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MoodleNet: the world’s first federated social network for educators

Doug Belshaw�MoodleNet Product Manager

March 2020

#moodlenet

Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com

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Our mission

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Moodle �LMS

Moodle �App

Moodle �Workplace

Moodle �Education

MoodleCloud

MoodleNet

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Overview

  • What is MoodleNet?
  • Who is it for?
  • How does it help?
  • How does it work?
  • What’s next?

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Overview

  • What is MoodleNet?
  • Who is it for?
  • How does it help?
  • How does it work?
  • What’s next?

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Every Moodle LMS site is a private space for teaching and learning

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How can educators connect together to better share great ideas & resources?

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is a new open social media platform for educators, focused on professional development and open content.

It sustainably empowers communities of educators to share and learn from each other to improve the quality of education. MoodleNet will be an integral part of the Moodle ecosystem.

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Overview

  • What is MoodleNet?
  • Who is it for?
  • How does it help?
  • How does it work?
  • What’s next?

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Who is MoodleNet for?

Learning Technologists

Sysadmins

Trainers

Teaching Assistants

Educators

(e.g. teachers and lecturers)

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Challenges

  • Conversations happening across various channels (e.g. “where did I see that great conversation about X?”)
  • Resources and content are disseminated across platforms (e.g. “I’m sure I’ve seen a PDF on this subject somewhere!”)
  • The places they discuss and share are separate from their LMS (e.g. “I’m wasting time having to download resources and then upload them into my course!”)

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Needs

  • Discover and share high-quality ideas and openly-licensed resources
  • Easily add openly-licensed resources to existing courses
  • Engage in discussions with a shared context

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Hypothesis

Educators don’t just need a more powerful search engine, because...

  • Learning is a social activity
  • Search engines rely on you already knowing what you're looking for
  • Individual resources exist in a wider context

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Overview

  • What is MoodleNet?
  • Who is it for?
  • How does it help?
  • How does ‘federation’ work?
  • What’s next?

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MoodleNet helps educators who want to find high quality teaching and learning resources because it enables them to discuss and curate resources from around the web.

(Unlike randomly searching Google.)

Estrella

Scenario 1: Educators

Takeshi

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MoodleNet helps learning technologists who want to encourage colleagues to use more technology by connecting them with like-minded peers and providing them with resources that are of immediate use.

(Unlike endlessly searching OER repositories.)

Seung

Scenario 2: Learning Technologists

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Ammaarah

MoodleNet helps system administrators who want to allow their colleagues to share (appropriate and legal) resources, both internally and with peers worldwide. MoodleNet provides an easy-to-deploy, secure, scalable system and a dashboard that provides administrators with insights.

(Unlike a locked-down repository for sharing resources only within their organisation.)

Scenario 3: Sysadmins

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MoodleNet helps trainers and teaching assistants who want to create and showcase their courses. By incentivising them to create openly-licensed resources, MoodleNet also enables them to create a professional profile showing their achievements.

(Unlike using several social and professional networks in an attempt to create the same effect.)

Bohdan

Scenario 4: Trainers & TAs

Lúcio

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Design sprint (mid-2018)

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Testing value proposition (early 2019)

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Completely rewritten (early 2020)

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Discover

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My MoodleNet

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Communities

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Collections

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Add resource (URL)

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Add resource (upload)

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Search

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Profile

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Settings

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Overview

  • What is MoodleNet?
  • Who is it for?
  • How does it help?
  • How does it work?
  • What’s next?

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is a federated social network.

Let’s have a closer look at what that means, and why it’s important.

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Email works everywhere...

...because it’s built on open standards

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home.moodle.net/@moodler

HOME

INSTANCE

ANOTHER

INSTANCE

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ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol from the World Wide Web Consortium (or ‘W3C’). These are the people who ensure you can visit websites using any browser. They set the standards to make sure things work.

This new ActivityPub protocol means that social networks can be interoperable with one another. Just as you can choose from a range of email providers, so with ActivityPub you can choose from a range of social networks for different purposes.

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Usernames include instance domain

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Mothership

(search index of public MN data)

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is AGPL licensed

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Advantages of federated systems:

  • Participation - encourages diverse contribution
  • Efficiency - quicker, more locally-informed decisions
  • Privacy - allows organisations to keep some data private

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Overview

  • What is MoodleNet?
  • Who is it for?
  • How does it help?
  • How does it work?
  • What’s next?

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Priorities

  • Community-focused- a first-class actor in Open Source development, meeting a variety of use cases
  • Integrated - beyond integration with Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace to other open source tools.
  • Sustainable - multiple revenue streams that don’t rely on surveillance capitalism.
  • Identity and Reputation - profiles for educators to represent themselves, including reputational elements such as badge, recommendations, and certifications.
  • Multilingual - available in every language, as well as each community being multilingual, potentially with automatic translation.

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Priorities (cont.)

  • Private - open by default, but private by design.
  • Easy to set up and host - even the least technical users should be able to run MoodleNet, including via cloud hosting.
  • Scalable - in terms of the number of active instances (horizontal), and the number of active users on each instance (vertical), and the ‘mothership’ search index.
  • Insightful - analytics collected should be privacy-respecting and enable the Moodle community to make informed decisions about future developments.
  • Flexible - usable in multiple scenarios, including education, non-profit, and corporate settings.

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Next few weeks

  • Federation testing

Then...

  • LMS integration (Moodle 3.9)
  • User testing (Moodle HQ-run instance)
  • v1.0 release

Near timeline

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  • @mentions
  • Direct messaging
  • Private bookmarking and communities
  • Open Badges
  • Share resource from LMS course to MoodleNet collection
  • Version control for resources

Post-1.0

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  • Doug Belshaw

Product Manager

  • Mayel de Borniol

Technical Architect

  • Alessandro Giansanti

Front-end Developer

  • Karen Kleinbauerů

Backend Developer (Federation)

  • James Laver

Backend Developer (Core)

  • Ivan Minutillo

UX Designer & Front-end Developer

MoodleNet

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  • Antonis Kalou

Backend developer (Core)

  • Katerina Papadopoulou

Front-end developer

MoodleNet extended team

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Special thanks

  • Martin Dougiamas
  • Sander Bangma
  • Carlo Polizzi
  • Tasos Koutoumanos
  • Moodle Users Association (MUA)

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César Awad, Phil Barker, Miles Berry, Luca Bösch, cj, Ruben Cancho, Hubert Chathi, Thomas Citharel, Mary Cooch, Rob Cornish, Matt Crow, Elizabeth Dalton, Nolan Damon, Julie Day, Debashish Datta, Vijay Anand Deenadayalan, Martin Deinhofer, Vicke Denniston, Noel De Martin, Stephen Downes, James Easton, Andy Field, Lynn Foster, Rogério Furtado, Wayne Gibbons, Sam Gluck, Meg Goodine, Jessica Gramp, Jim Groom, Ralf Hagemeister, Grainne Hamilton, Bob Haugen, Martin Hawksey, Ralf Hilgenstock, Laura Hilliger, Don Hinkelman, Matthew Hodgson, Mandy Honeyman, John Hunter, Kristina Ishmael, Rick Jerz, Chris Kenniburg, Khari Khambon, Tim Klapdor, John Kuti, Clint Lalonde, Kin Lane, Mike Larsson, KS Læring, Alan Levine, François Lizotte, Lilian Low, Bryan Mathers, Dan McGuire, Scott McLeod, Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, Alan O’Donohoe, Richard Oelmann, Nitin Parmar, Mark Pegrum, Adam Procter,Oliver Quinlan, Felipe Raimo, Ben Reynolds, Emma Richardson, Julian Ridden, R. John Robertson, Tom Salmon, Luiggi Sansonetti, John Saylor, Séverin Terrier, Amber Thomas, Christian Turton, Kayleigh Walsh, Martin Weller, Ben Wilson, Tom Woodward, Cyril Z

+ ALL OF OUR TESTERS + EVERYONE AT MOODLE HQ

Also thanks to:

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moodlenet-moderators@moodle.com

https://moodle.com/moodlenet

Copyright 2020 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC BY SA - support@moodle.com