Moodle Workplace: Truly transformational tech!

Since attending the official launch of Moodle Workplace at the 2019 Learning Technologies conference in London, the team at Titus Learning have been discussing the implications of the new LMS with excitement.

As a certified Moodle Partner of two years’ standing, we’re naturally extremely interested in any development or upgrade to Moodle, but the launch of Moodle Workplace is in a class of its own when it comes to the effect it will have on our business, our clients and the Moodle community worldwide.

Of course, it’s early days yet, and we’re keenly scrutinising each new piece of news which emerges from HQ about Moodle Workplace to find out more about the build and rollout.

Nevertheless it’s clear to all of us at Titus Learning how transformational Moodle Workplace is going to be, in a number of ways.

When we started Titus Learning, we were heavily focused on the education sector, particularly international schools – in fact that was a core specialism of our ours which helped to build the business in the early days.

Working across international borders, with a diverse set of customers with disparate needs was a great learning curve for our team, as we took advantage of the customisable nature of Moodle to deliver made-to-measure learning platforms with a healthy dose of bespoke development work involved.

 

Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas at the Moodle Workplace launch
Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas at the Moodle Workplace launch

 

As the company matured though, and particularly as we moved towards and finally gained certified Partner status, we found that interest from outside of the education sector was growing, and increasingly fielded enquiries from businesses, not-for-profits and public sector organisations.

With these enquiries came a whole new level of requirements, in terms of tailoring the platform, enabling specific workflows, allowing for particular infrastructure requirements, and so forth.

We’ve always been enthusiastic in rising to new challenges, and providing creative solutions, and so in most cases were able to use Moodle, perhaps integrated with some third party solutions, and some custom work on the dev side to meet these wider ranging briefs.

The fact is, that while Moodle was a great starting point upon which to build any custom learning platform, the core platform was of course still very much education focused. As you would expect it to be, after all, it had remained true to its roots, and to its historic user base.

The stumbling block was though, that while we were confident in our ability to create Moodle-based solutions for business, it did mean that convincing the prospective client that Moodle could meet their needs was sometimes a harder conversation.

It was difficult, to be honest, impossible sometimes, for a training manager or L&D head to accept that a “schools & colleges” product would serve their particular needs.

So from our point of view, Moodle Workplace has arrived at just the right time.

It’s not just the raft of features which make it a more direct fit for the needs of business users that matters, it’s the deeper implication that Moodle is now officially an enterprise product.

It’s the confidence boost for prospective buyers knowing that workplace learning is at the heart of the Moodle project, with Moodle HQ driving it forward. Not an adaptation of a solution designed for a different market.

For partners like us, it means maybe less development time spent on tweaking the basics to bring them into line with a company’s specification, but more time to spend on the creative bespoke work beyond that, continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Ultimately though, it means more Moodle users. And as tireless advocates for the Moodle project and committed Moodle Partners both for the UK and Hong Kong, that’s always a big win in our book.

Moodle Workplace will be available from mid 2019, exclusively via Certified Moodle Partners, so if you’re interested in upgrading or looking at Moodle for the first time, get in touch with Titus Learning for more information.

 

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Speaking at MoodleMoot Japan

Last month, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Japan to speak at MoodleMoot Japan and I wanted to write my thoughts on this unbelievable experience.

Japan is wonderful, but it can be very confusing for newcomers. Fortunately for us, we were met in Tokyo by Justin Hunt. Justin is a resident of Japan and is the creator of the Poodll plugins for Moodle. I caught one of his presentations of his Read Aloud plugin which converts speech to text and for me, it was a little magic. To give an introduction on how it works, the student reads a passage of text and it is then submitted for processing, A short while later it is returned with a mark for the accuracy of the reading. The plugins are especially useful for Language teachers. (Try it here)

The moot was organised by the Moodle Association of Japan, and there is a strong theme of University professors who teach English and many who are serious Moodle developers there. Moodlemoot Japan is small by comparison with other Moots, but I believe it is the most highly concentrated powerhouse of Moodle ideas anywhere. They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but I seem to have made an excellent choice of heroes, I met developers of plugins I have heard about for years and it’s always great to put a face to the people that develop my favourite plugins.

It was held at the University of Shizuoka (SIST), which is fairly small by UK standards and many of the attendees were staying at the same hotel. We could eat breakfast with delegates and then go to the presentations with them.

On the subject of eating, you really do need a tolerance of different food to flourish in Japan. As much as I enjoyed the local delicacies, after a few days, I was pining for some Weetabix and muesli.

My first presentation was a workshop on Quizzing, in which I gave the users access to a bank of over 600 questions based on learning English. These questions were in categories (e.g. verbs, tenses, nouns, vocabulary etc) but more interestingly, they had tags associated with them. Categories are useful but a question can only be in one category, whereas it can have multiple tags associated.

The ability to search questions by tags was only added in Moodle 3.5 last year, so most people have little experience of this feature. In my presentation, the users had teacher access, so they could experiment with searching by tags and add their own to see how it might work for their own system. The questions are freely available for redistribution and modification, if you would like access to a course where they are installed, please email – callum.barrett@tituslearning.com – and we can set you up with an account. About 400 of the questions are available under a free license for use, modification and sharing.

My main presentation was half an hour after Martin Dougiamas (the founder of Moodle) so I had a lot to live up to. The rest of the staff at Titus and even my friends (who know nothing of Moodle) have been hearing me rehearse my presentation, and I think the practice paid off. A video should be available soon on the Titus Learning YouTube page.

The other presentation that caught my eye was by Elton Laclaire, a professor at Sojo University Japan. This was based around the situation in Japan where there is an emphasis on test preparation, and reading students are not used to taking an active role in speaking. He described how they have designed a curriculum focussed on recorded conversations and speaking fluency tasks delivered through Moodle. This is not a uniquely Japanese issue as speaking and listening were removed from the English exams taken by 16 year olds in the UK.

After the conference, we had the opportunity to explore Japan further. Most people already know about the Japanese bullet trains but even their local commuter lines are clean, fast, reliable and frankly, amazing. Japan has a reputation for being very expensive, but in my view, it was no more expensive than visiting London (or possibly a little cheaper). Japan is famous for having little crime and the people are enormously helpful and a lack of common language seems to be no barrier.

I would like to thank the Moodle Association of Japan again for inviting me and I would encourage anyone toying with going to MoodleMoot Japan to go. You will not regret it.

For any assistance with Moodle plugins, you can also contact the team at Titus Learning – we’re always happy to help with any Moodle query however big or small.