all heavily influenced the new design that we're going to show you. So the OU has moved from a very print-based model to a far more task-based online and on-screen delivery of its learning. So our user expectations are now different as well. So students are studying for a qualification at the OU whereas before they were really centered around individual modules of learning. And they're also now paying really significantly for their studies. So all the changing funding in HE has changed how they're paying and how much they're paying as well. There's also a really great expectation on how they want to study. So they really do assume that they should be able to study where they want, how they want, on the device they want and really access it at any time that they need. So and also for the OU one of the really important learning outcomes for our students is to graduate as a digital learner. So to take those digital skills through into their employability. So I thought we'd share with you some of the research that's been carried out by one of our research units called the Institute of Educational Technology at the OU. They carry out an end of module survey for all our modules. And what this slide is showing you is that within the top six key student drivers for success, for satisfaction and pass rate, our website navigation. So it's really incredibly important for our overall student experience. Now to address all of those changes that I've mentioned in pedagogy, all of the user expectations as well, we've taken a very evidence-based approach to our new design. So all the changes we have made have been based on feedback, testing and where students are incredibly central to that process. So they've been involved every step of the way. They've been part of our design team. And to do this, we've created a user-centered iterative design process. And this enables us to make changes really, really quickly. It's reduced risk by the fact that we're only acting upon evidence. And we can pinpoint where those critical issues are and attack them really quickly. And as you can see, this is a cycle, so it never ends. So we're continually developing and designing at the same time. Now Sharon is going to take us through some more information about the discovery phase. And then Tammy is going to show you our new design. So I'll pass over to Sharon. Hi, thank you, Louise. So in this phase, we gathered evidence on our current systems to understand their suitability and also to inform our decisions in the future. Building on a lot of previous research and a wealth of data, including the end of module survey Louise mentioned, and also more informal feedback from student queries and help desk calls. We decided that the best approach was to actually carry out a formal evaluation of OU Moodle. We adopted a three-stage review process. So the first stage was a technical comparison of OU Moodle against other market-leading platforms. We used an independent consultancy for this work. And they actually returned a report with scores and recommendations that we could use as part of this ongoing process. Stages two and three were a stakeholder review and a user experience and mobile review. We designed a workshop that could be used by all our stakeholders, enabling us to compare the outcomes. The key activity they were asked to complete was to consider the statement the VLE should be and the VLE should not be. This provided an opportunity for feedback that could be personal and technical and cover a wide range of topics for discussion in the workshops. Each group prioritized the positives and the negatives against their, sorry, prioritized the positives and negatives to actually assess the impact of those on the online student experience. This summary shows that the user interface and usability were key. Words like scary, confusing and overwhelming are highlighting critical negative experiences, whilst engaging, simple and easy are actually the perfect description of how online experience should be. Our staff representing a broad range of our users generated very similar outcomes. The language was different, but again, from the feedback that the system may get in the way or actually hinder study, the message was clear. Now, the UX review highlighted key issues with our websites. An in-depth evaluation from an external UX company evaluated 10 of our level one modules and provided a real world perspective of these websites. They also used our user stories and student personas to complete key study tasks. It wasn't all bad. Positive feedback was received on engaging areas such as the planner, progress tracking, interactive content and quizzes. But to explore the issues a little further, with our current navigation dispersed over all three columns, for example, assessment related information appears in each of those columns, it's very difficult for our users to remember where they want to go. We have inconsistent design across desktop and mobile interfaces, combined with some inconsistent navigation and terminology. This creates an experience that is confusing and time consuming. The lack of visual difference between critical information and pathways within an interface that actually contains a lot of information is overloading and frustrating our users who find it hard to access what they need quickly. The increase in our use of online content, collaboration tools and assessment has simply overwhelmed this template, which was designed for more blended modules. Tammy is now going to take you through how we're addressing these issues. Thank you, Sharon. As mentioned by Louise, our redesign of the veerly was done using a user-centered design approach, and this allows for the continual inclusion of the student voice through all stages of our development. We started our journey by pulling together all the feedback from the research and analysis stage into a set of wireframes that we used to test our ideas before putting pen to paper. This helped the project team get a shared understanding of what we were trying to achieve. We then went through a multitude of design concepts from blue sky thinking to more conservative design approaches, which we together are user insights into a single design concept. And user testing was built into every stage of our journey to ensure that each iteration is better than the last. I'm now going to take you through some of our conceptual designs, which we used to test at last December. These were used to kick start our development and to help communicate our vision to stakeholders across the university, and there are many across the OU. We knew from our user experience review that students find our current websites complex. The amount of information displayed on the home pages causes problems related to cognitive overload. Our new home page combines the familiar with the new. The study planner remains the central focus for students, displaying a three-week view as default with the current week always open and highlighted. We've reduced the amount of information on display. It's not moving on my screen. We've reduced the amount of information on display to show the key areas that a student needs to focus on in any one week, thereby removing distractions and allowing them to mark their progression through their studies. Sharon's mentioned issues with consistency. While up until now we've had different user interfaces on desktop and mobile devices, and we wanted to fix that. We wanted to improve our students' experience without them having to learn two different types of interfaces. Our new responsive design allows for consistency and style and the function. The simplified interface responds to users' needs and to the devices that they're using. Our mobile navigation behaves consistently with our prospective sites so that students don't need to relearn interfaces as they move between our public sites and their learning environment. Our user interface needs to support the delivery of learning and help students navigate through their module content. Improved and simplified structures help students navigate through their course studying content and students are easily able to navigate through the week's activities, sections and individual pages. By introducing a primary navigation bar, we're able to group together similar information. This makes it easier for students to find their assessment and tutorial dates. The introduction of a forums area allows it, makes it easier for students to find specific forums for their collaborative activities. While the study planner remains the key point of interaction for students, they are now able to access tools, resources and downloads without having to remember the week in which they were presented in. And news, well it's coming in a bit, news does what it says on the turn. Again, all of this has been translated into our responsive design. Important information is presented in a readable way on any device or screen size. When these designs were first tested with our students, we asked them how often they were using their mobile phones for study. And the majority of them were hardly using them for study purposes at all. They were only really using them to check up on their forums. After presenting this to our students, we asked the same question again. And the majority of them said that if implemented, they would use the technology to reveal more on their mobile phones. We have come a long way in the evolution of our online systems. But we aren't finished. And we can't say that our user experience is perfect. Because we can believe we can always make it better. I'll now hand you back to Sharon. We'll talk through the practicalities and challenges of rolling this out. I'll wrap up really quickly. We had some issues to roll out to our students. That we can talk through with you if you've got some questions for us afterwards. This shows you a very quick overview of time scales. And these are some of the challenges that we have found. But we've got really good ways of working with them. So we're working with the IT developers who are now going to show us how they've actually redesigned this new OU Moodle theme using agile development. So thank you very much for listening.