Shaping the future of Moodle (MoodleMoot Estonia 2026)

Hello everyone. Um, it is wonderful to be here with you all in this beautiful country. It is my very first time in Estonia and the visit has been wonderful so far. Uh, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Marie Ashure and I am the chief product officer at Moodle HQ. Um before I start with the presentation that's going to be focused on telling you a little bit about what we've been doing in the products team um a bit of a showcase on our AI strategy and what's coming up next for uh the Moodle product suite. I wanted to say a a very thank you to professor for your wonderful opening. I think you expressed the relevance of Moodle in today's world better than I ever could. So that was wonderful. Thank you so much. Um, thank you to Lucy and Polio for that beautiful introduction. Um, and especially thank you for all of the work the Vexter team has put in, but also the community has put into making this event happen. Thank you to Taltech for hosting us in in what is one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever had the honor of speaking in and we really appreciate it. And thank you to all of you for being here um for being part of the Moodle community by attending a moot. you are an official member of the Moodle community. Even if it's this this is the only thing you ever do, uh you have ticked the box on the Moodle community. Um and this Moodle community has been in existence really now for 24 years. Uh Moodle has been what I think the best Moodle the best LMS uh builder in the market for all of these years. And um from the very beginning Moodle was created um with the philosophy of social constru con oh gosh social social construct where I can't ever say that word that and pedagogy which is a real problem in my career um but social construct which is the concept of bringing people together to learn that the the idea that people learn better when they can exchange ideas, see how each other learn and have collaborative work that helps them elevate their learning. Um, we've been doing this for 24 years and I have been in my role for four and a half and I just thought I'd double check to see how does that compare to the journeys of the people who are in this room. So, anybody is this are you brand new to Moodle? Anybody here brand new to Moodle or have not really started using it yet? Let's see if anybody puts their hand up. This is very rare. Yes, I'm not surprised. Less than a year or a year. About a year's worth of Moodle experience. Oh, one, two, three. Okay, getting there. About five years. Who's in the room that recognizes five? That's okay. That's a good average. Usually this is the highest number. About 10 years. Yeah. And then we'll go to the 15 20 years. Anybody in 15 20 years? Oh my goodness. That is way more than normal. Usually it's 10 that gets the most number of years. You are dedicated moodlers. I'm not going to teach you anything today. I'm very sorry. You might as well go and have some more coffee. Fantastic. Um, but I'll I'll still I'll start with a bit of a journey about Moodle because I do think it's important to kind of put the context of, you know, why we're all here and and what is this big thing called Moodle? Um, and one of the things that makes Moodle Moodle is the fact that we pioneered a lot of the features that today in LMS's feel like they're normal. Like you you don't have an LMS without question banks or forms. Um, but those things didn't exist until Moodle and its community created those and and included those in an LMS. And it's why from the very beginning institutions that were serious about teaching and learning chose Moodle as their digital learning platform and it's why they still do it today. And you can see that in the reflection of our customer base. Um I've put some logos on on on the screen there, but these are some of our the biggest institutions, biggest universities and biggest government departments in the world. And they all choose Moodle to teach and learn. And that's because they trust us to look after their interests better than most. There is one logo that is on this um slide that I really want to highlight. It's that one called NASA and con like if we consider what's happened recently uh in in the universe. Yes, Moodle helps people put put people on the moon. Absolutely. It's really exciting. It's my favorite logo. Um, and whenever I think about it and when I was watching the the astronauts on Artemis doing what they did, I felt this little special pride in the work that we do at Moodle more than normal. I'm always very proud, but that was a very special moment for me. Um, our customers, the big institutions are not the only people who love Moodle. One of the biggest things about Moodle is our community. Um, question for the audience again. How many of you, if you know, know if your Moodle site is a registered Moodle site? Thank you. Well done. Everybody else, you need to register your site. If you register your site, you are counted as one of these 154,000 Moodle sites in the world. Um, we have over half a billion registered users that use Moodle platforms. And that's only the registered numbers. There are a number of Moodle sites that are not registered. And there's an argument to make that there's potentially almost a billion people who have accounts on Moodle platforms around the world. Um, even at just 500 million, that's about 6% of the whole population. It's massive, right? And you know, it's because of Moodle's gravitas and and and the fact that we've pioneered true learning and teaching within our platform for so long that we have this space. It's very very important. Okay, that's where we've come from. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about where we're going. Our product vision. So, as I said, um I'm the chief product officer for Moodle HQ. And what does that mean? Well, I have the absolute pleasure and honor of leading the team of about a hundred or so people who together with our community design, build and maintain all of Moodle's product suite, which which includes Moodle LMS, which is the famous one, but also Moodle workplace, our Moodle mobile apps, our Moodle cloud proposition, and your home for learning anything you need to know about Moodle, which is Moodle Academy. Um, we do our jobs following a few different things and one of them is some key principles that I like to call non-negotiables about how we think about development in the Moodle platform. uh which is to say that when we are doing new work um we will not release that new work or that new functionality if we can't assure ourselves uh that we have made it as secure as respectful of data privacy and as accessible as we possibly can. Now I won't say that we always get this right. Uh it is impossible not to uh you know f have pockets of things that we don't get right. But it is a key priority in all of our development um all of our development philosophy. Um and I think this the aspect of data privacy in particular and importantly da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d da soy uh at this time in the world is is more relevant than ever and it is a responsibility that we to take incredibly seriously at Moodle HQ. Um the other thing that focuses our work in product development is our product focus areas. So the product principles are the non-negotiables and the product focus areas uh have been chosen based on feedback from our users and effectively a couple of years ago we did a huge piece of research and we we asked tell us tell us how we can make Moodle better for you and there were three key themes there are thousands and thousands of comments and feedback but if you boil that down there's three big things that people asked us to do firstly mood's a bit too hard to use um it is so rich in function functionality that that richness has an offset that makes it a little harder than it should be once in a while. So in any way that you can, please modernize and please make the learning and teaching experience that people have with Moodle more userfriendly and more intuitive. That was problem number one that people asked us to tackle. Number two, people's Moodle's a little bit too hard to upgrade. Um you want to keep up to date with the most recent versions of Moodle, but doing so takes a long takes a lot of work and it's not as easy as it should be. figure out ways that you can make that easier for us so that we can stay updated, have a secure system and benefit from the latest features that are issued by the the Moodle product suite. Uh and so that's the second big thing that we're focusing on. And the third one is is an allencompassing one, but in a world where LMS's are no longer optional for learning institutions or large organizations, you have to be able to demonstrate real value. You want to demonstrate an return on investment in terms of the value that the platform provides to the learning, teaching, educating, training experience. And what we need is to be able to optimize learning outcomes and training outcomes. And so create a platform that really allows us to do that. That was the feedback that people gave us. And these are the big focus areas that we then leverage um to think about what we prioritize, the the effort that we put into creating the platform and the things that we um choose to do versus those things that we choose not to do because that is always a very important trade-off when you're building software with a a fairly small team. And then the other big thing that's impacting or affecting our vision right now is AI. uh and it can't not of course it is the biggest shift in tech in the tech landscape since we started um Moodle was started in a world where the internet was new uh that was what kind of gave Martin our founder the first kind of thinking that says oh we could potentially do something with this internet business um and the second big thing that happened is AI and so we now have a similar shift to that of the advent of the internet it's probably probably more significant actually um but it is changing how we are thinking about what we do every day and the role of LMS's in the world um and our primary response to AI is the Moodle AI subsystem now I'll talk a little bit more about what that might mean for each of our products week but I I do want to particularly talk about AI in the world of Moodle LMS now we are here in a country where access to the internet is not a question mark. But Moodle has an impact mandate. Uh we want to bring learning and education to the many, not just the few. We want to bring learning and education to those who cannot access it any other way. Um we believe that learning and growing is a right. It's not a privilege. uh and having a a technical solution that depends on AI to operate and be effective is not an option for Moodle LMS because that means that there are too many places in the world where Moodle LMS could not be used effectively for learning. Access to AI and and the speed of internet that you have to be able to to access have to access it or even the cost of it is actually a privilege. We are all very privileged but there are a lot of lot of places in the world where that's not possible. So our philosophy for Moodle LMS is to enable AI for those of you who do have that access and want to be able to unlock it but not make LMS core functionality dependent on it. So you will see Moodle MS have what we call an AI integration strategy where you can use it without AI but you will have a world of opportunities to bring AI in via integration of the platform and that's the role of the Moodle AI subsystem. That's what it actually does. It's built for developers uh that are there to help bring and it's a tool that helps bring AI capability within the platform. uh and it is also built on the concept of choice. Uh the founding principle is AI your way. You get to choose how you bring AI in what LLM you use to you you choose to connect Moodle to and you know we've got more and more choices of that that are built into the platform and you we have a very focused interest on maintaining that first principle that I was talking about one of those non-negotiables about data privacy. So if you want to embed AI within your Moodle platform, you don't actually have to connect to one of the big American LLMs if you don't want to, there are options that are built into the Moodle AI subsystem that allows you to do that. So that's the the grounding philosophy and ethic that sits at the heart of the Moodle AI strategy. But when I say that, I always worry that people might think, oh, well, that means we can't do as much with AI. It's actually the opposite. This gives you more optionality and more choice and allows us to unlock the innovation that is coming from our community in all things AI. And we're going to hear a lot about that throughout this conference. So I'm not going to talk about all the different examples that are out there. But there is so much innovation happening outside of the core Moodle development and our AI subsystem allows you allows you to bring that innovation into your Moodle core platform. What it means our AI direction across all of the products. Um firstly we will as I said we will unlock the power of AI in Moodle. We'll just do it in a very measured and integrated way. Um but we believe that there's some really important opportunities to leverage the power of AI in three different ways. Enhancing administration of your site using AI tooling. Um so that there's less manual effort that you have to put into administrating your your your um Moodle platform. um enhancing the learning experience, providing learning assistance, meeting the learners where they are through the use of AI capability and then further educator support. Um we did this kind of longitudinal study um over a number of months following actually day day in the life type of activity uh with educators around the world. Last year we had 12 educators who kindly recorded how they spend their time in everyday life. Um what they do at their work and how Moodle plays a role for that with for us and they did so for a number of months. And the number one thing that came out from them was that educators have no time. Uh and so whenever we think about how we can add AI to the Moodle solution, what we're thinking about is how do we save educator time? How do we save them time so that they can focus much more on actually engaging with their learners rather than having to do all of the admin processes that they have to go through day in and day out and and and makes their jobs a lot harder than it should be. Um AI also plays a role in how we're going to be building Moodle. Um we are our our team members are are deep in uh the the the AI tooling. It's helping us code Moodle. It's helping us design Moodle. It's helping us research Moodle. Um, and we are doing all sorts of things to elevate the skill sets of the people who work at Moodle HQ, but also we're engaging with the community to try and drive the community to to to generate innovations in AI. And and we have some activities that we do to do that. I invite you if you're interested in participating in the conversation, uh, scan the QR code. It will take you to a course on moodle.org, which is our Moodle research AI course. um where you can see a lot of the dialogue, some of the activities. We have fortnightly meetings uh where people share uh ideas and exchange thoughts. Um I see a few people in this room who have a tendency to attend those meetings on a fairly regular basis. Um and it's a really vibrant chat group really. We have a matrix chat where we we talk about these things and the idea is just just to see what's what's out there, what are people doing with AI and explore because everybody is learning in this domain and we are not done learning in this domain. So, we're trying to encourage that learning and do that learning together with you in our community. A and let's talk about the Moodle community. Um, I like to talk about our Moodle community as our unfair advantage. And the reality is that Moodle is not built by Moodle HQ or one one company or one team. It is built by the world. Um, this is an example of the community impact in numbers. Uh, these are statistics from the 5.0 release. I choose it because it's a particularly good community release. Uh, but the numbers are pretty much directionally the same. And I'm sorry about the formatting. Sometimes when you move from one laptop to the other, it was a little funny. So, I'll read what it says under the world testing. But, um, effectively, this is the kind of impact that the community has on the Moodle platform. So, in the 5.0 release, 302 um features were added to Moodle. Of those, 69 were from community improvements. That's a a really big number of features if you compare it as a percentage. Sorry. And then those were contributed by 111 different developers from 18 different countries. So, it just goes to show how many different people participate in creating the Moodle that you guys all use. Um, an incredible impact from our community and we could not do what we do with without it. Um, and and we do really love you all for it. So, thank you for all the work that you do. Now, let's get into the specifics. So, that's kind of the big vision. Let's get into the specifics of of what we're really doing with the Moodle product suite. So, Moodle LMS their platform. Oh, is that water? I love the Taltech team. This is what happens when you spend 24 hours on planes to get to places. So Moodle LMS I don't have to tell you you know it is unmatched in uh the opportunity to pre provide people choice and flexibility uh when you are using a a learning management solution um and it is our flagship product. So we invest more than anything in making Moodle LMS better and it will continue to evolve and get better at every new release. We release a new version of Moodle LMS and Moodle workplace, but Moodle LMS in this case every single six months. If you are not up to date with your Moodle versions, you are missing out. And I always think I know upgrades aren't as easy as they should be, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. And I like to do this test. Uh maybe you guys don't know, but do you know if you are on a version of Moodle that starts with a three three something version? Well done. I I am in some rooms where there's way more hands that go up. Do you know if you're on a version of Moodle that starts with a four 4 point something version? Okay, we could do better. We could do better. Those versions of Moodle are no longer supported officially uh by by Moodle HQ. Of course, they work really well, but you know, we could and we are we have just released uh Moodle version 5.2 two actually on the um April 20th was when that when that new version um was released and I'm showing here a few of the highlights of some of the new features and functionalities that have come out in 5.1 and 5.2. Uh it's worth mentioning that our next release which comes out in October which is 5.3 is a long-term support version. Uh we find that many institutions choose to hop from LTS to LTS long-term support LTS. Um, and so I think that 5.3 is going to be a very popular new version of Moodle, but in the meantime, we have 5.1 and 5.2. And just to highlight some of the things, I've got to put my glasses on or else I can't read them. Um, we have made choosing activities much easier and and the flow of the activity picker uh much more intuitive, helping educators choose the right activities for their needs as they are creating their courses. Uh we're we've made course creation easier in a number of different ways through uh like bulk actions and and different ways that you can organize your course um that you can't do in today. The theme layouts have been updated. Um, we've updated the the the the login page and the dashboard in in Moodle so that the experience that people have when they first land into a Moodle instance and I know that many of you have been doing Moodle forever, but it's easy to forget that we have students and and teachers who who haven't um and so the first time that they log into Moodle having that a beautiful easy intuitive experience is really important. So, we've been working on making that better. Um, from an upgradability perspective, we're doing a lot of things in the in the back end in we we I'll talk about it a little bit more, but we've got a project that is is making a lot of things simpler in the long run um to upgrade Moodle. Um, but we there's always improvements that we push in that are dedicated to the administrators of moodles to make their lives easier. Um, and we've got a a really um beautiful story to tell uh in the 5.2 to release which is the multiple markers for assignment uh project. So this is a multi-phase project that will see us bring double blind marking to Moodle. Uh in in 5.2 the first phase is introduced and that first p phase allows multiple markers to mark different assignments and we know that right now a lot of institutions are doing that separately in spreadsheet and bringing their results back into Moodle. So we want to bring that capability and embed it in Moodle and it is one of those community initiatives that's worth talking about. Uh it is being developed by the teams in Catalyst UK and Catalyst Australia but is being funded by an international consortium of um universities from Melbourne and Mache universities and the UK. So UCL King's College and a fourth one which I always forget. And so it's this really great group of universities contributing, funding the work, doing that work and bringing this new capability. So phase one is in 5.2 with multiple markers and the goal is that by the phase four which is the end of the project I believe it's four we will have double blind marking in Moodle. So I hope that for any of you who work in the education space that is something that you will be looking forward to because we we hear that is a very high demand need. Um just to give you a little sneak peek, this is what some the new login page and the new dashboard looks like. Um you can see the changes here. We've made it so that when a user lands on the the the first page of Moodle, they see their courses first. They don't have to click to a different location to see their courses. We've moved the calendar so it's not straight in your face. Um and I know that a lot of you have versions of Moodles that have been customized. So these login page and these dashboards, you don't get to see them exactly, but um we also have a lot of people who are trying out Moodle for the first time. It's a little surprising because you wonder how many new people can discover Moodle, but it happens quite a lot. And so for those people, they get a much nicer experience when they start their journey with Moodle. And then what's happening beyond 5.2? uh we continue to focus uh everything that we do in Moodle LMS to be about making mood the most educator focused LMS in the world. So we think about the educator as that one person we want to ser serve and really that separate concept of saving them time and letting them really engage with their learners. So we're continuing to optimize the dashboard experience. Mood's going to start looking better than it ever has before. We have a lot of UI improvements being done. Continuing to make activity choice uh and actually this supported by AI um better and and more informed and actually using AI to help educators create sounder courses and more effective courseware um bringing our talent to that world. Um marketing workflows I've talked about um and more teacher control. We a long long-term project in in enhancing the capability of LTI tools in Moodle allowing teachers and administrative control because I know that's always a big thing uh to embed more LTI tools on their own in different ways within the Moodle platform. Moodle workplace is our next big product and and in Moodle workplace some of that impact mandate that I talked to you about with Moodle LMS doesn't exist. So we don't necessarily have to be more measured in our use of AI within Moodle workplace and so you will see more AI native features come out in Moodle workplace whereas in LMS they will be available by integration. Um but Moodle workplaces has a really important agenda ahead of it. Um just checking how many people work use workplace do we know? Okay a good good few number of people that's nice. Uh for those of you who don't know it, one of the big advantages of using a workplace solution and and workplace, by the way, is called workplace, but it's used by universities all over the world. Uh workplace is a a product that's made for more complex and larger institutions that have different um needs in terms of how they set up their Moodle platforms or more evolved needs and how they set up their uh Moodle platforms, which is actually makes it really ideal for larger scale university or teaching institutions. Um but workplace one of the big advantages that you do get with the workplace solution is the concept of cataloges uh and programs. So programs of learning that you can build within the platform. Uh cataloges that allow you to advertise your learning in a different way. And we are evolving the functionality being made available in both a catalog um and through programs bringing full program usage within the catalog which is released which was is going to be released in workplace 5.2 which is coming out in just a couple of weeks. And then from 5.3 onwards um a very heavily requested feature which users in multiple tenants. Um, right now if you are a user in one tenant of Moodle, it's very difficult to transition to another tenant under Moodle workplace. Multi-tenency is one of the very important features of Moodle workplace. Uh, and we are building a functionality in future that allows you to move a tenant from one to the other and that's coming out in 5.3. Um, and then all of the AIdriven skills development. So we have solutions that will help learners, managers, PNC managers, L & D teams and leaders leverage AI in different ways to drive benefits within the platform. I will not read them all because there is a lot coming out. Um, and you if you pay attention to Moodle releases, the workplace 5.3 release, I highly recommend you keep an eye out for what's coming out because the list of things that we've got on plan is growing every day and the team are really excited about that upcoming release in that that will be in early November um in the year to come. So, just continue to pay attention to that. We continue to look after our mobile app. If you do not currently have uh the app functionality as part of your Moodle strategy, I encourage you to really think about it. It brings a whole new dimension of to Moodle for your users. Um we continue to improve its functionality. There is something that we do at Moodle that is called a branded mobile application solution. It allows you to basically have a Moodle version, a an a version of the app that is completely branded to your needs. It looks like your's app if you wanted to. Um, and if if that's something that is of interest, I highly encourage you to to to reach out to to someone and find out about it because it does provide this visual identity that you just can't get um via the other uh mobile application functionality. But the uh our investment in the app continues to evolve and we're always bringing new features um to the mobile app. And I think one thing to say that's really important is the mobile app's primary customer unlike Moodle LMS where we look after the educator the mobile app its primary customer is the student or the learner. So you'll see that the functionality that you have in the app is adapted to really look after that learner. And then we've got something new coming. Um I'm sorry there's so much going on this I there is so much going on that we have a long list of things but I really want to make sure that I speak properly about this one which is Moodle marketplace. So Moodle marketplace will be replacing our plug-in directory but do not panic. I know that the plug-in directory is an incredibly important part of the Moodle ecosystem. I know a lot of people absolutely love it. Uh we are not going to make anything go away. Um, but we are enhancing and improving the plug-in directory uh and replacing it with what we call Moodle marketplace. So really this is about making discovering plugins that can add value to your Moodle ecosystem a lot easier than it is today. It means enabling you to evaluate whether a plug-in is going to meet your needs uh and is going to continue to meet your needs in a sustainable way uh to a lot easier as well. and should the case be enable you to purchase paid plugins um directly from a Moodle own system. So there are a ton of free plugins, there will continue to be a ton of free plugins in the future world, but there are also a lot of paid Moodle extensions and solutions that exist in the world. And right now there is no way to actually access those solutions through a a Moodle governance space. um they're all over the the place. They're difficult to find. Um and there's not that kind of self that assurance that the the Moodle system knows that this is a a good plugin. We have our certified integration plugins which are red speaker is is here um and they're absolutely beautiful integration partner, but integrations and plugins are a little different. Um, but there are all sorts of plugins out there in the world that get sold to people without the Moodle HQ oversight and and that's not great um for for some reasons, quality being one of them. Uh, and by bringing all of that to the Moodle marketplace, it can provide people that assurance that the plugins that are being sold on on that marketplace have been reviewed by Moodle HQ. Um, and the same with the free plugins that are there. uh just that extra visibility on the fact that the plug-in has been maintained, that it's been upgraded, that the security is there. The marketplace contract construct is going to make that a lot easier for everyone. And and we know that that's something that people worry about before you put in a plugin into your Moodle ecosystem, you want to know that it's going to be around in five years. And right now, that's a little iffy. So, we're hoping that the marketplace will help with that. Um, it's coming very very soon, the new marketplace. If you are a developer of plugins and you want to list a paid plugin on the marketplace, you can do so right now. Scan that QR code. Um, that QR code will take you to the marketplace provisional page, which is there right now just to accept submissions of paid plugins. Um then we're going to transfer all the existing free plugins in or not all but most of the existing free plugins in the directory onto the marketplace and in late June we will be launching the new marketplace site. So we are incredibly excited about that. Um and it's going to look really nice. So we've got a brand new color purple is coming to the Moodle world on top of the orange and the blues that we already have. Um, and so we're we're really looking forward to launching that to the world at the end of June, maybe early July. Um, and then much more to come uh in the marketplace world. Uh, uh, more options to provide things like having reviews and feedback within the marketplace on on plugins, which will make it easier for people to know whether or not this is a good plug-in. um more transparency on how plugins are maintained and continued improvements in helping you choose the right plugins for your environment, including things like recommendations. So, that's all of the product stuff that's going on, but there's a little engine that could that sits underneath all of that development that I kind of wanted to share with you as well. We're also inv advancing a number of what we might call more internal initiatives, but they have an impact on everybody who builds on Moodle. uh and so I thought it would be really important to share that with you as well. Firstly, one of the new things that we've done recently and and that's happened in October last year, sorry, is we've dedicated a team of people to look after anyone who wants to contribute to Moodle LMS. Uh we call them our community contributions team. Um and they have a series of really important goal which is really about engaging meaningfully with the community, strengthen the community connections and encourage and support people as they want to contribute to the Moodle platform. Um, we have a lot of people who want to contribute ideas, but sometimes those ideas depending on how they've been shaped or the philosophy behind them, they they might not fit nicely within the platform or even architecturally the way that they've been built doesn't meet our technological needs. Um, and that's really kind of sad because we have all these people who want to do great things. Sometimes they put a lot of big work into building new things and then they give it to us and we're like, I'm sorry, we can't take it. uh and we wanted to try and make sure that that happened less and less often. So with a community contribution scheme, you have a point of contact that people can contact and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing. Is it going to work? Will you accept it? Can you give me guidance from a design perspective, from an architecture perspective?" And in the past, it was hard for us to say yes to that. We just didn't have the people to do that. We now do the community contribution team. And the QR code that is on this slide will take you to a presentation that was given at the Moodle Global last year in Edinburgh. Uh Mick Hawkins, who is our um engineering or product manager who looks after the team, kind of articulates in his own words all of the benefits of the community contributions team. So if this is something that is of interest to you, I highly recommend that you watch Mick's presentation. He does a much better job than I do at explaining what it's all about. Um the other thing that we have just launched and we're very excited about it is the Moodle design system and it is a system that is designed to empower both internal but also external Moodle developers at a accelerating their development effort but also providing a more consistent user experience to people as they are using the Moodle platform. Um as you know uh Moodle's been contributed to by so many thousands of people around the world and everybody kind of has a little different idea as to what a save button should look like or where it should sit on a page or all of those kinds of things. And so it you you know because you use Moodle more than I do, sometimes those things aren't quite consistent within the Moodle platform. Like different activities have different look and feels and all that kind of things. And that comes from 20 years of people just putting in things to the platform and we've got to try and clean that up. And the design system is going to help us do that. It will set a series of baseline expectations as to what buttons look need to look like, what spacing look needs to look like, what what font types and those kinds of things should look like, the different colors. And this is on standard Moodle. And I know a lot of people customize their Moodle, but you should be able to do that less and less if we can try and make that a more consistent and cleaner experience. And particularly if you're building plugins or external applications that you want to connect into core and you you want to make sure that the user is having what seems like a seamless experience. Um am I in core or am I in your plug-in because they look the same they feel the same. You can use the design system to apply that consistency. It also means you don't have to code all these things from scratch. The code's all pre-built and and done for you. And should we choose to update the warning red from a very bright red to a not so bright red, it will change it across the system automatically. The design system will drive that for you. So, we're really excited about it. It just launched. Uh this is the introduction page. There's all sorts of documentation. Uh even if all you do is love to look at pretty things, scan the QR code and go visit design.moodle.com. My favorite is the colors page. It's just beautifully laid out. It's beautiful to look at. Uh and so even if if you're not a Moodle developer, um just it's quite pretty. It's worth a look, that's for sure. So, and wonderful initiative that we're doing internally. And then the other one, and this is a big initiative, and it's long long overdue, and I I know I'm probably going over, but I'm gonna keep talking as fast as I possibly can. Um the we are working very very hard at reimagining the Moodle architecture through our text transformation. Um Moodle has been around as I said for 24 years. There is some modernization needed in the ways that we develop our solution and the team are working um at delivering a series of enhancements that are designed to make that better and easier for people. Um we are doing so following some really important principles and the number one is that this has to be a journey or a technical transformation that is a journey that our community can come with us on. We can't change too fast. We can't break things. We know that there are mill literally millions of people who rely on our solutions but they still do need to evolve so that they will be here in 20 years or 24 more years to come. Um, we have a number of outcomes from the tech transformation, including making things like building plugins easier. We've got to clean up our codebase. It needs a bit of a tidy. We want to make Moodle deployments and upgrades easier. So, that third that second kind of problem, a lot of the fixes are coming through the technical transformation. And you would have seen already in Moodle 5.2 to some new ways that you can install and upgrade Moodle with the advent of of composer that has been brought into the Moodle platform. So if you are a technical person, we really um invite you to follow along on the tech transformation journey. Uh I think there is oh no there was a QR code. Nope, I'll have to send it around. Um I can tell you if you go to moodle.org or and look for tech transformation. Just do a search. Um you can join the tech transformation product advisory group. So if you are um somebody who builds on Moodle or more of a a technical administrator of Moodle, we highly encourage you to join the product advisory group for tech transformation and follow along with all of the things that we are doing in that space. So that's us. Lots to talk about, so many things going on in in the Moodle world. Um there is so much going on. I could have spoken for four hours quite frankly. I I do sometimes. Um people have to stop me. Um but ultimately I hope that I've given you enough a little snapshot a quick peak at all of the things that are happening across the Moodle ecosystem um to excite you about the future of Moodle. I know I am very excited about the future of Moodle and and I hope that you continue to be part of our journey. Thank you very much. Do we have time for questions? Did I speak fast enough? Thank you very Mary for a very interesting presentation. Do we have any questions? Please raise a hand and colleagues will bring the mic. >> I hope so because this Q&A is my favorite part. >> Okay. Till someone is uh waiting or thinking about your question. One question from me. Uh now you introduce it to Moodle platforms I think and for some of educational sector which is not using already the Moodle workplace. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you can share some uh top three uh functionalities why maybe university need to migrate because you not mentioned that model can be migrated to model workplace. >> Yeah, excellent question. Thank you Boris. Um so a bit of context for for those nonworkplace knowowers. Um, so Moodle workplace is effectively a series of additions to Moodle LMS. So if you have a Moodle LMS implementation today, super easy to migrate from LMS to workplace. It's built to do that. And when you do, uh, you will receive functionality that is not available in Moodle LMS and kind of can't be for many many reasons. Um, there's a number of things that are really important. The first one is multi-tenency. A multi-tenency means that you can run different instances of Moodle. So for instance, let's say you have a c a university campus in Estonia and one in Latvia, but it's the same university that runs both campuses. The Estonian campus could have its own URL look and feel implementation. The Latvian campus could have its own URL look and feel implementation, but it would be governed by one common platform. So sharing policy contexts etc according to the the different tenants. So that's a very big advantage particularly in a higher ed context when I was saying when you have a more complex middle implementation um when you have bigger universities that functionality is really really useful there that's probably feature number one that's different about workplace. Feature number two uh that larger again institutions absolutely love is the automations um that are available in Moodle workplace. Uh you can do all sorts of tasks without having to do them manually. Course enrollments, credential awarding, all sorts of things that take a lot of manual effort in a Moodle LMS platform um is available in Moodle workplace. So that kind of time-saving effort from an administrative perspective again really really interested interesting for more complex higher education institutions needs. And then probably the third big one is I kind of touched on it a little bit. Um and this is what it looks like so I'm just going to show it to you. Um the programs and cataloges. So the ability to have a preset course path. So it's not just one course that somebody goes and access. It's a program of courses and all of the courses that people need to take to get to a specific accredititation or certification level can be grouped together into a program um and guided and the user or the learner is guided through the completion of that program um within the the platform construct so that you don't have to do that outside of the platform construct which which has to happen in Moodle LMS because the program feature does not exist.