AutoLite and its 98,000 dealers bring you Miss Agnes Moorhead in tonight's presentation of Suspense Tonight, AutoLite presents a story in the classic tradition of suspense a new version of Charles Dickens Terrifying short story the signal man our star the first lady of suspense Miss Agnes Moorhead Why it's Oscar the super smooth and scintillating sedan Super squint an AutoLite electrical system Ah, there's none better Oscar and it's because your AutoLite electrical system is designed to operate as a team with all units and component parts Related by AutoLite engineering design and manufacturing skill to give you the smoothest performance money can buy I know how important Sure you do Oscar and you know too how important it is to have only AutoLite original service parts used when replacements are needed Because only these parts are designed by AutoLite engineers who design complete electrical systems used as original equipment On many leading makes of our finest cars trucks and tractors So friends always insist on AutoLite original service parts for your AutoLite equipped car It pays in performance Remember from bumper to tail light you're always right with AutoLite And now AutoLite presents transcribed the signal man starring Miss Agnes Moorhead Hoping once again to keep you in suspense It's smashed by like a wounded monster screaming in pain and disappeared into the dark tunnel In those brief seconds I had relived the emotions of my childhood I still trembled with the child's terror and fascination that had surged through me the many times I stood here 20 years before Nothing had changed The steep dripping wet walls of jagged stone that led down to the tracks The gloomy mouth of the tunnel The small signal man's shack huddled against the side of the cutting Even the job was held by the same man they told me in the village He stood there in the glow of an angry sunset Furling a signal flag around a short pole I called to him Instead of looking up at me He turned tensely to stare toward a red signal light that glowed at the mouth of the tunnel He finally turned slowly it seemed to me even fearfully and looked up He stared at me unanswering I was afraid the suddenness of my call had unnerved him I tried to compensate by being overly casual He stared silently a while longer then finally pointed his flag to a spot in the cutting embankment It was a zigzag path with small footholds cut through the clammy stone The tracks seemed a mile below but I was determined to get down Midway I sensed a vague vibration of earth and air like a sound that could be felt but not heard I tried to fight down a fear that suddenly gripped me The air was filled with a violent pulsation It seemed to have a force that could draw me down I threw my hands up to my eyes as though to shut out some terrible sight I flattened myself against the jagged rock and clutched hard Then I was angry with myself ashamed of this uncontrolled childish reaction I could see the signal man still staring at me I climbed down the rest of the way quickly, carelessly And I walked toward him with a casual smile He watched me expectantly Hello? I'm Amy Sears I used to live in the village I was anxious to speak to you I'm sorry I startled you when I called down Why did you use those words? Those words? How do you remember? I think I shouted hello below there or something to that effect Not to that effect miss, those were the very words I know them well, admit those were the words Oh, all right, I admit Why did you use them? You were below, I wanted to attract your attention So I called hello below there It seems logical, doesn't it? I miss, if you had no other reason What other reason could I possibly have? I thought you would tell me I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't have come down, I think I frightened you Why would you think that miss? Well, you stare at me as though you had a dread of me I miss, I was doubtful whether I had seen you before Well, if you have it, it was when I was eight years old Standing on that bridge over the tunnel up there I used to love watching the trains Then my family moved to the city This is my first visit back in 20 years You don't believe me? I'm not certain But where could you have seen me? Don't you know? I've been away for 20 years now Up there, by the red signal light at the mouth of the tunnel Oh, that's why you turned and stared there when I first called I miss What would I be doing up at the signal light? I don't know, I wish I... It is a mistake, miss, I haven't been well What is it you wish to speak to me about? Well, I'm a writer, I wanted to interview you Me? Why me, miss? Well, my magazine does a weekly biographical piece on interesting people and unusual occupations It's called Closer I miss, I've read You have? Well, you seem surprised Oh, pleased perhaps That wasn't so unsophisticated design I really didn't mean it that way There's a bit of a fire in my shack It'll be more comfortable for you there Yes, thank you This is a lonely post Visitors must be rare I miss the branch superintendent makes an annual inspection That's all, except for... Yes? Come in, please Oh, how snug and comfortable Most of my waking life is spent here I've tried to make it pleasant You've succeeded You were speaking of visitors just as we came I'll put this chair nearer the fireplace One chills out there I say you have a fine collection of books They've given me much companionship in the long nights Pretty weighty companions, given decline and fall Burton's Anatomy of the Melancholy Darwin... Do they surprise you again, miss? May I be frank? I'll have to be if I'm to succeed with the article My editor is only interested, you know, in the... Odd? The unusual And the level of my reading seems above the level of my station Not many people in any station these days Oh, come, miss, because you called for frankness Thank you, sir Why would a man with a mind capable of absorbing these subjects stay on a desolate job like this? Good, miss And I take no offense You see, I had one young been very interested in the natural philosophies I set my course, I studied hard, planned the future Then I ran wild, misused my opportunities Went down, I've never risen again But I've no complaint I've made my bed, it's too late to make another Maybe you gave up too soon No, miss No, there are forces beyond us that shape us One must know when not to resist I might have bloodied myself a while longer But I knew I took this position 34 years ago And you never regretted No, not until... Won't you please tell me? You first tell me what brought you here But I have You said nothing of what made you think of this place specifically There are many places and people Well, I told you I used to come here as a child The trains frightened and fascinated me I always remembered it vividly through the years I promised myself that one day I would come back and do a story on it Good subjects aren't easy to find, you know Why did you choose just now to come? Oh, these ideas germinate in the writer's mind for a while And then an impulse And you were drawn here? You say that as though mystic forces were involved It was much simpler, I assure you I've been working hard, I decided that a few days in the country would do me good I planned to use them profitably by doing a story on you Ah, true might have come to that decision last month or last year Well, that's true, but I can't see why you attacked such special significance In the fact that I... Why do they frighten you so? Now, wouldn't you think I might outgrow that silly childish... Well, if I was drawn here, as you say I guess it was to see whether I had The modern psychiatrist would say it was a desire to relive a childhood experience I miss, there are many answers Why are you staring at me so? Oh, was I staring at you? Please, please, you promised something is preying on your mind Can't you tell me? It's very difficult to impart, miss Very difficult to speak of If you ever make another trip, I would try to tell you Yes, yes, of course I will have to make several trips before the story takes shape When may I come again, tomorrow? Oh, I miss if you wish I'll come at 11 You won't have difficulty getting up? No, no, it was only that first trip down I'll show my white light till you reach the top Thank you I'll say good night now, miss Good night, sir I wish you a pleasant one I regret I... Yes, I understand I miss, I think you do May I ask then, when you get to the top Don't call out to me I beg you, don't call out I won't And when you come tomorrow night, please, don't call out Course not, good night And may I ask one parting question?   No Why should it seem otherwise? Because there has been someone at the red light at the mouth of the tunnel Each night for a week now Holding its hands up to its eyes like that As though to shut out some terrible sight And you have actually seen it? Every night Was it there tonight when you went to the door? Yes, I saw it quite clearly Who was it? You Autolight is bringing you Miss Agnes Moorhead with Jolth of Kerns in The Signal Man Tonight's presentation in Radio's Outstanding Theatre of Thrills Suspense Hey, Oscar, sound your horn Play your radio Now start your engine Why, all those operations depend on the sure smooth performance of your Autolight electrical system, Oscar And so do the lights, heater and electric windshield wiper They all depend on my Autolight electrical system, Harlow They sure do, Oscar And what's more, your Autolight electrical system works every second your engine runs That's why Autolight electrical systems designed to give the smoothest performance money can buy Are used as original equipment on many leading makes of our finest cars, trucks and tractors They're the best, Harlow Right, you are, Oscar And friends, treat the electrical system of your car to a periodic checkup At your car dealers or authorized Autolight service station To quickly locate him, look in the classified section of your phone book Or call Western Union by number and ask for Operator 25 And remember, from bumper to tail light, you're always right with Autolight And now, Autolight brings back to our Hollywood soundstage Miss Agnes Moorhead in Elliot Lewis' production of Charles Dickens, The Signal Man A tale well calculated to keep you in suspense I return the next night as the distant clocks were striking eleven The Signal Man waited for me at the bottom of the cutting with his white light shining We walked silently to his shack, entered it and sat down by the fire I didn't wish to press him so I said nothing He stared at the burning embers for a moment, then he turned to me I'm going to tell you, Miss, as best I can for what troubles me I'm glad I mistook you for someone else last night The mistake? Oh, the someone else Who is it then? I don't know What does it do? This time it stands with its left arm across its face The right arm is waved violently, this way As though to say for God's sake, clear the way, clear the way You've heard those words? I'm not certain about these specific words, but I've heard it called before When? One moonlight night, about a year ago I was sitting here when I heard a voice cry Hello, below there Oh, that's why you were so startled when I used the same words I miss, I ran to the door and looked out and saw this Someone else standing up there by the red light near the tunnel Waving its arm as I just showed you The voice was hoarse, was shouting and it cried Hello, below there, look out, look out I caught up my lamp and ran toward the figure calling What's wrong? What's happened? Where? When I got to the light Did you see where? The tunnel was the only place it could go without passing me I ran into the tunnel for 500 yards and searched around with my light Then I ran back here and telegraphed both ways An alarm has been given, is anything wrong? And the answer came back both ways All well Yes, of course Now I'm going to take advantage of last night's permission to be frank You've been here more than 30 years, haven't you? It isn't the most cheerful place in the world with that moaning wind through the tunnel And the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires It's understandable that you could have the illusion that you heard a call And anyone staring at the dark long enough as you did from the door Can imagine seeing something Let it prey on your mind so long it seems real I was not finished, miss Oh, I'm sorry Within six hours after it first appeared The main line flyer crashed and derailed at the far end of the tunnel Within ten hours the dead and the wounded were being brought through the tunnel Over the spot where the figure stood Coincidence, a tragic remarkable coincidence But I cannot see There is more, miss Please forgive me Six or seven months passed I had recovered from the surprise and shock when one morning Just as daylight was breaking I looked toward the red light And saw it again Did it cry out? No, it was silent It didn't wave its arm? No, miss Now it leaned against the post with both hands covering the eyes like this As though to blot out some terrible sight And that's why you asked me why I had put my hands to my eyes I miss As I came down the path You called out the words it used the first time You covered your eyes as it did the next time Go on, please That very day as a train came out of the tunnel I noticed a confusion of hands and heads At one of the coach platforms and something waved I saw it in time to flag down the engineer He applied his break but the train drifted past here about a hundred yards As I ran up to it I heard terrible screams and cries A beautiful young woman had fallen between the cars Oh She was brought in here She died on this very spot between us Oh, it's horrible But I still don't see it One final word, miss And you will judge how my mind is troubled It came back a week ago Ever since it has been here At the light? Eye It covers its eyes It waves its arm It shouts for God's sake, clear the way, clear the way I have no rest, a peace for it It calls to me many minutes together in an agonized manner Below there, look out, look out It stands waving at me It sounds the telegraph ticker Did it sound the ticker last night while I was here? Twice Oh, I assure you it did not sound It was your imagination I have never made a mistake as to that, miss I don't wonder that you failed to hear it But I heard it Do you hear it now? I What is it saying? It isn't clear It only warns It doesn't say against what If I only knew what it meant What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging somewhere on the line Some terrible calamity will happen You must set reason, take it If I telegraph danger on either side of me or on both I can give no reason for it I would get into trouble and do no good They would think I was mad This is the way it would work Message, danger, take care Answer, what danger where? Message, don't know, but for God's sake, take care They were, they would displace me What else could they do? I can help you But you must face realistically what I have to say Now will you try? Yes, yes, I'll try, miss These accidents have shaken you deeply You feel guilt about them Even though there was nothing you could do You've let it prey on your mind Until you imagine someone tried to warn you I've unheard that someone Even the senses can deceive when the mind is under stress Men dying of thirst on a desert Imagine lakes and hearing running streams The bodies of the dead were real enough I'm speaking of what you imagined after the accident If you let me, I'll prove to you step by step That the specter existed only in your fantasy How can you prove that in the face of what I've told you?  You used the same word Now listen carefully, I appeal to the intelligent Well-read reasonable man Three words, hello below there I was 500 yards away at the top of the embankment And you were here, below, with darkness falling And three words made you positive you had seen me before Can't you see we're trying to fit something to what you already believe? But then, you put your hands to your eyes like... Further proof! You've allowed yourself to believe some disaster is about to befall When I covered my eyes because of a childish fear You fitted that to what you already believe The telegraph ticker wasn't... You must hear me out Would you at any other time, or would anyone at any time Believe that a telegraph ticker could sound in a room this small And be heard by one person and not another I told you... And now the most important proof You said that when you went to the door last night It was there by the red danger light It was Would you come to the door with me now and tell me if it is still there? I... Do you see it? No miss It is not there Agreed And now I'm going to prove that it never was there I studied the light from the top of the hill before I came down tonight The post is at least seven feet high The light is shielded with a hood Even if a person stood directly under it or in front of it They would be in complete shadow in darkness You couldn't see that person from this door And you couldn't see that person if you walked within a foot of her Or him or it I'm going to walk up the incline to the light And prove that to you now I walked up the inclining tracks Toward the red light at the mouth of the tunnel The chilled dank wind had an edge like a cold knife When I got to the light post I stood directly under it No portion of the red glow reached me I was lost completely in the dark I saw the signalman silhouetted in the yellow light of the doorway Between the rails of the northbound track On a line with the red signal light And walked toward me Then the icy hand of my childhood dread gripped me There was a vague vibration of the earth and air Far behind him, coming up the grade fast I could begin to see the glow of the locomotive's light He walked as though in a spell He didn't hear me or wouldn't hear me I threw my left arm up to my eyes And waved my right arm frantically Long after it was over they found me Still standing there Both of my hands up to my eyes To shut out the terrible sight Suspense Presented by AutoLite Tonight's star, Miss Agnes Moorhead This is Harle Wilcox again Speaking for AutoLite World's largest independent manufacturer Of automotive electrical equipment AutoLite is proud to serve the greatest names in the industry That's why during these early months of 1953 The AutoLite family joins again in saluting the leading manufacturers Who install AutoLite products as original equipment Just two weeks from tonight To the climax to this year's AutoLite family salute program We will present the exciting story Of the first and only round the world auto race Our star will be Van Johnson And the program will be broadcast direct from the grand ballroom Of New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel Where the great Easter parade of stars auto show Will be in progress That's Monday, April the 6th For the auto race that stirred the world And of course be sure to join us next week For the first story of Suspense Next week, an American legend As we recreate the cruel murder of Laura Foster By the bitter Tom Dooley Our star, Mr. Joseph Cotton That's next week on Suspense Suspense is produced and directed by Elliot Lewis With music composed by Lucian Morovic And conducted by Ludbliskin Portions of the program were transcribed The signal man was adapted for suspense by Irving Reese From the short story by Charles Dickens In tonight's story, Joseph Kearns played the signal man Agnes Moorhead has been on the road in Don Juan in hell And can currently be seen in Metro Baldwin Mayor's picture The story of three loves And remember next week Mr. Joseph Cotton in Tom Dooley This is the CBS Radio Network


What are some of the social benefits and impacts created by developing energy sources, especially shale oil and shale gas? So in Pennsylvania, we've seen a range of impacts and on the positive side economic growth jobs in particular in particularly in rural areas that have been seeing economic decline for the last couple decades Although some of the research indicates that Morph is for workers coming in than for resident workers. So there's a question mark as in terms of economic benefits One particular economic benefit is leasing and royalty income households have seen thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars of an increase in in Income from development if they own their subsurface rights and lease those out And what we've seen is that people are spending that money largely on savings or paying off debt They're investing in their future Which is a very positive thing for for many rural communities On the other side we are seeing that we did see things particularly early in the development having to do with you know population growth stressing community services leading to increases in crime traffic and safety issues associated with the trucks on the roads Noise in particular is an issue near develop near the wells And communities having to adapt to new commuting patterns because roads are closed Challenges in getting kids to school safety concerns about the roads. Those are the primary kinds of impacts. We've seen community conflict in some Some communities has also come up as some people are opposed and some people are supportive especially around decisions like Moratoria or ordinances or leasing of public land as being the prime points of conflict In terms of how that compares to other shale plays in the US The Marcellus is very unique in that it's a it's a big region with very small communities and relatively large cities like Pittsburgh And and Williamsport anchoring that that geographic space So the development has been what we call hub and spoke where? Where the companies will locate headquarters or regional offices in the larger cities and fan their Workers out across an hour or two worth drive From those cities. So the kinds of impacts are different depending on where you are in that geographic space Because it's the workers that are the core of that impact just the presence of more people leading to that that growth Housing has probably been the other place that's the most impacted Workers need to live somewhere Even if it's temporary or if it's a more permanent relocation. So housing prices did go up rental units The rent was higher which pushed families lower on the economic ladder out of that Out of the market essentially So there were a number of issues relating to displacement homelessness and stress on emergency services to respond to that displacement So the other big difference between the Marcellus and those other regions is that we do have Highly interconnected road system particularly in the southwest part of the state a little less so in the northern tier So that allowed workers to disperse more than perhaps would be the comparison in other shale plays Particularly the Bakken the Bakken is also very rural, but very spread out And that and very very rural I mean the density compared population density comparison between the two areas is they're very different So workers going into the Bakken had a much harder time finding Housing and services that they needed so the much greater impacts and across the board were seen in the Bakken as compared to the Marcellus


So I'm going to say good evening and I'm going to cover my thoughts about what you're doing at the festival tonight. The thing is to say, the thing is to say that we've gone a long way in here. And it's so very nice, so very nice. We'll never happen again. So let's enjoy the moment. Now you ready to enjoy the moment with us tonight?


So tell the folks what you're doing.  Kobe Kobe Kobe.  That's gross But we should have like it's springtime. We got a cleaner yard Get to work landscaping. Is it is it pretty shitty? Bad job. Can I move your hair? No, like tuck it behind my ears.   I have quite the packaging day today It is unreal. I think I have over a hundred and thirty Paintings that I'm packaging and sending out to customers all over the country and all over the world There's so many pieces just scattered around that have to organize I have not organized any of these pieces So I have to do that first. Let me show you what I have here a Few down there a few here a few there on the table down here Over there over here It's not because I'm unorganized or don't care It's because I was going live on tiktok and showing people the pieces that I've made in the last week or so And they just happen to be scattered. So now I have to organize All these pieces. Let's get to it. I would say about 90% of all these paintings are going out the door finally got them all Now all I have to do is set up the packing area We'll first have to go get supplies like bubble wrap the envelopes and then come back and the package all of these might take Me like three or four hours total, but hey, that's that's what I do here. All right, so it's Monday Okay, I just finished packing a ton of pieces and Let me show you. Oh, but before I show you that I did a new wall of spin art I created this new Spin art wall and I think looks pretty dope. Look at that. Let me show you Look at that. That's pretty dope, isn't it? That looks pretty cool Look at that beautiful beautiful What do you think? I think it's pretty awesome. Look at that thing, you know when I do live Packaging or if I'm going on tiktok live or a youtube live this would be my background I'm thinking of doing one more row down here of like maybe eight by eight So it'll kind of give everything a cohesiveness to it. So Yeah, there it is I dig it. I like it All right, this is what we have so far. This is all the pieces that I have packaged this morning And it's quite a bit. I have more to do but it's a good start to the packing packing day so All I have to do now is as you can see I have everything set up I've got my computer got my label printer print out all these labels and then ship them out today. So Good day. Good day Can you take all of them? No, I can't do it all the way No, you go Another monday Can you grab all those? I got this filled up.  Let's go uh deliver these Okay, we are here at usps. Now I have to unload all of these Put them on there and we're good to go. Let's do it All right There they are Beautiful beautiful And that is it for today's vlog. Thanks for watching guys. I'll catch you next time. You guys are awesome. Peace


Hi everybody. I know probably about at least 60% of these faces here. It's good to see you back. Thank you for coming all the way across to this side. As you know we've had many years of moots and we've never had one over this side before and we knew it would be a little smaller because of that but I think it was just worth it. Just for once I wanted to have it here so I kind of really pushed that through. I'm really happy to see you here. Who do we have here? We were trying to kind of extend some of the things. How many people here are in higher ed? Kind of with some hands. Still we're still sort of about pretty high I guess 70%. How many people here in K-12? Okay look around for each other because not as many of you so you might want to hook up. Anyone here more sort of corporate learning that sector? Okay a few more of you still got another sort of 10-15%. How many people here are doing everything? Still 10-20 people. It's good. Okay good. Well it's really really a pleasure to have you here. Very nice to hear Barry talking about this because it actually leads very nicely onto what I was going to talk about. That's where I grew up right out there. Was it the one-way people? I think? And that was my classroom back then in Western Australia. There were kids spread over that sort of an area which is Spain. It's the size of Spain for one classroom and Australia's world renowned for distance education as probably Canada would be the only other place in the world that's so well known for it and maybe it's not an accident that Moodle came from here. That was one of the places we lived. My parents are actually over there it's their fault. This is Warburton which is right near the border of Western Australia and South Australia and Northern Territory that three-way border. It's not very big. It's pretty empty. And we had homework coming on aeroplanes and we had short-wave radio and that's how school was for me. It was mostly an Aboriginal community where we lived. One really nice thing to do out there is camping. Has anybody been camping out in the desert in Australia? How many of you have?  It is beautiful. It is so beautiful and so uniquely Australian and the sky will just blow your mind the stars at night. And one of the great things to do out there and I love fires. I love building campfires. I have a fire at home. I'm kind of liking there a bit of extra cold weather we're getting this winter because I can keep running the fires at home. And I really like building fires. I find fires to be a fascinating metaphor for a lot of things. When you make a fire you have to start with kindling. You can't just go and light a big piece of wood and expect it to work. You have to start small. You have to get sticks, grass, whatever. And then you add some bigger pieces onto it. It gets a bit bigger and it starts to catch. It starts to get a bit of a life of its own. Then you put in a bit more oxygen. Maybe you bring in bed grills or not. Put some more sticks on it. You've got to really pump up the fuel and get to the point where you can have a really big fire that actually starts getting a life of its own. Once a fire gets to a certain point you can throw wet wood in that thing. And the power of the fire is it will dry the wood before burning it. You can throw metal in there and it will burn. It gets to the point where the fire is re-burning its own smoke. It really has a life of its own.  I now live in the hills here in Perth. Just over the road is a national park. Last summer we had a bush fire coming pretty close to the house. Quite scarily close. That's when Gavin was here last time and I said sorry, Gavin got to go and had to drive home to start watering the property. So fires can be quite dangerous but what I'm really interested in is this process. This is exactly how I run online courses. In the first online courses that I did with Moodle, you build the framework, the kindling. You get that structure going.  Once you have people in there, you start throwing in the sticks. So you start throwing in discussion items to talk about. You start throwing in dilemmas. You start getting people engaged. You have assessments and so on. But it's not until you really get the feedback loop going where students are feeding each other, when students are reacting off each other, when students are waking up in bed in the morning, reaching for their device to see what happens last night. What did people respond to what they wrote earlier? You've all felt that. You've all probably done something on the internet and you check straight away what happened. What did they reply? It's that feeling you want to get. Once you get that feedback going, that's the fire is catching. Once it gets going, you don't really have to do very much. You just throw a log in every now and then. Moodle.org is one of my original online courses. It's still going. It's burning away there and it's very active. I built another fire, which is sort of caught on a bit. Moodle is now all over the place. I just got back from Brazil. I was there last week where 90% of everything, all education, is using Moodle. I was at a distance education conference. It was about 2,000 people there. It wasn't about Moodle. But when I asked everyone to stand up and then I said, if you don't use Moodle, sit down. Only 10% of people sat down. It was like just all Moodle. And it was really, it's really amazing. And that's the third biggest country. Australia, where it's the, in terms of raw numbers, I think we're at number seven. And there's incredible stuff happening around the world. It's really interesting to see how much doesn't change when I'm traveling around. Same issues, same sort of politics, same problems. Moodle has this weird place in the world where it's a free piece of software, which is really lets it spread and gets used and people pick it up. And then it gets denigrated for being, oh, it's just a free one. Right. Oh, we've got money now, so let's spend it on something expensive. And it's, it's a very weird sort of dichotomy that we're free. Moodle, of course, now is surrounded by lots and lots of education tools that are going around. Education technology has exploded in the past few years. We're now, or Moodle's been going for 14 years, none of this was around then. We didn't even have, these didn't exist back then. This slide looks really messy because it is messy. If you're trying to set up something new right now, it's very hard to make choices. You've got choices for everything. And they all do a few things. So how does Moodle fit into this environment now going forwards? Well, let me just explain how Moodle looks from my perspective as a tool. And it might be a bit clearer how, how relevant it is still. Moodle has a core learning platform. We'd like to call it a learning platform, not a learning environment, a virtual learning environment or a learning management system, because it's actually a tool with which you make those things. You take Moodle and you make a learning management system with it. And so in Moodle, it has really core concepts, basic, basic concepts. It has courses. So anytime you want to teach a bunch of things in some sort of order, in some sort of period, you know, that's a course. It has users, it has students, it has people. It has competencies now in 3.1. Very basic concept that we probably should have had earlier. But the fact that somebody knows something, we can now actually record and track. We can put people into groups. We can give them roles. You can have multiple roles depending on your context.  We have administration for administering all this. We have APIs, which are application programming interfaces so that other software can talk and remotely control this stuff. And we have categories and courses. All these sort of structures are very basic structures. So that's the core learning platform. And it hasn't changed significantly really since we started Moodle way back. Now around Moodle, you've got plugins. And the plugins sit on top. And some of them are the gift functionality of their own. So forum, plugin, quizzes, and some of them are connecting to other systems. And those integrations are really a huge part of Moodle. That Moodle can integrate and connect with other systems. So when you have all these plugins connected on Moodle, then you can make courses. And courses are just some of the internal plugins and some of the external plugins. And you bring them together in a protected environment where you have courses. So that's the basic structure of Moodle. It's pretty, all of you probably already know this. But I just want to explain it from this point of view because we're not looking to interface how it looks or anything. This is kind of the basic philosophy of it, I guess. Then you access Moodle through devices. Now, mostly in the past, we've used desktops and laptops and the web. More and more. In fact, more than that now, we're using mobile devices. And so we have a mobile app. We've got responsive design and things like that. And we're also working on all the other new display technologies and interaction technologies that are coming along. So virtual reality, augmented reality. Screens themselves are disappearing. We are talking more and more to computers and they're talking back to us. So in the future, these sort of screens that will disappear. They've only been around for, what, six, seven years. So they might be gone another six, seven years. So why Moodle? That's Moodle is a kind of a description. Why is Moodle still relevant? The fact that it's open source is really, really important. It's a true open source project. It's not, oh, open source. It's open source. We're not pretending or anything. We run things openly. You can see every line of code that's going on. You can get involved if you want to, to as much as you want. And we are open. We have a mission. Moodle is driven by a mission. It's not driven by money. It's not driven by VCs. It's not driven by investors. It's, it has a mission. We, if we make any profits in Moodle, they all go back in the next year to pay more developers so we can grow. So Moodle has this mission. It's the same old mission we've had for a while. It's a bit wordy. Maybe we should probably slim it down a bit, I was thinking, but it's still very valid. We support teachers, number one. We love teachers. We're not trying to get rid of teachers. Some software is trying to get rid of teachers. It's trying to automate things to the point where you don't need teachers. I don't like that whole world view. We love teachers. So we're just empowering teachers to do a better job, to be able to do more with what they have. We support learners. We integrate everything for courses, like I explained. We're open, which gives privacy. And as we start thinking about data more and more, the idea of owning your data is really important now to know where it is. We're accessible from any device. We want to be flexible. We don't know how somebody wants to teach. So we need to be very flexible. We want to scale. If you are able to teach 100,000 people something, why not? If you can do it, that's all the better for the world. And lastly, it should be a place where anybody can contribute to global education. If someone in Brazil does something cool, why shouldn't it help Australians? Why shouldn't it help people in Trinidad and Tobago? It should, right? I mean, everything should work that way. Really importantly, and back to the fire, is Moodle's a platform for science. Education is rife with theories. There's lots of theories about how education works. It's really interesting now with the rise of neuroscience, that neuroscience are looking at how brains actually learn and they can really get in there, that some of these theories are being proved and some are being disproved. But if you're thinking in a scientific way, we're led by data, we're led by results. So if somebody somewhere tries something to, something new with online education to teach people remotely and it works and they can prove it through data, then we've extracted a tiny piece of truth from the universe that we can now share and spread and use everywhere. So in this case we've got a teacher trying something amazing with all the students looking. That could very well be one of the students standing on that desk showing something to the fellow students or that could be an administrator at a university showing a really great learning environment for that institution. It works on lots of level. But it's about data and we have to get more focused on proving our assertions. And I know there's some really great talks in this program and I'm really looking forward to seeing them because I'm going to learn a lot over the next couple of days and I know a lot of you are interested in this as well. Another reason why Moodle is still very relevant is it lets us focus on bigger problems. So a lot of people talk about various learning tools against each other, this one or that one. This is better than this one. I reckon the differences between them are not as, not that great. I mean a really good teacher can use email and teach successfully if they know what they're doing and they're dedicated. For me there are much much bigger problems that we should be focusing on, not this button or that button or little details. These kinds of things. I reckon the things around Moodle in a particular implementation are probably 90% of the problem. You are not going to get good online teaching at a university unless you value teaching at a policy level. If you don't pay teachers appropriately, if you don't give them value and make their job a valued thing, you're going to get bad teaching. If they're getting research point, if they're more interested in the research because they're getting points for it and publications and that's how their career is determined, then the 20% of time left they have for teaching is going to be just, well I'll just deliver the same old notes I've done for ten years because I don't really care. I had the opportunity to sit with the coordinator of K-12 education in Helsinki. I was in Moscow, name dropping a lot, sorry, two weeks ago I was in Moscow and I was with the Marjo, I can't remember last name, who coordinates education in Helsinki. Finland is often held up as like this amazing model where teachers have a value. I asked her how did that happen? How did Finland get that? She said it actually started back in the 60s and there was a couple of really motivated individuals who were really pushing this idea that we should change the culture. So they were in dire straits back 40, 50, 60 years ago. It's taken that long to build the culture up to now where teachers are paid so highly and rated so highly that they stay in teaching and their kids end up being taught by maths teachers with 20 years of experience. I mean wouldn't you want your kids taught by someone who's a career teacher in a subject who's involved in the research of it as well but also they're really engaged, they're motivated and that just leads to lots of better outcomes. So like things like policy and economics are very important, much more important than the tools you're using. Rights, who owns things on the internet, who should be able to do what. There's a lot of outstanding issues that probably most of you have dealt with the copyright agencies. It's kind of a fundamental disconnect between copyright law and the physical reality of digital technology which is that electrons can duplicate anything for free. It's just like this disconnect. We still haven't fully worked it out. What integrations are there? So you know you shouldn't have to have more than one password at an institution. It should just be, it should just work, right? Everything should be integrated, everything should be single sign, etc. You want things to be very smooth. What else we got here? We got the community. What does the community that Moodle is in, how does that support that implementation of Moodle? Are people behind it? Are people helping to improve it? Are they empowered to improve it? Automation. We are building robots all around us. It's quite scary once you start to realise how many robots we're building. It's software and hardware. We are slowly replacing a lot of jobs. We're replacing a lot of activity. Where's the line? Where do we want to draw that line? Who wants their job automated? And you know what things does it make sense to automate? We've got to kind of direct that process, I think. Not just let it happen. And you know all the processes, what are the processes? What is the learning experience for a student? So not the user experience of a particular product, but what's the learning experience of them choosing to learn something and then coming through, being involved in an institution and all that process through, right through to graduating and working, or maybe they never leave. Maybe they're part of that institution on the long-term basis. You know, all these sorts of things. I just, I see a lot of people saying yeah, we're having problems like this and the solution is we'll change the LMS and they'll spend six months changing the LMS, whether it's to Moodle or from Moodle, it's not really the issue, but it doesn't solve those things. You still have the same problems, right? So I see these bigger problems out there. So how the Moodle project works. We've got Moodle HQ, we've got a community around us, as you know, we're all here. This is not very new to you, but there is some new things in here that I want to show you about how we're changing. Moodle HQ builds the software. We're responsible for integrating changes and building Moodle Core and Moodle Mobile as two major open source projects. Moodle Mobile is becoming as important as Moodle Core. We provide the infrastructure for the community, the sites, databases, the brand. We communicate about the projects and we have a new communications team now in Moodle HQ with a lot of new people who are actually around here at the conference and I'm really, you'll see a lot more from us in future. We're very bad at communications and marketing, I believe in the past. We have to create sustainable revenue. This is something that Moodle Project has really focused on, I focused on from the start is that things have to be sustainable.  You can't have grants and things. It's got to be sustainable models. So we work a lot on sustaining the project and keeping it going as long as we have. It's been 14 years or so and we're still growing. We've just been doing that. And lastly, research. We take on research. We now have a new research team. We've got two people in this team who are focusing on analytics and we have a new UX team. Can you believe Moodle never had a UX team before? Probably you can. We actually never really made it that a specific role. It was just everybody did it. So now we actually are doing user research, user testing and this has also started fairly recently. I'm really, really happy for that because that's a major focus of the core. So a few things about what we're doing in Moodle core. 3.1 came out last May. We are in our heads thinking we're almost at the end of the 3.2 cycle which is coming out in November. But we had some big things there. Competencies was finally in core. Better assignment grading interface, long term support and LTI publishing. So this is what the competencies look like if you haven't seen them. Is anybody here on 3.1 already? Anybody some hands? Not so many yet. So this competencies is it has interfaces. It has ways of defining competencies, creating learning plans, connecting learning plans to people. And then you have to you have evidence such as things that happens in courses that get attached to those competencies. And so you slowly prove that you can do things. It becomes part of your each individual person's personal record. However, because it's a core information structure in Moodle, you can write or anybody, any developer can write new plugins to implement new interfaces. So if you want the competencies to be automatically determined or changed or connected to external systems or particular interfaces, we now that now is possible. So the developer community of Moodle can work on new competency interfaces and supports a real almost any framework that's out there. The assignment grading interface, this was something that a lot of people wanted. And we finally got it together in 3.1. It's more of a one, one page grading interface that you flip through a lot of assignments. And the content of the the thing you're grading can be a lot more file types now. So Moodle will convert different file types into something you can see on screen and and markup. The LTI stuff is really interesting. Is anybody here doesn't know what LTI is? It's okay. It's okay to admit ignorance. We're all friends here. LTI is learning tools interoperability. It's a standard. It's one of the few standards that I like because the trouble with standards is everybody invents a new one. But LTI is learning tools interoperability and it lets you connect a learning activity into a learning management system. So you have a course here and the students jump out to this other thing could be on another website. User information is sent there. They do something. And if there's any assessment, the grades are sent back and they go into the learning management system. Moodle can now publish LTI as well as consume LTI. So you could take an activity or a course and publish it as an LTI module and it gets included in another Moodle course or you could take another learning management system and include Moodle stuff in there. So that opens up the options for a lot of different structures that we couldn't do before. And that's working really well. There's some improvements even in 3.2 for the versions of LTI support. So they're all being brought up to the very latest standards. And that's something we'll be committing to keeping up to date. There was a little project called the Recycle Bin, which came from the Moodle User Association, which started at the beginning of this year.  So that lets you, I mean it's a nice feature in itself, but it has the effect of letting people be a little bit less worried about deleting things because you can always get it back.  This is one of them. A small thing. You know when you post to a forum and it usually comes up with a confirmation screen and you have to continue and then it goes back. So that little confirmation screen is gone everywhere in Moodle. What it does now is it goes straight back to where you were and it just puts the same text in the green up there as a notice at the top of the screen. It's a tiny thing, but imagine how many clicks it saves across all the Moodles in the world for all those students and all those reloads and all the server load, etc, etc. So it really adds up. And there's a lot of other little things. Some of the stuff will be talked about in other sessions of Moodle. Now at 3.2, these are the main things we've been working on. The first one is a new default theme called Boost. It's based on Bootstrap 4. It's aiming at simplified navigation, a much more modern look. I'm not going to show you a screenshot of it because we're still working out all these details, but it's really intended to so that your initial experience with Moodle out of the box is, wow, like we wanted to have that really modern feel. For developers, there is a new CSS framework, Bootstrap 4, which allows a lot of new ability so you can actually do some really nice buttons and pop-ups and menus and things like that in the content, in plugins that just really add to the overall experience. Messaging and notifications is now completely cleaned up and it just looks like every other system you've ever used. It looks like LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. You have messages and you have notifications. They're mirrored on the mobile devices as well. I'll show you. Actually, I haven't got a screenshot, but the messaging looks like, I don't know, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, any other thing you can think of pretty much. They've all converged. They're all alongside the identical now, if you haven't noticed. So, Moodle messaging actually looks like that. LTI has been improved. We've made it easier now to add LTI links to other things. There's more compliance. There's a new graph library. So, you know, when you look at a report of maybe user activity and you can see all the logs and there's that really crappy graph at the top, which is the one that I probably made back in, like, 2000 and 2000. That's gone. Thank goodness. I don't know how it lived for so long. It's survived, but it's gone. It's now a really nice HTML5 looking swish graph. You can zoom in on things. It's got, it's sort of dynamic. And all those graphs right across Moodle have been replaced. They look nice now. There's another feature called user tours, which is, I'll show you a screenshot of that, too.  Little dialogues that pop up and you're next, next, next, and it's done. You never see it again. So Moodle can do that now. Those little tours can be written by an administrator. So they can write their own. They're very easy to write.   Those sets of instructions are called tours, user tours. They can be exported and shared and they can be imported. And we have a database on Moodle.net where people are collecting these. And we already have 100 or so. Is that right, Kevin? How many? Probably user tours? Quite a lot. You can share them how you want. You can write them any language. You can write the multi-language as well. And it's just a really nice way, I think, to onboard people into a system because your Moodle is not going to look like your Moodle. It's not going to look like your Moodle. You may have customized it greatly and you can add these little tours in to just onboard people. We've also done a lot of core activity module fixes, some low-hanging fruit, some long-standing problems like a database editing of templates and little things that annoy the heck out of me and you. Lots of little fixes. So we're really focusing on UX. The last thing is IMS caliper. I'm not quite sure if it's going to make it, but that's something we really want to get into core as well. If not, it will be a plug-in in the community. And that's a standard for analytics, transferring analytics information between systems. That's what the messaging menu looks like. Apologies for the icons there. But that's like the menu at the top. You can see there's a messaging one and then there's a notifications bell, just like everything else you've seen. Improved settings for notifications. So your notifications, you can send them to your apps, devices. You can send them off to mail. You can send them off. All this was kind of in Moodle before, but the interface was so bad that nobody ever used it. Now it's good. Now going forward, our direction on core is simplifying UX, UX, UX. It's all about UX. We really want the slick interface, the modern feel that everyone wants and that everyone usually implements on their own sites.  The second big piece is interoperability and that includes IMS standards. We're now going to actually start taking active-handed IMS. So I went to the IMS conference in San Antonio earlier this year and got involved with their working groups. We've been an IMS member for years, but we've never really led anything. We're actually going to start driving some standards because everyone can make a standard. So why not us? Google and Microsoft is, you know, a lot of people are using them Google apps, Office 365 for documents, for calendars, that sort of stuff. There's integrations floating around the community written by different people. We want to get those into core. So ideally, a student writes a document in Google Docs, for example, and they submit it to an assignment. It should automatically be made read-only to them because you don't want them changing that document after the due date. But then the teacher should have access to scribble all over it. And so that's sort of level of integration where Moodle's permissions are affecting the sharing of the documents. That's the goal. And we're working with Microsoft. We're working with the consortium of universities around the place. And if you're interested, let us know to define those better and get them in core. The mobile feature set is a big focus. I hope, I think, in fact, I'm fairly sure that by the end of this year, the mobile feature set is going to be good enough so that about 80% of students don't need to use anything else. They never even need to go to the website. They just use the app. The reason it's 80% of students is it kind of depends on what plugins you're using and what functionalities you're using on your courses. But we've got a lot of coverage already. I'll show you in a sec. And the last thing is, for me, the most exciting thing about analytics is not just the thing most people talk about, which is finding students at risk, which is a good thing to do. But where I would love to see it go is get to the point where Moodle is an active participant is continually suggesting things to you that help you be a better teacher, that help you be a better learner. So you should get a little notification on your phone saying there is a discussion right now in this forum that is happening. It's got really hot right now. The fire is burning. Chuck a stick in there. Here's a link. All this student has done an amazing job and has improved. Give them a call. Here's their phone number. So that kind of stuff, that computer aided teaching, computer aided learning, that's where I think we can go. And the new analytics research team has got some really great ideas, which I'm very excited about. Now Moodle Mobile is the other second big product we work on. There is some sessions about Moodle Mobile that were yesterday and there was tomorrow, sometime next couple of days. But if you haven't looked at the app in the last six months, go and have a look again because it has evolved a lot. It's really going fast now. The new platform, which is HTML5 based with native apps, is really working out very well. So since January, we've got support for forums, quizzes, SCORM, wikis, glossaries, assignment submissions, competencies, link support between activities. So if you mention an activity in a forum post, like in a hyperlink, that even works on mobile now. So when you read the forum post on the mobile app and click the link, it goes to the equivalent thing in the app. It doesn't jump out. Sounds simple, but it's not. Remote plug-ins. So now you can actually have Moodle plug-ins that provide Moodle mobile interfaces. Guest access to courses, more translations. There's now a rich text editor. So you can actually do HTML and rich text in the mobile app. What they're working on now is improved synchronization. So the main point of the mobile app is to give this offline capability. It's easy to forget that probably 90% of the world has really bad internet. And I travel a lot. Hey? Yeah, Australia has really bad internet. Tell me about it. I've got three and a half megabits max at home. I'm gonna leave it in Perth. It's really bad. So offline capabilities is a big focus of this. And the idea is, and this already works and it's getting improved for performance, is you just synchronize a course. You download it here. You do stuff, reply on forums, submit assignments, do all the things you need to do. And later on, connect up and it synchronizes back again. And that enables Moodle to work better in India, in Africa, in Perth. Everywhere. Even like I was in Brazil and they have Wi-Fi everywhere, but you connect to it and it just cuts out every five minutes. It just stops. I don't know why, but it's just really, really, really bad. So yeah, so that's the kind of things that are happening there. This shows you the next release coming out for the mobile app 313 is in the red. And you can see it filling in the gaps and functionality for all the core activity modules. And we're slowly getting, well, not that slowly, the mobile team is amazing. We've got one of them, one of our developers from them here, Pow, who's over there. The mobile team's based in Barcelona, our team. And they're doing a great job. Now the nice thing about their mobile app is you can customize how it looks. And you can provide a CSS file and get some way so that when the default Moodle mobile app connects to your site, it will get some colors and CSS and it will look a bit different. But we have a new thing that I wanna tell you about, which I'm really excited. We've set up a whole program for producing branded Moodle mobile apps. So if you would like your own version of the Moodle mobile app that has your icon on it, your name is in the stores listed as your institution and that when the student opens it, it doesn't tell them what URL to connect to. It already knows. So they just put username and password and get straight in. You can now get that. So it'll be updated every couple of months with new releases of Moodle and it's available now. So you can just go to any Moodle partner, start that conversation and once it's set up, it's an ongoing process and it'll be made for you. We've already made a few and we're really happy with the results. It's really going very well. We only started this last month. Quite a new program but if you're interested in this, talk to your Moodle partner. There's like a setup fee of $5,000 and then there's a annual recurring fee of $5,000 which is not very much if you think what it would take to do that yourself. But our team will be really working on streamlining that process and making it really smooth. So you can really change the look of the app. You can really customize it quite a lot. We also at Moodle HQ, we run a MOOC and we just finished the last one in August. We run them twice a year. This is a four week introductory course for teachers who don't know Moodle at all who just want to get a little leg up into using Moodle. We run these free MOOCs. There's some statistics of engagement over the five week period, really high. Normally when you see these graphs for MOOCs, they start off really high.  I'm really happy to show that graph and just show that how much engagement activity there's been all through the MOOCs. So people really get into it. Has anybody here taken that MOOC? Has anybody? Got, yeah, about 20, 30 people. It's cool. It's always been improved. Mary Kuch, who's the main facilitator is here. The blonde British woman over there. So, yeah, if you want to meet Mary, if you had her on the course and wanted to meet her, go and see her. Mary is also the voice of the videos if you see our release videos as well. So if you want to hear those dulcet tones right over there. Moodle Cloud, the Moodle Mood last year, we launched Moodle Cloud, the Australian Moodle Mood in Melbourne. Some of you may remember. Anybody here have a Moodle Cloud site now? Still? Yeah, we've got 30 people. We have roughly about 14,000 active sites. This number goes up and down if you're seeing any of my other talks and it goes up and down. It's because we always delete unused sites. So if someone hasn't used it for 90 days it just chunk gets deleted. Well, we do send you a warning. But that's a lot of Moodles being running now and it's really running smooth. It's in 183 countries, 137,000 new files a month getting uploaded into this system and it's active. And I'm really happy how it's been working. We added the ability to take off the ads so you can pay a little bit of something per month to get the ads off the free sites. And a few months ago we released our first paid package there. So this is to, they're very small, limited packages deliberately. They're very, you know, they're constrained. We don't want to get into the position of support, Moodle HQ. We don't want to be doing support. That's what partners do. This is a way to try Moodle to get to know it. $250 a year, up to $1,000 a year. I'm so glad I don't have to translate the currency here because I'm usually translating that currency to things. Up to 500 users. And Moodle for school looks different. This is the theme for Moodle for school. It's what you get out of the box and you can change all that carousel there on the top and do a lot of customizations. But you can't add new themes. You can't add new plugins. It's limited. But it's going very well and there's more to come in that area. Now, the Moodle community is the rest. What does the Moodle community do? Well, they're using Moodle. They're integrating it for local use is what you're all doing. You're experimenting with online learning and hopefully sharing that knowledge with the rest of the community. That's why we're here. Giving feedback to us, supporting each other and supporting Moodle HQ financially through Moodle partners, through Moodle users association and the custom branded apps. So that's what Moodle can look like. That's what Moodle can look like. That's a Moodle. That's a Moodle. So people really take Moodle and bend it in different places and I love seeing how that happens. We're up to 85 Moodle partners now worldwide. That's a lot more than we had this time last year at the Australian Moodle Moodle. There are three in Australia, including one new one in Australia. So we're E-Creators, Moodle Rooms and My Learning Space and they're all here. So good to see you guys and they're all in that room. But these are the most important part of the community, the Moodle partners. They're the ones who are actually paying for everything. So using them supports the project, of course. We're currently up to about 1,244 plugins in the Plugins database from about nearly 700 community developers. That is a lot of stuff. We're improving that plugins interface to make it easier to find plugins, to review them, to see what other people think of them, so that the high quality ones bubble to the top to make it easier to choose them. And there's a lot of work happening on that. You'll see it very soon-ish. But this really shows that Moodle's a learning platform. It's not just a particular system. It's a platform like an operating system people are building on. Elizabeth did a bit of analysis on what the community are producing, what sort of plugins are being produced. And this is just an initial analysis, but you can see how much the blue ones there are assessment. There's a lot of things related to assessment that people are producing. And they're filling gaps and they're producing quite unusual things. For those, there's quite a lot of communication. Amazing, the green ones there. How many are about planning? Helping teachers and students plan their work. Which is great. It's exactly, I think it really is what was needed. Then there's content and navigation and so on. A lot of question types, too. How many people are members of the Moodle User Association here? Got some hands? Okay, a few of you. I was, last year I was talking about this as something that would happen. It is now launched. The User Association, we've got about 150 members growing. There are different levels of membership and the membership money goes into a big pot. And then the members go through a twice yearly process of proposing projects and voting on them and producing a recommendation for a particular project that they think the money should be spent on. And that's for Moodle Core, really for Moodle Core development. The first big one is this one. This is just a little screenshot from inside the Moodle User Association website, which is a Moodle site. And it's about the dashboard, about progress bars on the dashboard so you can see the progress of your courses, what are old courses, what are future courses, how far you're through them. And behind that is a lot of work on making activity completion in courses much easier to use. So just out of the box when you make a new course, activity completion will be on. It'll work with sensible defaults, automatic settings. So you don't have to go and set them all up one by one and all that stuff. So that's what's happening there. There is a meeting this afternoon. Michael Sankey, are you the highest ranking member of the MUA here? Yep, so what time is that MUA meeting? Five, five-fifteen? Okay, so if you're interested, even if you're not a member, go along. I think everyone's welcome to come in and talk about that and what's happening going forward.  It's not that much. The higher level you are, the more votes you have, the more swing you've got. So think about it. Moodle Moots, we're at one. I don't need to tell you about Moodle Moots. But we now have official Moodle Moots. Looks like next year we might have seven, I think, Gavin said. Seven that we're running around the world. There's a South African one. There's an Indian one. We have maybe US, maybe Middle East soon. Even Russia was coming up as a possibility, so yeah. What we're trying to do with these is, you know, we have this big Moodle sign here. So the videos for these go up onto YouTube. And what we're trying to get to is a point where there is a constant stream of Moodle keynotes and videos coming through that you can tune into your stream. You can sit in the lounge. If you've got an hour one night and you feel like watching some Moodle videos, you can crank it up on the TV. And it's, you know, it's going to be something watchable. And that's where we're going. The US, if you looked at the last US Moodle, unfortunately we had a video recording snafu. So we don't have very many from that one. But I think we're, you'll see a lot more coming from the Moots like this one. That's Charlie. It was a great talk from last year. So what are the future? Because I should probably get off the stage. Yeah. Look, technology is always evolving, right? I'm using probably one of the oldest ones, which is speaking right now. You know, we've got writing books. The thing in education is every time you add a new one, a shortwave of radios or televisions with people reading to bears on them, for no apparent reason. Or computers or tablets. You know, every time, and this gets set again and again, education, ed tech professionals go, this is going to revolutionize education. It's going to be the thing. We're all going to use that. And every time, what happens is we, education just takes it on as another thing. And we end up using all of those things. I mean, we're still using whiteboards. We're still using books. We're still writing. We're still talking to each other. Maybe, not maybe as much, but anyway, we still are. So, you know, virtual reality is a very big interest of mine. And then some people are going, oh, virtual reality is going to do everything. Well, no, it won't. We have a VR room at Moodle HQ. We're experimenting in there. And it is pretty exciting, but this doesn't change. Right, we still have this lump of meat. We still have a hippocampus, which is processing all this stream of information from your sensors is going through your hippocampus. You've got like a 15 minute, 20 minute recording buffer in there, like the short term memory. It's just sitting in there. And if you don't use that memory in that 15 or 20 minutes, it gets deleted. And if you do something in that time with that new information, that's how you consolidate your memories. It becomes new links and synaptic links and the brain gets embedded. These things don't change, right? So that's why new learning technologies don't take over the world. So that picture I showed you before of Moodle's core structure doesn't change. It won't change. Maybe it's run by different people at different times through different media, but it's not going to change. That picture is still very valid as a system, as a platform. It's still very useful. The idea of a course being a sequence of activities will not change. And the way you access it may change, but the key idea that you have a device or something to access this stuff somewhere else will not change. What is really exciting is this augmented reality of the future. The VR helmets we're playing with now are going to be dropped in favor of really just light sunglasses that you put on. And this screen doesn't have to be a little tiny projector screen there. If we were all wearing the sunglasses, I could have just flicked one up. 20-meter screen here, and we would all see it. And it would be just like it was here, but we're actually seeing it on our glasses, but we're all seeing the same thing in the same space. This is coming. This is a few years off. It's not very far. It's not gonna change everything, though. And I think in this environment, I think Moodle will still be the learning management system. The learning management will still need to be done. You still need to go in and out of experiences, capture assessments, pipe them to different places, have people with different roles. And that's really exciting. So if we're looking at the far future in the next five, 10 years, that's where Moodle will probably still be very, very valid. Worldwide, through open source, we can do anything. One last thing. If you wanna build a fire, this is my recommendation. You first plan the experiences you want people to have. You start there, forget the technology. What's the experience? What's the brain's gonna do? Then find the tools to make those experiences happen. And if you build feedback loops everywhere, if you let the participants feedback to the people making the course, and you let everybody give feedback to each other, you end up with a fire that burns by itself. So once you're all to go out, build a fire. Make it the best fire you can. And I hope to see some new fires coming out of this conference. Thank you very much.


Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are basically going to look at how you can form a strong bond between your melody and your harmony. Harmony is also known as chords or your chord progression and we look at two approaches for organically using the two together as either a composer or an analyzer of music or a transcriber of music as some of us call it right. So the idea behind composition is you need to have something to start with. You need to have a seed to grow into a tree so to speak. So the seed idea could either be a chord progression or it could be a melody. I'm not saying it can't be a rhythm groove. It could also be a rhythm groove but in this lesson we are sort of limiting our study to melody and harmony and how you can interact them together and this is or I've tried my best to make it as easy as possible for beginners to understand.  These are concepts which you need to just flow with. You don't need a book. You don't need that much theory and that much of you know you know planning to do this sort of stuff. So in part one we are going to look at how you start with chords and then form the melody through the chords and in part two it's going to be pretty much the inverse. You're given the melody as the seed idea and then you would form the chords around that or develop chords or grow chords or build a strong progression around that. So we thus as we say we are trying to develop a strong bond between melody and harmony. So before we get cracking guys it'll be awesome if you could also get your keyboards out learn with me in the lesson you can play along or you could and you should also get yourselves a book a pen and paper write down a few things and it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button and the bell icon for regular notifications where you get informed of our new content which we put out on our youtube channel. So let's get rolling right now we have a concept in music called cadences which are super tiny chord progressions usually chord progressions are three or four or bigger so cadences are a great way to start approaching harmony and melody linkage. So if you take all the standard cadences in music which have been around since the time of Bach you could say back way back in the day you have a five going to one which is the authentic cadence I'm just going to use the key of D major I like that key for today so let's just do it I encourage you to do this on as many keys as possible. So authentic cadence on D would be the five to one let's first recap our scale D major two sharps right D E F sharp G A B C sharp D D C sharp B A G F sharp B D now the authentic would be the fifth degree that's A going to D or A going to D sometimes we could also play this as a dominant seventh chord to make the movement a lot more stronger the bass however goes A D A D so the authentic would be five one the plagal cadence would be four one you see it can really inspire the melody just by playing these cadences or you can do five going to six we call that deceptive cadence now it's not there in the textbooks but another kind of deceptive cadence could even be a four going to six or something going to six I guess because you're deceiving the listeners here by not playing the one resolution and you're resolving to the six which is another tonic chord instead which is the four now of D that's a G so that's plagal that's the deception there going to the six minor or deceptive that's the authentic cadence okay and last but not least you would create a very open ended sound for yourself by ending on the five chord also known as the dominant chord of the scale so that could be like that's a two E minor very nice in a pre-chorus to kind of give you that that impact to take you to the chorus la and then we go to the one chord in the chorus okay you can even do five four going to five that results back to the one right so these are all I'm not going to talk about the other cadences there are quite a few and on our youtube channel we spend a lot of time on cadences so in the descriptions you're going to find other lessons which you can definitely learn after watching this one or if some of the concepts have not been covered in depth definitely there are videos which cover them in depth so cadences is something you need to type search on our channel and just to also give you a mention on our website Nathaniel school dot com you have a section called free tutorials where we have sort of the team has taken the effort to take all of our youtube content which is ever growing and put it on our website so you can go now to the site and kind of use these easy to use filters so that might also be helpful for you the free tutorial section on Nathaniel school dot com coming back so these are all your chord options so when you have to build a melody around this each of these chords have three possible melodic landing points or three possible as we say chord tones the three chord tones are or could be your melody notes which you can sing along or play on your principal instrument so if you're a violin player you could relate to these chords if you're a singer you could relate to these chords if you're a pianist you could play the chords in your left hand and and the melody of course would be produced in the right hand so if I take let's say the plagal cadence for now which is also called in church music as the amen cadence so amen so if a person if you hear these chords the first thing is to be drawn towards the sound of these units of music which are the two chords g major being g b d d major being d f sharp a now the way the chords are also played on different instruments gives you different motivation so if you have to hear the chord like g major played as b d g g is the four of d right the plagal so if you hear this the g is influencing your brain to to sing that or to relate to that melodically because our brain tries to hear the catchiest thing possible right so that happens to be the highest frequency which is being presented right now on the piano with this inversion so you go g and then the plagal resolves very peacefully I guess back to the root so the root if you played with piano inversions so that can inspire your melody creation process that's a good way to start just take the chord tones and sing along as you play the chords see where it takes you there are no rules it's just a starting guideline it's like a tour guide I'm just a tour guide in this adventure so to speak now these are not the only chord tones available what about D D is there in both chords so if you play let's say to promote D I'll invert the g major chord to put D on top now only singing just D D is not the greatest melody on earth I think getting rather boring and monotonous so you could perhaps sing that D more rhythmically interestingly or color it up during the journey of G going to D maybe and I'm using stepwise motion to create these passing tones la la la la la la la la just using the scale tone I don't want to do I don't want to sing a wrong note I want to still sing in the D major scale but have a workflow wherein I respect my landing notes the landing note is the note which generally collides with the chord change moment so that if the chord changes every four beats then the land is going to be one two three four land two three four land two three four change like at the change point that is where the listeners here is really really attentive they've heard that chord change at the one so you need to present something important for them melodically at the one otherwise if something else happens away from the one a listener may get confused with too much of an information overload you could say so coming back to the plagal so you can nominate any of these notes I've nominated the la which is the G F sharp I could do D D I could also do what's remaining now in the G major chord we've done we we need to do B where does the B like to go at least on the piano it likes to go to A because that's good voice leading that's good inversion usage so just stealing the piano concept of inversions to build melodies so at the landing point you need to respect this chord tone system and everything in between the chords is pretty much up to you it's sort of like you have two destinations but how you reach those two destinations is up to you the map will take you through different road routes I guess in so to speak so that's the melodic passing note concept while the chord tones are your destination eventually you want to land at your you know place where you want to spend some time so another nice thing to do is you have the two chords of the cadence in this case the plagal which is G to D and then you can say okay nominate one note for every chord let's say for G I will nominate B and for the D major chord a nice note to nominate would be the D because it's in the chord name of the chord so use your singing voice to try and find these notes use the piano to help you sing those notes so that's G major with a B on top but a G in the bass and then D with a D on top with a D in the bass so be aware of both the top note and the bottom note so somehow trying to get to that D so you devise your entire composition your entire melody around that principle you see I can even go down to D just by giving those giving ourselves those two pillars to play around with can you feel a lot of tonight seems to believe this method I guess and it becomes a bit catchy so you can repeat it a few more times like a lot of great songs the same melody line will go on and on also following the poetic structure or the the lyrical form which could be like an A A B C or an A A B B or A B A B songwriting model which we can go over later in another video of course so I hope that that explains things for you and this is not a lesson where you just do what I told you right you just take the concept and then explore so in this case at the beginning of the lesson I told you there are all these basic classical cadences authentic five to one plagal four to one deceptive five something four or five going to six and then half is something going to five so using the cadences you can then build melodies and there's so much more you can do a melody doesn't have to be built on two chords a cadence of two chords it can be built over maybe four four chords four chords is how many cadences at the bare minimum two cadences so maybe if I do plagal deceptive and try and build something with plagal and deceptive what do I come up with again to recap plagal is four to one deceptive is five to six watch the cadence video for more revision at the end of this video so you go so I nominated gf sharp ed of all chord tones I am singing this but keep in mind that I'm not a regular vocalist per se I don't write a lot of my melodies for singers or for me to sing I write it keeping in mind an instrument which I'm inspired by so the melody you create you could even think who should be playing that if a violinist plays that your creation process will change if a trumpet player plays that creation process will change synthesizer plays it it's going to be different right so this doesn't imply that the melody has to be done by a singer it's a melody can be done by anyone who wants to play a melody even a cello could play a melody so we've talked about this sort of correlation or this sort of way of linking melody with harmony to conclude or the second part which I have for you in this video would be what if the melody came first and then you have to extrapolate chords I think the process you're understanding hopefully by now that you just need to reverse engineer all that we talked about so far so you take the melody let's say you have a melody something like this something like that something like that okay but you see with all these melodic structures see there's all even in a melody writing concept it will land there are landing tones and the passing tones so as a chord creator you just have to focus on the landing points and leave the passing notes to either your imagination or your creativity just made that happen organically and then the construction work is only at the or the pillars are created around the landing of the melody point so now you see what chords work with a in the d major scale so you can do d major seems to work fine a major seems to work fine what are the chord in the d major scale seems to have a in it f sharp f sharp minor so I can do or a or f sharp a bit weird but it kind of works depending on how you finish the cadence so maybe I'm going to nominate a major and now you may be guessing it that feels like it wants d major at the end right and that's your authentic cadence you see it's all reverse engineered authentic what if I want to make this same melody deceptive there we go or make it a bit half-ish you see a lot of chord chord cadence is work so it's your job to now reverse engineer now the melody you write it down what are the landing notes and then you figure out the chords now you may be thinking if I don't want to compose this melody let's say I want to find the chords of an existing song can you not do it using the same strategy the melody has let's say a popular Beatles melody see what's happening there the same story the landings jude bad sad better and incidentally the important words which are landed on are also lyrically important words these are things like adjectives or proper nouns and things like that jude for instance is the name of the guy jude okay so you target that so if you have an existing song the lyrics can be your guide circle the notes of interest and then harmonize those notes with appropriate chords right so hopefully this video gives you an insight into incorporating your chords and your melody as organically or another thing as I tell students as old school as possible because back in the day before apps and before technology how are musicians doing it the Beatles were still writing the greatest songs perhaps still ever written and so was Bach back in the day and so was everyone so and even today the lot of people if you ask them how did you make this melody how did you come up with these chords I mean it's honestly something you cannot explain because making that idea creating the seed comes to all of us but we don't know how it actually happened it's based on our training yes but it just somehow comes to life and that's something you don't want to slow down you don't want to you don't want to ever figure out how a seed is made or you don't need to because you're the creator you're the you're the composer so let the seed happen however it should happen it's your job to collect the seed grow it out water it as as we as we say and then try to figure out chords for the seed melody or try to figure out melody for the seed chords so to speak right guys so hopefully you found the lesson useful do let us know in the comments what you thought about the instructional video and more lessons coming up on these topics theory cadences composition do check out some of our old videos as well which covers similar topics use the keywords to your advantage and let us know in the comments also what you'd like to learn next if you have something else in mind don't forget to give the video a like or a thumbs up as it looks like and don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell a lot of these notes per se a lot of these supplementary notes for this lesson and a lot of the other lessons which we will do and have done are waiting for you on our patreon page do consider being a member on patreon as well again thanks a ton for watching i will catch you in the next one cheers