Hello and welcome to the Moodle podcast. Hello, everyone and welcome. My name is Lucy. Today we're joined by Atish Gonsalves and Becky Sage from Gamoteca. They are here to talk about technology enhanced collaboration activities in their Moodle certified integration. Welcome to you both. To get us started, let's begin with a bit more information about you and Gamoteca.

Hi, everyone. I am, uh, artish Gonsalves. I'm the founder of Gamoteca and I'm here with Becky.

Hi. Yep, I'm Becky Sage. I'm CEO at Gamoteca.

So it's nice to be here. We will be talking about human connection and game based learning, uh, for online learning and in particular, uh, working with Moodle. Um, but we'll start a little bit talking about what we do. What's a bit unique to our approach to digital and online learning, and a big thing that you'll hear from us is human connection.

So that is a big unique selling point and a big differentiator for how we see ourselves. And our approach to learning has a lot to do with how people learn in teams. And a lot of research has shown that learning is much more effective, much more engaging when people together in teams and especially when they are, when they are provided the opportunity to practice.

So imagine you are learning public speaking and you have the opportunity to watch a great TED talk video, but also have the opportunity to practice that and get feedback. So I would say those are the two key, let's say, secret sauce elements of what makes, uh, Gamoteca is its ability to learn in teams and the ability to practice.

And that's what fosters this sort of human connection. There are a few other things as well. We try to make it as easy as possible for you as creators and trainers and learning administrators, ah, even as Moodle partners, to integrate this with learning platforms. So that's a big part of what we do when we sort of talk about this human connection practice.

We've got a few examples of what we mean by human-connected learning. So the first area is where gamoteca got started quite a few years ago in the area of serious games and role plays. So this was driven very much by the need, uh, for organizations that organize these types of think about like a fire safety simulation or a, uh, security exercise where people have to react under stress, but have to build muscle memory when they are practicing for some kind of scenario before it actually happens.

And a good example we have is with a client called Fleetforum who trained drivers and fleet managers to make decisions under stress, but have to also not just make those decisions, but also justify why they made those decisions and get a bit into the nuance of I chose option a or I selected this vehicle because this, or I pushed back because of this.

So this ability to create simulation and serious games online at scale, at, ah, a much lower price point than what, what it costs to actually run an in person simulation is kind of where we. We got started off, I'd say, today about more than 50% of our projects fall into the second area, which is around learning by doing so, it's trying to combine some kind of knowledge or, uh, content with the ability for the learner to practice, collaborate, and receive feedback.

So I shared the example previously about public speaking. One very inspiring example we have is from UniCEF, who built out a learning, uh, and practicing sign language learning experience. The goal here was you won't become completely fluent in sign, but you will at least learn to practice the basics of some expressions, finger spelling, your name.

This is really the core of what Gamoteca allows you to do. It allows you to take bite size content, have the ability to practice, to make mistakes, even in a safe space, and then receive feedback from a peer or an expert. And you'll see a lot of examples will fall into this second area, which we'll share with you later.

And the third area has been an emerging area for us from, uh, about a couple of years ago, where the platform has been used to actually provide asynchronous coaching and mentoring. And a really great example of this has been the Norwegian Refugee Council in Jordan, who have been using this to provide job coaching to refugees who are transitioning into the workplace.

So this is what we mean by human connection. It's not some sort of abstract term, but it's really practical. And especially when it comes to learning, humans can learn together and make learning much more engaging and impactful. So what is Gamoteca? Gamotecais two things. So there's the platform to create.

So think of it like an authoring tool where you can build these human to human collaborative learning experiences. Uh, and it's a learner app which can be accessed from mobile phone or a browser for individuals to learn and practice alongside other learners. On the ideation and creation side, uh, Gamoteca provides a platform, but provides also a number of design templates so you don't have to start from scratch.

We've got design templates in areas like onboarding, public speaking, interviewing skills, coaching and mentoring, and helping teams to really get started on this journey of building human connected learning experiences. We're also starting to see a bit of a community of organizations sharing their templates with others as well. And on the creation side, especially for our pro and enterprise users, they are able to then work in these kind of collaborative workspaces.

They can share their designs with each other. We've got tons of articles and videos for how to get started. So all of this is available on our website and we can share some links at the end. The goal is to really make it easy for creators to build these kinds of learning experiences.

Uh, and I've been talking about learning experiences, and you'll also see on the screenshots of calling them games. We are increasingly calling them technology enhanced collaboration activities, or techers for short. So if you see us saying learning experiences or games or TECAs, we mean the same thing. And then, uh, in terms of how this gets published, and this is where the moodle piece starts to come in as well.

So there's a few different ways how learners can actually join these learning experiences. So the first way is something called instant sessions. Where learners can join, similar to how they'll join an online course on a moodle course and launch it directly from there. And if it's a multi learning experience, they get paired or grouped with other learners, or they can choose their own, uh, learning partners.

There's another mode called custom sessions, where trainers have a lot more flexibility and control over who they put in teams and how they choose a configuration of the overall group or cohort. Once learning starts, the learning can happen very synchronously over a very short period of time. So I mentioned the serious games, which usually could happen in an hour or two, but then for a lot of, uh, more leadership or skill development learning experiences, those could happen over a period of a week or even a month.

And the back and forth then is enabled through notifications. So, for example, if Becky and I are learning together, Becky will watch something and will practice something. And then when she shares that, I'll get a notification and I can respond to it tomorrow, my own space and on time.

I could be in the office, I could be outside. And it's really the mobile friendliness of it also makes it very easy to respond from wherever you are. And then finally, for trainers or for the organizers of these learning experiences, they have a live dashboard. They can see the progress the learners are making in real time.

There's a bunch of analytics, and they are able to, in some cases, even provide feedback to the learners directly from this dashboard. And then that sort of brings us into the plugin. But I'll let maybe Becky talk about the partnership, and I'll talk a little bit about the technical details of the integration later.

Over to you, Becky.

Absolutely. So, I mean, uh, if you're already a moodle client, hopefully you can see that there's all sorts of exciting ways in which you can use Gamoteca in order to enhance your learning. This asynchronous human connection is incredibly powerful, but we also know it needs to fit in with your organization and the way it works, which is why we have partnered with Moodle and become a certified partner.

So that should give you lots of confidence. Um, as part of the Moodle certification process, we have to be able to show that our plugin is good, that our solution is good, and that it's going to serve you and your learners. So as a Moodle partner, uh, if you are a Moodle partner and you're working with lots of different clients, then we are definitely very happy to work with you.

We're really excited to be able to provide you with, uh, support, help to then give all the benefits of Gamoteca to your current clients. And, uh, of course we can give you lots of benefits when we do that. Um, we can help open up new sales opportunities for you and upselling for you with existing clients.

And of course there is a, ah, percentage of license fees. There are also other opportunities such as customization. So we do work with clients on bespoke projects in order to really get the most out of using Gamoteca in their organizations. So that's an option for you, um, to be thinking about if you're a moodle partner, if you want to find out more about that.

So moodle.com certified. Integrations, forward slash Gamoteca, or you can get in touch with us directly and then to talk to you a little bit more. If you are a client, if you have learners, we know that you need to make it as seamless as possible in terms of your learner experience.

So if you've already got Moodle, if you're using that as your LMS, we have to be able to create this plugin so it's nice and easy for you. And this can just be integrated into the learning experiences that you have with users. So if you have something that's perhaps a little bit more passive as a learning journey, but then you want to add something where there is human connection, where you're able to do that at scale with lots of learners, students, employees, uh, whoever you're working with, then we're able to do that for you as well.

Again, it's very, very simple. All you need is to get the plugin from the Moodle plugins page and have an account with Gamoteca. Then, your learners can launch Gamoteca seamlessly. They don't even really need to know that this is it. This is all going on in the background.

We'd be really excited to hear from you about how you would like to use it. But you can also go through the process of downloading the plugin and getting going by yourselves as well.

You can either go to the Moodle certifications page and, uh, yeah, so you can learn more about us and learn more about the plugin. You can also reach out to us directly from here. The other place as well is you can just go to Gamoteca.com directly as well. And you can try us out as a learner.

So you can download the app, uh, on your phone or try it on the browser. So you can try some of these learning experiences as a learner, and you can actually sign up as a creator and sign up for a free account and start creating some of these technology enhanced collaboration activities or tech as yourself.

And so I really encourage you to try this out. As I mentioned, there's a number of other resources as well. We have a lot of inspiring cases, studies from clients. There's plenty of support articles, including how to use and install the plugin from Moodle as well. Thanks so much for listening to us.

And Lucy, over to you in case you would like to ask us any questions.

I guess this one's probably a nice one for you. Becky, how do you envision Gamoteca impacting Moodle users and the e learning community? Yeah, I think Gamoteca can be really powerful in terms of increasing the impact of learning and development activities. So, and, um, we've seen this already with people that we engage with, that it goes so much beyond a lot of kind of knowledge acquisition that we would often see in terms of online learning.

We've, uh, already spoken about this, but skills development is one thing. So really focusing on areas where you need to practice, you need to actually probably fail and get some feedback as you go along and be able to do that in a supported way. Um, often the only ways organizations can do that is in a very intensive face to face, or perhaps kind of very one to one manager, um, or mentor mentee, that kind of relationship.

And with Gamoteca we allow that at much greater scale. So uh, for me what I'm excited about is what that means in terms of us really being able to shift the way the organizations can work. We can put some really great practice in to support employees and um, also to support learners.

So for me that's the vision really is to be able to facilitate things that we know are good, but often are only reserved for, you know, maybe the highest level of organisations or for those who perhaps are very privileged to be able to work with great teachers or trainers.

And uh, now we can make that more scalable, more accessible and therefore have a much bigger impact.

Excellent, that's great. Are there any technological advancements that you are looking forward to in the edtech space? It might be things that are already happening or things that you can imagine happening with Gamoteca? I'd love to know.

I think for both of us, we've been in the edtech space for a really long time, so in some ways it feels like we're having the same conversations as maybe we had ten years ago. Um, but we're really seeing things come to fruition in a way that is where there's mass adoption.

And of course the first thing that springs to mind is AI, large learning, large language models. And so we can certainly do a lot now in terms of AI and how that's used in learning. But I think again, having it built into a platform allows us to also be really thinking about how it's implemented because I think when you have um, when you have new technologies coming about, sure we can do lots of exciting things, but where's the validation, where's the kind of curation of um, and the thought that goes behind perhaps some of the content that's coming out.

So for me I think it's really exciting to be able to think about kind of human AI collaboration and how you bring those two things together to create really great learning experiences. And I think throughout my whole career this has always been something that I'm very passionate about, which is we've got to use the technology that exists.

I mean it has a lot of power, but we also have to be really mindful about how we use it, how we implement it, and not forget the human along the way. Because at the end of the day it's that human experience that we're trying to create human development.

So yeah, that's definitely a big one. I would say that we will certainly be implementing. Um, and I'm excited about, just quickly to mention, I think in my career, I've worked a lot with immersive technologies, um, VR in particular, and ar. And there's certainly roles that. That can play.

We've seen a lot of benefits, especially, we mentioned before, kind of different scenarios, role playing, that kind of thing. I think that looking to the future, there, uh, are going to be ways to kind of maybe plug that into a Gamoteca experience. And, uh, so that's also something that I think can be quite exciting again, whether it comes from us, whether it comes from partnerships and plugins.

Um, but, yeah, I think Atish also.

Has several exciting technology ideas and visions for where we're going to be going as well.

I think, Becky, you captured it really well. Just maybe to build on the generative AI area, which everyone is quite excited about, as Becky said, for us, learning is a very human endeavor. So I think that's really still a core part of it. There's two aspects of leveraging generative AI in Gamoteca.

One is for learners to drive engagement. And so, as Becky said, less about. I think a lot of people are getting excited about content creation, generative AI, but what we are excited about is actually better, facilitating the human to human connection. So that could be very practical things like, we have learners all around the world speaking very different languages.

So, Lucy, let's say you speak Spanish, only Spanish, and I speak only English. We could still be mentoring each other, but using generative AI to do asynchronous translation of as we're mentoring each other, it could be creating very bespoke activities. Let's say one of the activities is to share a project or an idea, and that activity could be very bespoke to what you've just shared.

So the generative AI could come up with a case study that's not very generic, but that's more tailored to the learner's needs. But then the feedback is still coming from another human, maybe with some AI prompts, assistance, et cetera, as well. So it is much more facilitating that peer to peer learning.

So these are very practical things of driving engagement and impact. And then for the creators also, um, I mentioned real time translation for the learners. But for creators also, one of the big challenges, uh, for our creators is how to localize into multiple languages. So just driving efficiencies for better localization.

So not just language, everything, the case studies, the names, everything can be much better localized now using generative AI, um, as well as being able to come up with even storytelling and creative ideas. So we've been working on openaid. I will be sharing this shortly. Essentially a custom GPT we've created that help creators, essentially that initial steps of storyboarding when you are building out your first tech, uh, on Gamoteca and being able to move from, this is my concept.

How do I turn this into a two or three learner peer to peer experience? It's not just about content. It's also about suggesting activities. This custom GPT comes up with ideas and gets this creative juices flowing and helps really with that. Then putting that into really nice storyboard format in the Gamoteca platform really helps.

Uh, the creators as well in their design process too.

Excellent. So that's in addition to kind of pre made templates you can already use, you've also got a custom solution for people starting out. That's excellent. So I know that many universities academics, uh, are working with Moodle and you use it as your lms and uh, of course all your learners are using it to access everything throughout their learning journeys.

Um, I'm actually one of those academics as well. Work at the University of Exeter in the business school and we use moodle. Um, and I know what it's like. We need to put everything on there. Um, and we've got all that online content that then compensates.

What we're doing when we're face to face. And in fact, more and more things are moving online. And so I think that having the Gamoteca platform as an extra tool that you can use is really exciting. So, for example, I teach entrepreneurship and I do a whole module on organizational talent.

And during that module, teams have to go and work together. And we know what students feel about being in teams and working together. Uh, they find it challenging, but I'm not going to hold their hands through all of it. So instead of that, I can create different, uh, Gamoteca learning experiences that allow them to get a little bit of nudging from me, a, um, little bit of facilitation, but, um, actually allows them to go off and it kind of makes it safer, slightly more guided as they're working together as teams.

Uh, but it means that they are learning as they go. So, I mean, there's thousands of examples that I could give in terms of how we could use Gamoteca in different academic settings, but that's just one example. So, I mean, if you're somebody who's working in an organization, of course, ah, try and get your it teams to get that Gamoteca plugin.

Um, that's probably the first thing that you need to do if they haven't already. And if you are leading on it, then make sure that you've got the Gamotecaplugin. And again, like Tish was saying earlier, have a play with some of the learning experiences to get up to speed with it.

If you want help in terms of how might you create something, please do get in touch with us. But otherwise, really think about where could you do with some, um, asynchronous human connection. It's everywhere across our learning where this can be really helpful. So have a think about that and then please do implement Gamoteca into your learning pathways with your students.

I know that they enjoy it, they really love working with it. So yeah, I think it can really enhance the learning that is happening within the academic setting.

The biggest opportunity for learning and the biggest untapped learning resource in organizations are its people. The best way to tap that resource is people. The way they use coaching and mentoring within organization. So mentoring, focusing, for example, on helping transfer some of the immense knowledge and lived experience and skills that exist, and helping newcomers in the organization of people who don't have a skill set to benefit from that.

And traditionally, coaching and mentoring has been quite difficult to scale and it's been offered at more senior levels. So it's a methodology we know has worked for a while, but it's been difficult to scale. So with Gamoteca you are able to then, um, provide that bespoke knowledge and experience from others, but do it in a way where they can do it effectively and time effectively for them as well.

So if you do want to find out more, you can find us at Gamoteca.com. or you can come find us on social media. We're on Instagram at underscore learn. Or we're on LinkedIn as well. So come and find us. Gamoteca Uh, on LinkedIn. And of course, you can find Atish and I there as well.

Atish and Becky, thank you so much for being part of this podcast. And to everyone else, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more, visit the show notes for a video. Version of this podcast with more information, or visit moodle.com. catch you next time.