Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today we are running our second webinar on reflections on MEC. I am Anna Krasa, education advisor at the MEC coordinator here at Moodle HQ. And with me I have Kim Salinas, Daniel Star, MEC facilitators from Moodle US, and Kim and Dan will share with us a little bit from their own perspectives as MEC facilitators and will it reduce later to four of their candidates who are the guest stars of this event. Candidates are going to share their own experience and tell us what impact MEC made in their lives. These sessions will be more like round tables, so you will have the chance to pose your questions to and discuss with our guests. Just before we get there, let me give you a quick introduction about what MEC is and what is not. The Moodle Educator Certificate is an international certificate for teaching with Moodle and it is offered exclusively by authorized Moodle certified service providers. Be careful. The MEC is not a basic Moodle training. No. It's not even an advanced Moodle training. In fact, it's not a training at all. So what is it is a certification process focused on meeting learners needs with Moodle and it requires that candidates have at least one year of real life experience in teaching with Moodle. This certification consists of six courses, be careful not training courses but six certification courses that lead to six badges and once someone has all these badges is eligible to get the MEC certificate. But you might wonder why six courses? And the answer is very simple. We have six courses and six badges because the MEC is based on the European framework for the digital competence of educators. Perhaps you know it as DigiCompeteDo. This framework organizes educators' professional and pedagogical competencies as well learners' competencies into six areas. These are the professional engagement, the teaching and learning area, the digital resources, the assessment, the empowering learners, and the facilitating learners' digital competence area. Overall this framework contains 22 competencies organized in six different areas. And if we take a closer look, we can see for example that in the teaching and learning area that we have about, we talk about collaborative learning, self-regulated learning, teaching, and guidance. So the question when it comes to MEC is how do we apply this in Moodle? And this is what candidates need to answer through this certification process. As mentioned before, the MEC is offered exclusively by Moodle certified service providers. So when you join a provider to take the MEC, you will be registered in the MEC site. And then you will be allocated to the MEC program as shown here. Not that all the MEC courses have the same structure. So let's take a closer look at one of them. Let's see the teaching and learning course. On top is the welcome section with the announcements for how and how this course works book that summarizes all the basic information about the course. Then second section is the what you already know. And here we have a self-assessment checking. This is a quiz based on the selfie for teachers. This is a well-known self-assessment tool for teachers, especially around Europe. This quiz has been designed for teachers so they can evaluate where they are, where they are standing at on specific competencies. The third section is the teaching and learning overview. Here we have mainly books and quizzes. The books explain the competence and contextualize it within Moodle. It's not about how Moodle works and how can we set up activity or resource. This just explains which tools can be used to achieve this competence. So the books and the books are always accompanied with a quiz to help candidates confirm their understanding. The number of the books and their quizzes depend on the number of the competencies existing in each area. In MEC courses we may have three, four or five pairs of books and quizzes. In the specific course we are looking at in teaching and learning, we have a quiz, a book and a quiz for teaching, for guidance, for collaborative learning, and for self-regulated learning. The next section is called Your Assessed Tasks and it's the place where the actual assessment is happening. Here we have two assignments and candidates need to write and submit both of them. Now each of the assignments must have between 500 to 800 words and candidates need to answer specific questions and offer solutions in real life problems based, of course, on their experiences. Candidates can also include screenshots or from courses that they have offered and they can also include links to courses that they run, of course, giving facilitators permissions to access. And they have the right to submit twice after the first grading and feedback. And the past grade is set at B2 level. Although what is B2? Well, assignments are evaluated with rubric like the one we see here. So vertically there are the competencies and horizontally you can see the levels that vary from A to B1 to C1 and C2. If you are familiar with the common European framework of reference for languages, you will recognize this ABC scale of basic independent and proficient user. At A1 we have users who can interact in a simple way and at C2 we have users who can talk fluently and precisely and these are usually interpreters and translators. The same levels are also used in the digital overdue. That's why we have adopted them in the MEC as well. This means that if you are standing at levels A1 or A2, then it's too soon for you to think about the MEC. You still need some experience. You might even need some training. If you are standing at level B1 then perhaps you are a good candidate and you can start the MEC as it would mean that you are a regular user, but perhaps you haven't considered those competencies in detail. Now if you are standing at level B2 then you have certainly a pass for MEC and you would be an expert. If you are standing at level C1 it means that you are already a leader and if you are at C2 then you are an innovator, a top trainer. Last but not least, before I leave the floor to our guests, I would like to inform you that MEC is already offered in seven different languages. It's fully translated in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic and there are more translations to come such as Catalan and German. And it is very easy to take MEC in any of these languages because all you have to do as soon as you look into the system is to change the system language from the drop-down menu on top of the page. You change the system language and this action will result to the change of languages both of the system and the content. And that's all for me for now. So I'm leaving the floor to our facilitators and their lovely guests Kirk, Ramon, Diane and Tim. And Dan, Kim, the floor is all yours. Okay so thank you for that Anna. And I just want to share a little bit about Moodle US. Moodle US is a subsidiary of Moodle HQ. Moodle US was created by merging three respected US Moodle partners that's Munami, e-learning experts and my learning consultants. We are a service based oriented company that listens to our clients to help them create solutions for their training environment. We provide hosting, learning design, custom development, training, and of course we offer the MEC in English. My name's Kim Salinas as Anna said. I am one of the MEC facilitators here at Moodle US. Just a quick little reflection from me as a facilitator. The MEC really gave me confidence in my Moodle abilities, as well as my teaching strategies changed like I found myself reaching out to create more engaging materials for my learners personalized learning experiences for them. And they have loved it and I've never looked back. Also earning the MEC I was able to become a facilitator so it's changed my career path a little bit so that's a little bit about my reflection. And I think we got Dan next. My name is Dan Starr. My career was as a school superintendent and I learned Moodle when I was asked to teach in a master's in a doctoral program. So the to say that I've learned from people like Ramon and Tim is not an understatement. I've learned a lot from them and appreciate that that learning of that knowledge, but it also helps facilitate because they set the bar high for people who have come after them. So, that's where I'm at. Let's take a quick look at who our guests are. We have Kirk, Kirk would you like to share a word. I'm honored to be here. First of all, it's nice to be in a group like this I really appreciate the opportunity so welcome from Atlanta, nice and chilly here. And look forward to hearing from other folks. Hello everybody, Ramon via here I live in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm humbled and honored to be here to share my experience with you. This screen says I am an instructional designer for consulting firm. We both work commercial and government markets here in the in the United States and abroad. But my background is actually I was an instructor for 23 years in in the military. So, like I said humbled and honored to be here with all of you and looking forward to sharing my experience with you. Hi everyone. I'm Diane Knudsen and I'm also very honored to be part of your group today. I'm an instructional system specialist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service which is a federal government agency, and I look forward to talking with all of you and learning from you. Thanks. I'm Dr. Carvel and again it's a pleasure to be with you all this morning I started working with Moodle about 15 years ago as a university professor. And for the last decade have been serving with the Presbyterian Church at the national level, where I provide support to those who are preparing for ministry and we've been using Moodle as part of our professional certification program for about 10 years now. Thank you so much for the quick introduction and actually I'm going to stop here now and we start with the questions. The floor is to over to our beloved facilitators and dear guests. Well, I'd like to first ask thank you all for being here, number one so we really appreciate your representation as our MEC candidate so in our successful ones at that so we have all learned from you and we're anxious to hear what you feel about the MEC so and if you could share a little bit about what was challenging for you within the content like the quizzes, the assigned tasks, what challenges did you have going through, if any. Well, the assessments want to start there. Assessments are intrinsically linked to the content. So I was relieved that that it's always nice to have something to refer back to. I do a lot of work in Atlanta public schools, our Moodle is not geared toward the K12 population it's all human resources. It's for about 4000. But they are education oriented. So they always appreciate when the instruction. That's not actually what pertaining to the the assessments what I really liked about them is that they are real world scenarios based on something that people are actually going to do and how you're actually going to use Moodle so it's not a this is the right answer. Of course there's a right and wrong answer but all of the answers for example on the assessments are valid answers they're no dummy answers. It's just you have to find the answer that sort of directs your response in the right direction, depending on the scenario. So I do a lot of scenario based training here. And HR with Atlanta public school so that was refreshing and nice to see the sort of designing things that are contemporary and in line with bill learning so the MEC is definitely line with the old learning. It's real world scenario. That's how I benefited both learning and you know use the MEC is a model for how I might structure some learning. And again, this is Ramon so just to echo what Kirk said just highly highly recommend the the MEC. You know when we talk about the quizzes in the assessment my experience was as an instructional designer who isn't necessarily on the platform, you know all the time or currently how do I design training how do I think about it. I was thinking about training and delivering a value based education to our learners. So, you know the quizzes in the essays, I think the most challenging thing was the unexpected, but once I opened that first one and submitted and started collaborating with my facilitator Dan. I felt very very, I felt free to explore and to think about thinking about ways to expand Moodle and utilize its various resources to better instruction. And for my comment I would point to the, the criteria again if folks can kind of remember that slide of what you know what the higher levels are the C1 and C2 levels which really are about helping others to understand what you've learned along the way. And I think that kind of reorientation to thinking about how I can help my colleagues who are also using and developing content for this platform to think about these issues and to how I would share my experience with them is really important. Part of that I think is also going back to pedagogical technique from my years in the university, you know one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to somebody else. And so I think that one of the things that the MEC really helps you to do is to consolidate your own sense of your learning of what you've learned by calling on you through these case study scenarios to teach and to share what you what you've done thinking about it in terms of the competencies with other people. I'd like to echo on what everyone has said. I really appreciated that you had scenario based learning in it. I teach conservation adult conservation professionals. And so what I found was that some of the scenarios provided were things that I had not necessarily encountered before, because it just teach adults, but it gave me the opportunity to explore and, and really think about how I would apply them to myself and also to how I would teach others to apply them. So I very much appreciated that and I really enjoyed the whole experience. Can I make an additional comment concerning the essay specifically. And in that I was really concerned about writing essay, you know writing the essays but I really appreciated the essay because it forced me to articulate how I would apply at the steps I would take in and expand that thinking by just doing like a multiple guest kind of thing to check to check competency. I actually had to articulate my thoughts in an essay. So I really really appreciated that. I would like to say amen to that too because that I think that's a critical component of of the whole MEC, you know maybe writing five or 600 words or 800 words seems a little bit daunting but after that first one, you got to get that first one under your belt, work with your facilitator you got to tweak that one and then it gets a little easier in terms of just the structure of what you're doing but just amen on that you. Think about what you're doing better you're going to be about it, and you can analyze, you look at your writing and go what did I write that makes sense that that makes sense to someone else. So just writing as an analysis of self analysis really helps you, you know, look at what you're putting out to other people. So Kirk, while we have you right here. Did you find the content beneficial, like the resources and things like that was that beneficial to what you're doing. Yeah, absolutely for two things. The interface was very simple. You don't have a lot of things to press, not a baubles and all that kind of stuff. Just a very simple interface that allows you to concentrate on the content. Contents displayed in a book, a couple of graphics. So the minimalism, I thought was refreshing to me because you're on the web all the time. You see all this content flying around, but MEC is really straightforward couple of images and a lot of time. A lot of emphasis on processing the reading, read it process it and think so that's what I appreciated about the content. I guess we'll kind of go in a little bit of an order here. So yeah, Kirk is absolutely right I thought, you know, and this is with all the Moodle courses that are out there. I mean, a snapshot of what you need not a whole lot of blah blah blah. You know, here's here's the content here's what you need here's the essence the heart and soul of the activity, or whatever we're talking about. I really like the design of the course that it was linear, you know I could checklist, you know things off as I was going so I was tracking my own progress which is some things you learn as you get started on Moodle about monitoring your progress. And then all the all the elements in there really really were targeted towards those competencies that were in the previous slides of this presentation. I found that the content, very, very helpful. I think like all of us kind of on the panel. We're somewhat atypical because several of us work in the nonprofit, but certainly in the adult learning sector or in education. Kurt mentions that he works more of the HR with the adults rather than the delivery of students. You know, one of the things that that with any complex system or software, I tend to learn things as I need them. And so the parts of it that were really geared toward more like K 12 instruction and grading and things like that which are not necessarily a major part of adult learning, but then you know, kind of expanding that being exposed to that and then thinking okay so how would I incorporates incorporates some of those things into the way that we track our adult learners and so forth. So, I would reiterate what was said at the beginning this is this is not to teach you how to use Moodle at the kind of technical level of how to set up a book, or how to pick the content to go into a book, but it is very very important that you think about okay when would I use a book, rather than a lesson. And when would I, what would be the benefits of doing one or the other, and the content really helps you to kind of begin to think about it at that level, and to how have I kind of fallen into ruts in relying on one or two activities that I'm really I've gotten more comfortable with. And would I be able to help my learners by expanding the types of activities that I'm including in the course and maybe using those to take these in some in some different kinds of ways. By going last I get to be the summarizer. And always say I reiterate what everybody said. But I appreciated the design of the course as well, because it models good design in Moodle, and the content was great is very streamlined. I think Kirk mentioned that that there's not this extra fluffy stuff that you have to go through. You get exactly what you need. But then that frees you up to be able to think and see how you would apply it yourself. So, I found all that very helpful. And, you know, just you were modeling what you were, you know, wanting us to do as well and I really appreciated that. And Kim, can I say one more thing about that course. Because like, yeah, well I have limited time so I would do most of, I mean, you're going to spend some time on this. It's not going to be anything easy, but the course was cool because my wife, you know I got to go to the mall with her I got to spend time with my son son on the weekend so I can take my iPad or my phone, either one in the course is just going to display perfectly on either one so I'm in the mall. I'm sitting in the women's shoe section, and I'm cool I'm just sitting there. I can do my course right there. I don't need a laptop. I don't need big device, but I can still concentrate on the content. Please my wife, and please my son I still you can still stay active thing is mobile. So I just want to, I want to, I want to say something about that aspect of the course, because we're all short on time. You are the penultimate family man. Diane, since you set yourself up to go first on the next one how was your instruction changed. I would kind of echo what Tim had said that I think more about how others could use the materials that I'm presenting in the course. I'm kind of going to jump ahead a little bit our, our distance learning branch is going through a visioning series of visioning meetings right now because we're getting new upper management and we're thinking about what we could be and I think our role will be more to help in our course in our development. And some of the, I was looking back through some of my assignments. I'm yesterday and one of the assignment in particular I think that I'm going to use if we're allowed to go in the direction that I would like us to go in. So we did, did that kind of answer in a roundabout way what you were looking for. Because there are no wrong answers. I think that one of the things that I'm kind of alluded to and is that, you know, when in doing these exercises and thinking about because a lot of their several of the assignments that you write where someone comes to you for help with developing a course and so you've got to really kind of step outside and think about okay what, what advice would I give to this person, but it helped me to kind of then. So, if I would give this advice to somebody else am I following it. Am I doing the things that I would be advising this person to do. And as Diane was just mentioning you know one of the things because you know, though I'm in a leadership position. I would also report to people and you know part of it is also kind of prodding them to kind of take advantage of some of the flexibility so for example we have in one of our courses we're training people to prepare to take a professional assessment. We give them some sample quizzes and so forth. And, you know, I would really like to take that that question base and randomize it so it generates a fresh quiz every time. So if somebody could come back to it and do it but I'm getting some resistance from the people I work with but you know again, kind of learning and thinking about you know how to make these things the most effective to others. And that the focus isn't necessarily on you know what we would want as the content deliverers but what would be most effective to helping the learners get the end result that we're hoping for them to get. So, from my perspective, I'm going to think I'm going to kind of wrap it around one of the comments in the chats from from Christian asking about so no matter what medium you are University corporate whatever does the MEC fit well. Yes, I believe it does. Because like we've always we've all been talking this whole time, taking the MEC gets you thinking about thinking about ways to apply Moodle in the different environments so whether I'm with, you know a corporate environment, talking about financial management and thinking about well how do I, how does the design of this course or what the content I'm going to put in, and the different, you know, activities that I'm going to utilize to deliver the message but then I can also go down to, you know the elementary school agent and think about how simple, I want to make that course design, and I'm speaking from an instructional design perspective here but everybody does it on some on some level. The thing is, is from what I've experienced. After taking this course, how my instruction has changed, particularly my position is, I came back with that MEC. I let people know what it was in all of a sudden it was like poof I became the subject matter expert in my institution for the MEC so all these questions started getting funneled in the way of, can Moodle do this can Moodle do that and the answer most likely is, yes, not only can Moodle do this for you but the way we're doing it now, if you would do it the Moodle way and save yourself a lot of money to. I guess let me I guess let me expand on that since, since it seems like there was a just a brief flow is there's a lot of things that get outsourced to create instructional instructional content. Can that be scorn packaging scorn wrapping stuff that's you know coded and digitally designed and, you know, but can I, if I have a simple PowerPoint slide do I have to outsource that into a PowerPoint scorn wrap presentation, or can I just take that PowerPoint this is the thinking about thinking about Moodle, can I just take that file content slip it in there and get the message across if it needs to be changed, I don't have to outsource that change, I can go right into Moodle, make that change and I'm done. I'm implemented with the newest changes that are out there on the industry market and we can move on. I agree, 300% because I deal a lot with subject matter experts from all over the district and a lot of different departments and Tim said something earlier about getting into a rut, you know what I like to do, what I feel is best. Well the MEC was really good at saying hey Kirk, that's cool that you like to do that but other a couple of other things that other people might like to do, and I deal in scorn. I mean that's my bread and butter, but the point was just made everything doesn't have to be fancy. Just make something simple and concentrate on the content so MEC helped me to say, look at the array of tools that Moodle has like just mentioned, you can do it's a Swiss army can do 1000 things with it. But what are the three or four most important things that are going to get your point across so it's cutting down on a whole bunch of stuff and figuring out what is going to get the point across and I think MEC helped me. I think there's a lot in that, keep things simple, just keep it simple to get the point across. I think just real quickly to follow up on that point, Kurt. I think that one of the things that was helpful for me is though I've had some training and other settings and instructional design and online instructional design I was a professor for 20 years. And just the competency structure itself, the things that it highlighted, you know, are you thinking about what's the level of digital competency that the user would have to have to navigate this. How do I help to incorporate into what I'm doing, increasing their digital literacy and their digital competency along the way. And so just that competency structure itself. It's a kind of way of ordering and thinking about some things that I may have been doing for a very long time, but he said, Okay, yeah, okay, that's, that's the principle there. I need to give that some focused attention and not just hope it happens along the way to kind of accident. Kurt, I like your comment, Kirk. Yes, yes. Okay, I liked your comment about how that how you worked with teachers on that. I've seen too many teachers who are presenters, but not teachers, because they didn't do that check for understanding they didn't do that engagement piece. So many instances using Moodle to present, and as their LMS presenting information would have alleviated that problem. And the bigger problem is they didn't even realize that that's what they were doing. One of the one of the assigned tasks was about a history teacher that was lecture oriented. And I think we've all suffered through those people and learn from them in a way, but Moodle kind of makes that a very archaic way of instruction. I like your comment, Kirk. Thank you. And also on that, we have to realize that from a digital standpoint, we're come, you know, we have so much competition. There's the plethora of digital platforms out there and everybody's buying for that time. And, you know, the more responsive we can make our content using simpler platform sometimes simple is better and not saying Moodle is simple course it can do a billion things but sometimes just concentrating. You know, as Tim said, what is that was that most important thing. Let's just get that and respond to learners and that in that way what can learners already what is their digital competency. And that's another great point and meeting them where they are because they're wanting to learn how to present stuff to you. So Tim and Kirk had something, you know, just kind of a rule of thumb that I have when you know I designed training for for others or myself goes along with digital competency and and digital mediums, you know, competing with themselves. And this is where this Moodle helped me apply this. If a user has to click more than three times to get to what they need or to get to what they see, then you need to figure out another way of that design. And, and I think those two gentlemen, I hit the nail on the head of something that I try to apply when I, when I look at implementing plugins and activities in Moodle. All right, well, we're getting close to time. So I'm going to put two questions in for all of you to kind of wrap this up so we can have some time for questions. Has your instructional role changed based on completing the MEC and what is one piece of advice you could give to the folks that will be watching this webinar on preparing for the MEC or just any type of advice you would want to give to those folks. So my role has not changed at all. But the services that I'm able to offer to folks is broader. I'm a better, I guess I'm a better advice giver. I'm a better go to person, because I am broader because of the MEC and MEC again is about approaches. So where are you going to approach what you, what it is that you are want people to learn. So using for me, particularly forums, groups, wikis, the collaborative tools, that's where I really, really picked up a lot of stuff from the MEC, how to use those tools. I'm a better resource for people who want more collaborative learning and more personalized learning because now I'm sort of, sort of telling people, you know, concentrate on groups. How would you personalize the learning for groups so that's been my focus when I came away from in these, how can I increase getting, getting more groups and getting more personalized learning so that's how I, that's how I've expanded the working part more district offices. So in my case, my role did, did change somewhat so by trade like I said I'm an instructional designer, but for the project that I'm on right now I'm actually the project leader. However, they asked me to start exploring as a project leader this thing called Moodle, and I did the MEC and therefore not only project leader I became like I said, I guess the speed, the subject matter expert for Moodle for our institution. So that has been a that has been a blessing in that part of being that the, the one thing it has changed is, it's allowed me to help others think about ways to apply Moodle in different in different ways. You know, we may have an old platform that we're using, and we try to fit it into the Moodle box and I typically say, well no don't try to fit it in. You know, let's, let's expand our thinking of different ways that we could utilize these Moodle things, other than just the way we've always been using our, our older product. So that's been a big help. If there was any advice that I could give anybody is through the MEC. I was a little apprehensive at first because I didn't know what the expectations were, but I just want to let everyone know that your facilitators are there to help you get through it that it is very open and free. I know Dan, Dan, with me he was very, he was communication happened within some sometimes hours of my question I really appreciated that because my that that just told me that Dan valued my time and when I had a question he knew I needed it answered right away so those facilitators are there to assist you, and and they'll get you, they'll get you through it, they'll get you through it and if I can do it, you can do it as well. Thanks Ramon. The check is in the mail. As far as my role having changed. I'm kind of in the same boat with Kirk. No, my role hasn't changed but I think doing the MEC and gave me additional credibility. I was previously our moodle administrator for the Fish and Wildlife Service. And when I first started looking into the certification I was, I was initially a little bit disappointed I'm like oh it's not techie really because I like techie, but I think one of the biggest advantages is that, and this theme has come up repeatedly is that it gives you the opportunity to do bigger picture thinking. And it allows you to apply, think about how you would apply the different moodle tools in different contexts and you know it gets you out of your, your little custom box that you're used to playing in with moodle and being able to see the, the larger picture and I really appreciated that. And also, Kim is wonderful, and she was just right there responding in, you know, practically immediately. And I really, really appreciated her guidance and things and I love, I love the writing assignments so I thought that part was fun. But as far as any advice. I think it's a great experience. I would highly recommend it and if you're thinking about it, go ahead and try. So I think that the way my role has changed within my organization now that I have the certification is on the, on the front end, before I had done this part of it. I have a couple of technical questions about. So what is this setting do and why would I want to turn that on or not turn that on or those kind of things. And now I get a lot more people who will come to me very early on and say, Okay, this is our goal. How would, how do we get there. What would be the things that we could do in moodle that would help us to reach that. So if I can tie with that then my advice to folks who are doing it. And that is be creative. You know, don't think to just because the label this, this put on an activity is all that that activity is able to do. For example, one of the things that we did is we took the glossary right which everybody knows what a glossary is it's a way of find definitions of words right, but we found that okay because it's set up for people to go in and, you know, provide answers and they can upload video or audio or they can do you know provide the answer a lot of different ways. So we're the glossary entries where their names. And we use it as a tool for them to introduce themselves to other people. So they put their name in as the as the term and then they upload a video to kind of introduce themselves to the people they're doing. So really try to think about the creative ways that you could use the the activities that are part of the toolbox in ways that are not imagine. I mean there's a there's a famous saying that most educators have encountered some point from Maslow about you know when when your only tools to hammer everything is a nail. Well, you know, think about what else could I do with that hammer. It may be a hammer but maybe there's some other things I could do with it besides beat on nails. Hopefully that won't be destructive that would be helpful, but really bring to those scenarios and your work in Moodle. With this, the MEC to really think about what are creative ways and kind of out of the box solutions or ways that these tools could be used, both in the scenarios and in my own work. Thank you all for sharing those reflections on the MEC. It's been awesome. I mean, even assessing everybody's work. I get to see and Dan will say the same thing we get to see how everybody's using Moodle in a different way. And that helps with my teaching that I'm still teaching so thank you for all of that all your submissions and everything that that you guys have done and we really appreciate you being here to share your reflections. So I don't have any more questions I do have one word of advice for the people on the call. If the MEC is something you're thinking about. Find that selfie tool that Anna talked about in the presentation and go through that there's also a quiz in the course I think you're probably going to talk about that right so so yeah make sure you you are prepared by doing those self assessments and be honest with them and that'll give you a good idea. So that's all I have to share. Thank you so much for all this interesting story, sir. I've been around in, I've been involved in Moodle certification for quite a long time and I have to say, I have, I need to echo what Kim said that we learn from candidates I think we are highly benefited from the assignments and the inputs.  Some notes and comments and questions in the chat so let me go through them. As already mentioned and this has been understood by Ramon Christian says that so regardless. If I am a university or school teacher or trainer for adults learning in a corporate environment, this course helps me applying best practice. It's not a course, it's a certification process. And yes, it doesn't matter where you use what environment you use Moodle. The books contain case case studies and from every, every environment that Moodle can be used starting from nursery schools to agencies and corporate environments, including everything. So, even if all the case studies don't fit to your context, I believe that it's a eye opening to see how the same activity that you use can be used in another environment. Always in MEC, the focus is on the context because whatever choice you may must be meaningful for your audience must be meaningful for the environment that you work. Continuing with Mustafa, I think MEC is good idea to develop and promote Moodle and good alternative to what we have now like MCE. I'm not sure what MCE stands for. So, but yes although the idea to behind the MEC is that exactly to promote Moodle is to promote and support Moodle's vision which is empower educators and MEC is working directly towards this direction. We have some more points. Oops. Terence, I deal with a lot of instructors and have found that they initially struggled with blended learning techniques. I'm looking forward to Moodle and MEC being a big step forward in true blended learning. Have you all had similar experiences? Would you like to answer, Terence, I think you want to comment? Of course with COVID blended learning has come to the fore. My advice is to take one or two things, learn those things well before branching out into other areas. And I'm K through 12 during the day, most of the time. And then afterwards it's adult learners. Sometimes there's no difference, but learn one or two things well in the blended learning arena and then branch out to some other things.  Learn one or two things well. I've had some experience with the blended learning as well. And it really ends up being, once you expose your instructors to the capabilities of Moodle, even on a very basic level, they'll get it. They've even talked about blended learning, then they've even started incorporating and talking about flip classroom methods as well. So I mean it is highly effective and it's a time saver as well for your training or your coursework. I actually began using Moodle for blended, blended setting. So I started using it about 15 years ago when I was in university professor position. And there were things that I couldn't do in the classroom that I needed that I wanted to be able to augment and so that's where I started with Moodle. And so really again thinking about how it can provide the tools, one of the key concepts in the MEC is this idea about the self-guided learner. So how do you take that Moodle as a tool to provide those options and those opportunities for self-guided learning that can augment what's going on in the in-person setting. So yes, it will, both the course and the tool are very apropos to these blended settings and the challenges that they raise. If I could just add to that. I encountered the same thing with some of our instructors and I found what helped is if you can show them like adult learners like examples. If you could show them examples of courses and possibilities and things that they could do and do like Kirk said, you know, try one or two things and get them started slowly then once they get dip their toe in and then they'll be fine. So, but if you have a variety of examples to show them to see how they can apply blended learning techniques, it's useful. Excellent ideas from the experts now. So, officially, do we have, would you like to ask something more? Would you like to say something? Well, I can share that as a result of my experience I've got two more folks who are willing to sign up or shown a great interest in the MEC. We're growing things organically here within our district. That's important because they've seen what I've done and I've talked positively about it, but it's no joke now MEC is not a joke. It's, as Kim said, you're going to really want to be prepared for it. So take those assessments to see if you're ready, but you know, encourage others around you because that's a big part of the competencies. What are you doing for other people? What can you do to encourage digital competence from others around you? So I really like that organic aspect of MEC as well. Thank you all very much. So I'm going to say quickly my screened once again to wrap up. I have a question for everybody who's joining us today. Are you ready for the MEC? Thank you for everything. You have, you have heard a lot of stories around it. You have heard how impact other people's professional lives. So if you want to know about the answer to this question, you may easily just check the quiz that is called pre-placement test and it's in the, are you ready for the MEC section in this same course that you join us from today? And depending your score in this quiz, you will find guidelines on how to proceed. So you will know if you are ready to take the MEC right away and you just go to contact a MUL certified service provider. If you need to come back at a later stage after getting some training from the academy or from our extended network of certified service providers and gain some knowledge more around and gain about MUL and gain, most importantly, experience in teaching with MUL. Don't forget that MEC is for experienced users. If you have enjoyed the session and MUL Academy in general, you may consider getting involved further and help us grow by contributing to its development. Being in the academy, you can be an active member. You can suggest topic ideas, what would you like us to cover in the future? Join the Get Involved course and make your own suggestions. You can ask the subject of your interest and vote for subjects that have been already suggested. You can also contribute to the webinars if you have particular skills and if you are an expert on a subject and you have something interesting to say, just let us know. Note that the webinar presenters will gain a presenters badge from the academy and you can also contribute courses based on your expertise and continuing contributing to course development. And this way you will gain a course builder badge. Of course, please help spread the word about the academy and the MEC as well. Tell your friends and colleagues about the courses offered and lead to badges. Don't forget that to take, don't forget to take the, are you ready for the MEC quiz? And if you are ready, contact one of our partners and they will get you through the certification process. Thank you so much for being here today.


What's up everybody, I'm TheMangoos, you were awesome today on what to talk about my top 3 most wished 4 heroes to be added to OverPrime. If you've been living under a rock, OverPrime is a new Paragon remake in development by Team Soul Leave. It's playable now as peer to peer or on Asian servers, just follow the link in the description and in a pinned comment. It is not available on console yet. Now when I say my 3 most wished 4, I don't mean the 3 I think should be added or that they're the 3 best heroes, just the ones I long to play once more. I'm sure you all have your top 3, so let me know in the comments below. I also assure you that I will not use my small amount of creator influence to try and get my top 3 edged in. I'm going to go in reverse order here from least to most desired. My third most hero that is not currently in OverPrime is Shinbei. She was the last hero I mastered in Paragon and one that I really enjoyed playing. I know many people scoffed at the K-pop star mixing it up in Agora, but I personally found it hilarious to square off against a giant hammer wielding embodiment of death and come out victorious.  She was meant to fill the assassin role and for a long time, I felt that countless could just do what Shinbi did and could do it faster. However, that's when I was building her wrong. Once I started adding more health and armor to her kit, I could stick to people like glue dashing and in outhealing up any damage they could possibly do with my circle of wolves, catch them with a clutch line rhythm if they got a little too far away, and then when they finally thought they had escaped, I would just give them a cheeky kiss goodbye and call in the doggos to finish the job. Her assets are the most complete out of any Paragon hero. She was already in Overthrow, so I imagine Shinbi's return isn't too far off. My second choice is Big Booty Decker. Decker was my first hero that I mastered. However, I neglected my girl in the later stages of Paragon.  So frustrating to beat somebody in the face, watch the ball explode in their mouth hole, and no stun. God, that legacy Decker though.  Either that or pin people to the wall with containment fins when it's still dealt damage and watch them helplessly get zapped to death. I truly hope that Soul League can fix the stasis bomb problem and add damage back to her ult, so that Decker can once again reclaim her throne as the Queen of Legacy. Now my number one pick should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following my channel for any amount of time.  God, I miss Richter. I know he's going to be a challenge to program, but damn man, I really want to play Rick again. Now I need to caveat this by saying that I stopped playing Paragon months before it died. I was very unhappy with the direction the game had gone in, so I missed out on the buffed version of Richter when Electrocute actually did more than just clear wards. I played Richter almost exclusively as support, with some offland and jungle mix to indicate for some occasional fun.   No hero could surprise someone like Richter. That hook had so much more range than anyone imagined. Nothing felt better than yonking a wukong out of Cloudwalk.  Blinking forward and catching a tower humping carry completely unaware than hoarding them ever so lovingly in your chains by popping the chesticles. Shot therapy too. Yes, it was melee range ability, but I love smacking people with this. Narbash starts up a crash bang boom and nope, not on my watch buddy.  Epic has greatly improved his assets, but I still don't imagine we'll see rick for a while. Just too hard to program the hook I think. There you have it folks, my top 3 heroes that I won out of the most. Let me know who you want and why. For now this is the man goose starting off, you guys have a good one.


Okay, very good morning Wednesday 29th of April. I hope you're doing well. Just a quick final reminder later on this evening. I will be covering the FMC in full live via a webinar on Zoom. You are welcome to register.  All we need to do is go on the link I'm going to post in the video description. I think there's about 100 spaces left. So look forward to talking to you guys later on. Will's also going to join us as well as peers and the others. We're going to have a bit of a chat about some tips about managing your kind of trading mindset as well. So a couple of topics around psychology will also be covered. So I'm looking forward to that session. But looking at the day ahead and what have we got on the agenda? So this morning, quite interesting actually. I was watching the news when it came out last night for Alphabet quite keen to see their earnings results. Initially in the aftermarket trade, they were up about 4%. It actually went as high as 9% in extended hours trade. And that pretty much arrested what was at lower close on Wall Street led by the NASDAQ. I think the other indices were down. The losses were more marginal, kind of around the half percent region. But the NASDAQ was underperforming. You can see pretty big selloff that we had pretty much through the initiation of the open and then went all the way back down to around 86.50, which respectively was around close to its S2 on the daily pivots. But you can see a gap up here. And then we've pushed up higher during the Asia Pacific session. So Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, all their local stock indices rose. Equities in South Korea also were higher despite a warning from Samsung electronics that their profit may fall in the second quarter as the pandemic is obviously hitting demand at the moment. But otherwise, it was a much needed event to offset some of the selling pressure that was being observed yesterday. But this morning, just coming under a little bit of pressure once again, reversing perhaps some of that move, there has been quite a busy earnings day in general, not only is there a few things to look out for from the US in pre and aftermarket. We've had, I can just see AstraZeneca being out this morning. Their core EPS are touched above expectations at 105. Revenue is also actually a beat. Their final 2020 guidance remains unchanged. I know that Deutsche has been out. There's a few other names as well. So do make sure then the head of the cash open in about half an hour's time that you've had a good read through if you're trading any of those indices. But in other markets, T-notes, a little bit of an uptick amid just some of this latest, just fade if you like of the games that were seen overnight in the equity space. So the US 10 year bottom right here, just coming close proximity to the late US session highs that we printed yesterday at 139.03 and a half. So just keeping an eye on that some near term resistance for this morning. Gold pretty unreactive to all of this at the moment so far this morning. Trading just above its pivot at 1724 in the futures and oil having dipped considerably yesterday finding a bit of a flaw around the psychological $10 handle. Just given again the kind of liquidation of the USO into further out duration kind of contracts in the calendar months looking to offset any repeat of what we had last week with that kind of negative oil price situation with that front month futures contract. And so prices have bounced a decent amount. We're up about just over $3 from those lows and probably now that a lot of that has happened to a certain degree. They've spread that across several months now probably the likelihood lessens a little bit that we're going to get this massive run on markets. Can't imagine there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be want to touching that June contract in particular but obviously it does remain susceptible on the downside to potentially quite violent movements as people kind of liquidate the positions in that specific contract roll over to say July and so on. But for the moment fairly stable finding a bit of a platform at a level you can see here down the bottom chart of what was providing some resistance yesterday evening and also during the Monday evening and also yesterday in the afternoon session. And that was also an error support as well on the 23rd in that June contract. So just sitting around that technical point at the moment. There were the API numbers they were out last night. While I'm on the subject what did they look like? Well we had a crude build of 9.978 million slightly smaller actually than what markets were anticipating. We've obviously seen some huge consecutive builds. This is the 14th in fact weekly crude build and the gasoline surprise though with the drawdown after four weeks of build. So that gasoline number in fact just just going against the recent trend but the crude headline markets you can see not really that reactive to it. I don't think that's particularly a surprise as I've said it's been multiple weeks in a row now we've been seeing these particularly large builds just given the pandemic situation that's ongoing at the moment hampering demand and therefore still a somewhat oversupplied situation until those cuts really start to take hold from OPEC plus over the coming weeks. Back to the charts momentarily elsewhere in the FX markets not really too much going on right now. Dolan just coming back a little bit from having declined overnight the Asian session. The Dixie narrowing its loss is to just one tenth of a percent. So you're a dollar top left and cable beside it just sitting above the pivot at the moment. The pivot probably being a fairly decent level in both pairs for the time being just having a look here you can see if I just quickly highlight it this area of highs that we were trading back on on Monday's session we had a retest of that same area yesterday evening and that's where that pivot resides at the moments and then in Euro dollar you've got the overnight Asia Pacific kind of low here so we'll just make this a bit bigger. You've got those other highs as well that we've seen from yesterday evening and then going back as well to some of those other areas here and here of interest around that similar price point which again would coincide around the pivot level. Now the one thing to be aware of I guess going into today's session is we now start heading into what is the fairly busy part of the calendar we've got the Fed obviously happening later on this evening we've got the ECB tomorrow you've got lots of earnings coming out you've got some people like Boeing coming out later I think you've got Microsoft aftermarket today you've got Apple, Amazon you know some of the world's biggest companies reporting over the next two days so there's quite a lot here that could act as potential I guess catalysts to then inspire the next kind of more directional move in markets so at the moment I'm kind of going into this morning I guess fairly neutral in a sense I mean with the S&P 500 I was just looking this morning there's a fairly nice level of support more broadly speaking this is just what I wanted to do here was encapsulate this rectangle here which was the S&P coming under pressure via the kind of drag that the oil price shock was creating at the beginning of last week and as we were discussing in the briefing yesterday that kind of time has passed now and equities largely have been ignoring a lot of that negative price movement yesterday we saw a breakout of kind of the the range of what we had been trading over the course of the last kind of two weeks quite a powerful initial move on the upside you can see however then as soon as the the market opened on wall street we came crashing back down again only then to reverse but there's a couple of nice nice points I guess of support that just going to zoom this in a touch here so the pivot level again just kind of like with those currencies here looks quite nice just from the Monday high top and going back on to the 20th as well so it's probably going to be a decent level now certainly until we hear a bit more from these earnings reports they're going to be coming out later and then the open on wall street as well just having a look see what this trend line potential a couple of touches there and that would coincide where depending on what the time frames are with around some of those highs that we're seeing in the overnight late age-specific session early European entrance that comes in around that 2900 level which is also around that R1 and depending on where that would come in with that trend line that'd be worth just keeping an eye on if we come back up to that level later on as part of the session as it develops any break below pivot then on the move to the downside you've got the kind of the weekly low if you like down at this level which I'd probably be keeping an eye on if we were to trade a little bit more heavy around 28 53 so some nice the S&P has been I know Sam's been commenting with it to a couple of the guys quite nice technically over the last week or so been forming these nice kind of periods of consolidation break in either direction but typically from the back end of last week breaking higher and then forming in this a kind of nice structure to then push ahead again on a break and a classic to get back in and long on the pullback so be similar similar kind of techniques we'll be using as we go in the period ahead but as I said going forward what will the market have much appetite not sure obviously there's quite a few things to fed although I'm not really expecting a great deal out of them they haven't really provided any way in the form of real clear guidance since their last meeting post the pandemic and lockdown and so that's going to be probably the most interesting point rather than any new policy shifts in that sense because we've already seen them do so much already all right a quick run through some of the headlines alphabet as I mentioned pretty pretty decent up the executive comment showed the company's cloud and YouTube businesses kept growing despite the COVID-19 pandemic sales were 33.71 billion up 14 percent from a year ago above street estimates YouTube revenues jumped 33.5 percent their Google cloud top line saw 52 percent and their shares were up 9 percent in aftermarket trade the company's search and display ad revenues though had dropped 10 percent in March a lot of that coming amid the kind of the associated lockdowns a lot of businesses having to tighten their belts so decreasing their marketing budgets and that that hurting that side of the business but overall fairly positive and executives are optimistic on usage trends and long term prospects elsewhere the other thing that I just saw in Bloomberg that I thought I might point out because often you hear people referring to the VIX and they were suggesting that the fear gaged basically is closed below its second month's future and I'll explain what that means in a moment but in summary it means that the S&P 500 volatility measure a bullish sign over the next month and what this looks like is is this so essentially the VIX closed below its second month future on Monday for the first time since February if you look back to where we were here on the 21st of Feb and this this would reflect going back to a more normal structure so contracts dated further out tend to carry more uncertainty than those closer in so what you should see then is that normal kind of trajectory of a curve and its regular kind of shape seeing that the further you go out in the future the more uncertainty that there is about what might happen and so therefore we're seeing a bit of a reversal that would be a signal that actually this pattern would suggest that potentially people are foreseeing a period of calm in a period ahead whether or not that materializes or not obviously a lot of the things that we've been talking about what could create the next spark of potential violent price movement I think probably the main risk to that is going to be the potential for a second wave on the back of the relaxation of lockdown measures globally but the reality of that is probably a couple of weeks away from that even being known because if you think about it not only are we looking at more like mid to late May for most countries lockdowns really to be loosened more significantly but then there's that incubation period which can be up to two weeks before people even start to so show signs that they've contracted this virus so probably makes sense that why this is reflecting in that way but a couple people looking at this is then if you're following that trend in the equity market despite the little sell-off that we had yesterday then we could be on for a continuation of that move and just looking at the S&P on a slightly longer time frame if we were looking at the daily this is kind of that fixed chart I've had for a while and we've managed to get above quite a key area of resistance around that 2855 which was the October low and it was also an area which the market found some resistance back in the the mid part of April so about two weeks ago but we've managed to push back above that we've now got the 618 fib from the all-time high to the March 23rd low coming in not too far above the current price is probably the next target to look out for and then above there around 2949 50 which would be those peaks that you can see there that we've printed which were previous all-time highs of course back in October of 2018 and then April of 2019 as well and you can see the peaks are some of the the other price action through the period of 19 so probably up around here will be the next interesting test if we continue to move higher you've then got the 200 DMA coming in which would kind of run into around 3000 level if you're looking at the S&P in the futures okay other things to be aware of we've had some Australian data come out overnight and Aussie touch firmer nothing spectacular but is trading above its R1 and at the moment up about 37 pips the Australian CPI it makes for quite sensational reading but I would say it's probably more of a temporary lift rather than anything sustainable so food underpins stronger inflation essentially so if you think about it they've had wildfire about bushfires that's caused immense damage and so you know the available number of goods to eat in terms of fruit and veg and so on would have been diminished and therefore prices were higher already now you've had the coronavirus shut down impacting food prices given the kind of infantry building and things that people were doing kind of stockpiling and so on so CPI rise the fastest pace since 2014 yes that's the first time the headline figure back inside the RBA target since 2018 but I don't think I wouldn't really read too much into that because ultimately beyond that those those effects generally speaking the Australian economy like everyone else in the globe is going to slow considerably under the pressure of the reality of the the pandemic and people's lots of jobs lots of income lots of confidence and so naturally inflation will decline under those types of circumstances particularly in the context of more loosening of monetary policy from the RBA another headline as well you had a surprise announcement from Fitch they downgraded Italy's rating by one notch to triple B minus that's just one level above junk for Italy they weren't actually scheduled to hold their next meeting in july 10th when they had a review date Moody's is due next month but they came out they made this out of cycle downgrade anyway and quite a few people I saw on Twitter were talking about this because it was an unexpected announcement but the one thing I want to remind you is remember the ECB has already kind of made that move in buying sovereign incorporate what they call fallen angels which means that a credit rating that drops as far as a certain level below investment grade would be aimed or they can basically still be eligible for collateral with the central banks so yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't read too much into this to be honest and it is still in investment grade the the point is it's just one notch away from being junk which obviously would be quite symbolic in nature but the overall changes and shifts are already being made by the central banks and and namely the ECB and perhaps this could be something we'll be looking out for in the press conference for sure in terms of questions that will be put to Christine Lagarde interested to see what she has to say when that happens as far as the Fed is concerned for tonight as I said the registration link for our for our zoom session is in the video so so do sign up for that I'm not going to go into this in any great detail right now all I'm going to say is really we're looking out mainly for forward guidance as I said earlier they've kind of deployed a lot of their weapons or bullets at this point and what we're more concerned about now is there how do they currently see current conditions and what's their future expectation the current guidance as it stands officially from the Fed was issued before the mass layoffs begun and obviously we've got jobless claims coming tomorrow I think I caught a headline we're going to probably see another three four million type number and obviously this is getting into the idea then that we can we could see layoffs in the month of April alone when we get to round to non-farm payrolls next Friday which could be around the 25 million market so you know it's this type of thing well you know what are the Fed not just saying about that situation but what do they see for the period ahead for the second half of the year would be particularly interesting to see what options how confident they are and what options do they have on the table if things were to take another sudden turn for the worse if we were to see quite a large second wave on the relaxation of these these lockdown measures that's the type of thing in summary I'm looking at from a Canada point of view we have got on the docket here the German state CPI as they typically start coming out at eight o'clock so we'll get Saxony followed by Brandenburg, Battenvertenburg and so on then at 10 o'clock you've got the various sentiment indicators coming out of Europe economic industrial services I know these are highlighted on the calendar but they don't really move the market so I kind of discount those I wouldn't really factor them too much into your your strategies for this morning and then going into the afternoon of course we get the Q1 advanced US GDP now a little bit up for debate about how important is this going to be one of the things here I don't know if you can quite see it but I'll read it out the expectation is for a minus four percent reading so this is GDP in the US their their gross rate over the period of the last 12 readings as you can see we've kind of hovered around two percent and in fact Trump you could say have done a pretty good job at keeping this number fairly consistent I mean there were periods where you know we were we saw the inversion of the yield curve and we thought the trade war wasn't going to play out there were fears that this was going to get quite low several months ago but it somewhat stabilized until obviously the pandemic is here and what we're expecting today is a median consensus of minus four percent now minus four percent I'm going to have to put this onto a 25-year chart of US GDP to capture them the global financial crisis so you can see here during the severity of that fallout the GDP level got down to around the minus eight minus nine percent type level and today a minus four percent would be here however the bottom end of the range if you look on the calendar is minus 15 percent to a high most optimistic a plus one percent so minus 15 percent would be by far the worst there on record so why is there you know when you're looking at these distribution of these estimates from these banks obviously the models that they run to try and generate these economic predictions amount this type of data now given the fact that we capture the last two weeks of March within this first quarter reading it's incredibly difficult then to get a degree of real concrete evidence or calculation into that model and hence the variance is very wide because the the lockdown would have been hard to just get good quality information given the time frame so here what I'd say is yes it's expected at minus four percent could it come in much lower than that sure it could so the point is there is how important is that beyond the initial knee jerk reaction I'm not so sure because ultimately don't forget people are more obsessed about q2 not q1 q2 is what's going to be the shocker when GDP is going to you know put put whatever today's number comes out as well in the shadows because that's going to really capture the severity of the total national lockdown in America and this mass layoff situation that we've seen unfold in the jobless numbers so yeah I definitely would be would be out of any positions definitely would be listening out for that figure we're more than likely going to see a initial knee jerk reaction to it but don't forget as well the traders will be mindful that you got the Fed later so if there is any trade opportunities they could well be fairly short lived as people will be wanting to just clear the deck just in case we do hear of any surprises no point going in in any position of risk into the Fed as much as we're kind of suggesting that it could be a fairly tame event with all things being equal from an earnings perspective this is a bit small for the amplify guys I've sent this out to all of you this morning so you'll have to full list and you can see all the corresponding numbers what you're looking out for the pre-market names I'm particularly interested in going in chronological order general electric will be around 1130 London time I'm also keeping a close eye on Boeing Boeing actually you know was one of the biggest companies in the Dow not that long ago it's now the 10th largest company in the Dow so yeah quite a radical shift obviously for that firm their market caps only actually around 78 billion now so way smaller than what it was only around two years ago to put it in context I think Netflix is now got a market cap of more than double that size nearly triple so yeah what a world we live in aftermarket of course as I mentioned there's quite a few other key names to look out for namely Microsoft and Facebook they're probably the biggest names to be aware of but you also have the likes of Qualcomm as well as eBay and Tesla there's another interesting name that's going to be reporting as well in aftermarket trade so remember just follow me on Twitter I'll be tweeting some of those results as they come out later on this evening for those interested all right that is it I wish you a good day don't forget to register for the event and hopefully I'll speak to you later on this evening all right have a great day ahead thanks very much