Martin:
Hello and welcome to the Moodle Podcast. *Intro Music*

Lauren:
Hello and welcome to the Moodle Podcast. My name is Lauren Goodman. I am the Product Marketing Manager here at Moodle. So today I have the honor of speaking with Scott Anderberg, our CEO. I, um, wanted to say new CEO. And you are relatively new to Moodle, but really not so new anymore.

So Scott, I think this is one of your first times getting to be introduced to the Moodle community. We're so happy to have you. Um, could you start by introducing yourself and just telling us a little bit about yourself before you join Moodle too?

Scott:
Yeah, Thanks, Lauren. It is really exciting to be here. You're right that I am. It's not really new anymore. I just passed the 12-month mark. The last 12 months have been full of getting to meet community members in different venues, meeting a lot of our partners, meeting a lot of our customers, and meeting a lot of our users that are out there.

Had a fantastic opportunity to meet people in global, global Moodle moot, uh, down in Mexico and Merida last year. But this is definitely the first time getting to really broadcast this. Um, and so thanks for the opportunity to do so. You, uh, asked a little bit about uh, my journey here so I can talk a little bit about my story.

I've, I've been in online education my entire career, which is almost 25 years now. I started in the LMS space actually, so uh, the to Moodle is actually a bit of a return to my roots in online education. I started with Ecollege back in the US in Colorado back in early 2000, was there for seven or eight years.

In fact, I started with Ecollege in the help desk. Uh, so my very first exposure to working uh, with LMS and its customers was actually directly with users, helping them solve problems and, and then just had a lot of opportunities to move through the organization. I worked in product, I worked in sales, uh, operations, I worked specifically in sales and account management.

Ecollege was acquired by Pearson, uh, in 2007 and I had the opportunity following that to uh, move to London and work in a market development role as Pearson worked on how it wanted to internationalize the offering. So, uh, I spent quite a bit of time in the UK and across Europe, the Middle east and Africa, uh, which was a really, really rich period of getting to understand the global education ecosystem.

It's where I really developed an interest in educational access, which has been the thread of my career since then. We went from London and spent about three and a half years in Sydney, and after Sydney, we were back in the UK for seven and a half years, with a couple of short stints in Colorado between those big international moves.

So a lot of moving in the last 15 years and then ultimately started here with Moodle in uh, February of last year. So, as I said, we just passed the 12-month mark, but it's been a really, really exciting year.

Lauren:
Awesome. So, yeah, happy Moodleversary, as we say here. Um, so, uh, with all of this experience you've had in E learning and starting in direct support and all of this experience, what do you really love about learning?

Scott:
As I mentioned just a minute ago, the thread in my career has been pursuing access to education. While traveling through the Middle East and Africa, that market development role, particularly in the developing parts of the world, became so obvious. The disparity between regions that have access to high-quality education and those that don't.

And so you can see what that does to the quality of society, the quality of employability, the development opportunities and the opportunities for individuals. And that really has been the thing that I've wanted to uh, make an impact on throughout my career. What that meant is that most of my time with Pearson was spent working with universities to help them develop and launch fully online programs.

Probably a little bit. Paradoxically my focus was on graduate programs. But it was because, uh, I think developing access to education is really hard. If you think about where access is needed the most, logically where you need to start with that is right at the very bottom of the educational pyramid and start with the schools and making sure that you're building that foundation well.

But it's really hard to do that because resources are really scarce there. My thinking was always that if we could begin to develop a model and I could start to really understand access at scale with the end of the educational spectrum where there were quite a lot of resources available, which are graduate programs and professional learning, this we could move backwards.

And by the time I finished that program at Pearson, we were offering graduate programs to students in over 150 countries globally. Really working out how to begin to bring the price down, seeing a lot of progress. It was really exciting. Do some strategic decisions there. Um, it was just the right time for me to move on.

And this position with Moodle came along at just the right time. I can't imagine a better platform than Moodle to continue to think about educational access. Moodle is the most widely used LMS in the world over 430 million users at this point. And those are just our, uh, registered users.

So there's far more out there than that. Suddenly taking a lot of those lessons that I've learned over the last 15 years of working on creating programs that were accessible other places, now I can think about educational access on a much different scale. Not only full degree programs, but a wide, wide range of learning activities that cover both, uh, the traditional academic sector as well as professional learning.

For all the work that we do in the business space.

Lauren:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so in your time at Moodle thus far, uh, tell me, what have you learned about Moodle, about the organization, the community? Just anything you'd want to share that kind of stands out to you?

Scott:
Yeah, so one of the things I've gotten to do quite a lot in the last year is actually talk about the things that I've observed and that I've learned and that's been really fun to do. The two things that jump out to me the very most are that first, first of all, there is an enormous amount of goodwill for Moodle, the strength of the community globally and the enthusiasm for Moodle as a continued open source project.

And it's because of the power in that, uh, enthusiasm and the social mission of that project that's really driven those kinds of user volumes that I talked about a minute ago. Um, people, people love use the ethos and the mission of Moodle. And it's been so fun to get to join that, be a part of that.

The second thing I would say is that it is one of the most complex ecosystems I've ever been a part of. And that's not a criticism at all. That complexity creates really, uh, interesting opportunities. But we are first and foremost an open source project. We are also a set of products, we are also a company.

And that all sits inside the ecosystem of users, uh, customers and partners, all of which are working together in some way to continue to move, uh, Moodle forward and advance it, both in terms of its use and its innovation. So those two things are standout. I'd really be remiss to if I didn't say that enthusiasm that sits in the community is there because of the enthusiasm that's inside the organization.

I've been very few places where, uh, it's more delightful to work because of the commitment and the passion that everybody brings to work every day. So that's been incredibly exciting as well.

Yeah, yeah. Um, is there, can you think of anything, a, ah, moment or anything that kind of for you, captures the spirit of the organization that's happened to you over the past year.

It feels cliche to say this because everybody told me this would be the case, but until you're at a moot, you can't really understand how that feels. I've been to a lot of educational conferences in my career, both trade shows and more traditional academic style conference settings, and nothing feels quite like a mood.

It isn't until you're there and you have individuals from m. Uh, in our case this year, from over 50 countries, most of whom don't work with each other on a regular basis. But when you're there and come together and you see the sense of community that actually manifests, it's.

It's remarkable. And I, I would definitely say that is the standout moment.

Lauren:
Yeah, absolutely. I had that experience of the moot this year talking with, you know, a person who told me that other conferences they've been to, they felt kind of like an outsider for some, you know, different reasons. And they told me, like, I've never felt more welcome and more happy to be here.

And that was the absolute best thing I could have possibly heard. You know, I think that's exactly what we want. And that's really the vibe. Yeah, totally. All right, so Scott, Moodle has been around for 20 years. Where do you see Moodle evolving in the next few years and beyond?

Scott:
Uh, so this, I'd probably answer that first by augmenting the previous answer I gave in terms of other things I've observed. You cannot, uh, begin to become familiar with Moodle and not really rapidly see the kind of impact that it's made. And so as I look back on the last 20 or 25 years of Moodle being around and all of the work that Martin did early on to get it off the ground and begin to get it distributed and see that uptake, the kinds of things that have been accomplished are amazing.

When you go back to that notion of educational access, there are literally hundreds of thousands of Moodle sites out there that are there simply because Moodle is available as a free, open source product. And because of that, there are users all over the world that have access to learning materials that likely otherwise wouldn't at the quality that they do, um, today.

So as I think about the next stage, uh, for us at Moodle, um, the first thing is to recognize that that level of impact is what we want to continue to have. So as we think about the next 10, 25, 50 and even 100 years, I think we have every reason to believe that in spite of the rapidly changing environment in which we operate and the difficulty it is to forecast 100 years from now, we have every reason to believe that Moodle has a really important role.

To play, um, over the next century of educational evolution and development. But that's because we'll stay focused on, on impact and access and affordability and making sure that we provide really quality products that enable all that. But it's also become clear that if we're going to do that, there are some things we need to change about the way that we operate as a business.

There, uh, needs to be a stronger foundation of sustainability in the organization. And so we are working really hard to think about what are those things that we do as we look at that broad footprint. Moodle has created an awful lot of value in the market. But I really believe that we need to capture some more of that value back into Moodle to ensure that we can continue to make that impact for the, for the long term.

So we're looking at how we continue to offer more services directly in the markets where we have, uh, direct service organizations, specifically in the US and in India. We are working hard to support our partners even better than we have to make sure that they're as successful as possible.

Those are partners operating across 70, uh, countries. So that gives us a huge global footprint. We are going to continue to look at how we enhance and grow Moodle workplace as a premium component. For Moodle that's been hugely successful. And we know that there are people that really appreciate those premium elements and we'll continue to build on that.

So all of those will form a strong part of how we continue in order to do all that. We are in the process of reshaping the way we work as a business. We're reorganizing to make sure that we're more agile, that we are better at making decisions rapidly, and that we can work together as an organization with a really singular focus to make those things happen.

Lauren:
I remember, I think the very first time I heard you speak, maybe in an all hands meeting, I remember you kind uh, of our call to action, call to thought, you know, call to imagining was to, you know, in 100 years, what do you want Moodle's legacy to be?

What are we? Where are we in 100 years? Um, and it kind of makes me think, you know, what you were describing in your past, um, with thinking toward graduate programs, right? Like our end goal, where are we here? And then let's think backwards from there. You know, my background is in instructional design.

And that's what we do, right? We do backward design. Like this is what we want for our learner here. How do we get there by like working backwards from there. And I Loved that, you know, I loved having that, like really thinking long term, that vision, that legacy.

Scott:
That's great. It's been a really fun way to imagine things. It's a daunting exercise actually. If you actually sit down and try to think about what education looks like 100 years from now, it literally is almost impossible. It's, uh, a fictional exercise, but a really important one because it allows you, all of us, to engage our imagination and out of that comes the kind of energy that's actually going to help us move forward.

Lauren:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned that Moodle, of course, um, is open source, will continue to be open source. What is the biggest thing that you've discovered about open source learning? And you know, this role Moodle plays in global education as you've been talking about, you know, why does open source matter?

Scott:
This is a really fun question because I'm, I'm new to open source. None of my career until I was at Moodle was in the open source space. I've learned an awful lot. Before I respond directly to your question, though, the way that you asked that reminded me it's really important as we think about what we are doing and what we are, uh, going to put some time and energy in what may potentially change or grow or develop, to also talk about what we're not going to do.

And you said this quite specifically, that there's a continued commitment to open source. And I want to reinforce that because in all of the things that we're thinking, what building a more sustainable platform for Moodle does not mean is a departure from our commitment to having a fully open, freely available, enterprise capable lms that is at the heart of who we are, what we do and the mission that we have as a, uh, as a project, as an organization.

And we feel like it's a big part of what makes us both special, unique and competitive in the marketplace. So that'll continue to be a huge source of value and a remaining commitment for us because, um, of that I really have tried to think through, what is it about open Source that is so important?

What is it about this in the community? I'm new to it. I really want to get my hands around it. And there are three things, um, in the last year that as I've observed it and really processed it, that I think are particularly important and meaningful in terms of what open source brings to the world and the communities in which it operates.

This is not unique to Moodle; it is true of other open-source platforms. I think this is inherent to the notion of openness. These are fairly philosophical, but I think they're really important because a lot of the other practical advantages build on top of this. So there's.

There are three things that I've noted. The first is that, I think openness facilitates inclusivity. And I think that's because anyone can take advantage of it. So by its very nature it's inclusive because there are no walls. Anyone can use it, everyone is invited to use. Um, doesn't discriminate, it doesn't create in groups, it doesn't stereotype, it doesn't marginalize or villainize.

That level of inclusivity is amazing. Everyone actually can have a place. And what that means is we get to take advantage of anybody who wants to use it, which inherently means that it also encourages diversity and that diversity allows for a much broader platform of innovation. There's a huge spectrum of ideas out there.

And because of that diversity, the kind of innovation that comes back into the platform from our community of contributors, whether those are the people, individuals out there that are developing plugins or it comes from our partner network who are working on custom development projects for, um, their customers, we're seeing a much bigger set of uh, innovation than you would ever get, um, in a closed proprietary system.

And the last one is that that diversity fosters creativity. One of the funnest things that I have seen as I've done this are the kinds of customizations or modifications that have been made on Moodle. I have seen implementations of Moodle that absolutely don't look like Moodle. If you are familiar with Moodle, if you've worked in Moodle, you have a sense most of time what Moodle looks like.

And I have seen implementations that have been completely changed in terms of the interface, the workflows that are used, the assessment types, and it's done to create environments and learning experiences for learner audiences that really need something unique and as a result are taking advantage of these really unique experiences.

So those are the things uh, that I've seen so far that I love the most. I think it encourages the kind of culture that we want inside the organization, but also that we want inside the entire community. We want to be, uh, a place that's inclusive. We want to draw on the diversity of ideas and uh, that diversity of ideas.

We want to see that turn into really creative output.

Lauren:
Yeah, absolutely. The more different we are, the stronger we are. And I love that. When I look at Moodle, um, now obviously I love Moodle, of course, when I'm in there. When I'm looking at Moodle, when I'm using Moodle, I'm seeing many, many hands. You know, like a mural, just a mural of um, different folks working over the years and collaborating and kind of riffing on each other.

You know, I, you, you mentioned you've seen Moodle. That doesn't even look like Moodle. You know, and, and I think it's so exciting too. Sometimes you see or you, you just learn that Moodle is running underneath something. You know, I saw an amazing project where courses, were being delivered entirely by SMS, in areas where there was very limited Internet connectivity, completely powered by Moodle underneath.

And the folks who developed that, they were kind of riffing on the Moodle mobile app and took a lot of learning from that but then adapted it to what was needed in that area. And I just thought that was so amazing and so beautiful to kind of think of all those hands involved in that over the years to get to that point where someone is able to learn about clean drinking water via SMS entirely.

Scott:
Yeah, yeah. I mean one of the examples that I highlighted at the moot is um, an organization out of South Australia called the Inventorium, focused on high uh, school students that are at risk and have dropped out. The traditional learning system inside schools simply don't work for them. They've created a fully customized Moodle environment which is all student driven.

Students pick their learning paths. They're matched up with um, an individual mentor. Assessments are not at all like what you would expect inside a classroom. Um, they do things through competency driven uh, work and it's been incredibly successful because the level of customization is there, driven by that kind of creativity, uh, that creates this output which means that we're able to reach another audience that otherwise would get missed.

And so again you see this wrap around from the openness of the software itself being inclusive to creating an environment that is bringing in a group that otherwise would get excluded.

Lauren:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so, you know, looking ahead, how do you see Moodle's role in kind of the broader open source movement in education, in workplace learning? Where do you kind of see that, maybe, maybe even in the near future?

Scott:
So I think we're going to continue to work in all of the industries that we currently are available in. Because it's open source, Moodle is available everywhere. Where we've seen the most growth over the last few years has been actually in workforce learning. And I think we're going to continue to see that as I mentioned before.

The success of the workplace product suggests that there's lots of demand there for better platforms to facilitate learning and development inside corporate environments. What I'm really excited about is I think we bring nothing. Only the platform, but skills and expertise that can help these organizations move from programs that are often positioned as learning development, but really are about compliance or regulatory exercises and actually move to places where there are really strong development programs in place where uh, learning can be driven by the employee in a way that both helps them, uh, but also provides a benefit to the business.

And as a result you see much higher engagement, much higher output. Just done some recent research with a third party organization on this, um, that's really helped to see the level of burnout across the corporate workforce right now and some of the things that we think learning development could do to help that when it's done well.

And I think we can bring those skills and expertise to places to help organizations do it well in the academic space. I think we have the opportunity. We are the most widely used LMS in higher ed by far, globally. And I think many institutions are moving to a place rapidly as the needs of their students increase, um, that the organization themselves will continue to have a harder and harder time meeting those needs if they are doing it by themselves.

And we are really well positioned either through our partner network or through the services we provide directly to actually help them get over that scalability hump. Um, continue to use Moodles, continue to get to have something that is as flexible and customizable as that for their very specific learning experiences.

But I think we're going to see the opportunity to work more closely and more directly with lots of those higher ed organizations around the world, which is certainly what we want to be doing. I think there's an opportunity for us. Uh, we've seen this growth as well, that there are more and more government agencies that are needing to take learning as a key piece of what they're doing, either for their own employees or through things they're offering as value, uh, back out to the societies that they serve.

And Moodle sits in a really unique place there. We have the opportunity to offer the product much more flexibly and within the security parameters and requirements of those organizations. And I think we're going to see a lot of growth across the work we do with government agencies around the world.

Lauren:
Yeah, so much there. Um, when you were talking about workplace learning, um, when I have these conversations, I often um, hear sort of this, like that videos is the assumption like I'm watching a video and then maybe I'm answering some questions. Right? That's just kind of this assumption. And you know, I think Moodle disrupts that by its nature.

You know, Moodle is founded in social constructivism, which is all about bringing people together and learning in community, and has so many, you know, of those tools that help facilitate that. But really it's about, you know, human, humans bringing humans together in that community. And, you know, I see that in what we're doing in workplace learning.

And I just kind of hear that as a through line in everything that you've been talking about is really bringing people together for these common goals, whatever they may be.

Scott:
Togetherness is a really big value for me personally, if we look at it just at an organizational level. I think we ask people who are part of an organization to give the two most valuable things they have, which is their time and their talent, to whatever the objective of that organization is for more hours a week than any other single thing that they do.

And I think if you are going to ask them to do that, there has to be a high degree of fulfillment for them in it. And you have to like to do it with the people that are around you all the time. This partly just emanates out from the things that I care about as a leader and I care about as, as a member of an organization myself, that that has to be true.

But because of that really unique environment in which Moodle operates, where we are part of this complex ecosystem, I think it's important that that notion of togetherness permeates beyond the boundaries of the organization and out into the community. And so when I say that, I really mean it as a community.

That's not a euphemism just for the stakeholders or the constituents. We have this, this is a community of learners and users and administrators and partners and developers and translators and all kinds of things. So that idea of togetherness is really, really key in how we operate.

Lauren:
I have a few rapid-fire questions that you don't know about that I'll ask you to wrap up. But before we get to those, is there anything else you want to add, any kind of message to send to our community?

Scott:
I think the thing that I would say more than anything else is thank you. This has been a big transition for everybody as I've come into this role. Moodle does things in a very specific way. And when I say that in that sense, I mean the middle of the community has done things in a specific way for a long time.

And this, this represents change. And people have been so incredibly generous with their hospitality and their time and their knowledge and, and I just feel really privileged to have gotten to step into this and be a part of It. So that would be the most important thing, to say thank you.

And then I would say, in that spirit of togetherness, I remain really excited about what we're going to do together moving forward. I'm really excited about the first year as a foundational year. There's a lot of exciting things to come. I suspect there'll be a lot of opportunities for discussion and in that, probably disagreement at times.

But ultimately, I really believe that we are headed towards doing some really important things for learners all over the world through the kind of activity that we can move forward together.

Lauren:
I'm not gonna cry. You're not gonna cry? I'm not gonna cry. Okay, here we go.

Scott:
Okay, here we go.

Lauren:
All right. Some questions for you. What was your favorite subject in elementary school? And why?

Scott:
Elementary school would be English? All. Uh, that's. That's true. Right up until university, English was my favorite subject. I loved. I love stories. I've always loved stories, and so it was the place that I can engage in stories, and then I love to write. So those two things definitely stood out.

Lauren:
What's something you've learned recently?

Scott:
Ah, something I have learned recently. Um, bats are a protected species. In the UK, we, uh, discovered that we had something living in our attic or a loft, depending on which part of the world you come from. Um, I thought it was mice. It turns out it's bats, and there's nothing you can do about them.

So we've had to just sort of seal things up and make peace with the fact that we've got some, uh, friends who are roosting in the attic.

And they're still there.

Oh, as we speak, they're still there. Um, I mean, from what I understand, they. They stay a long time, and as soon as you have more than one bat, then you really have a problem. So we're trying to. Trying to look into what we can do to limit the proliferation of bats.

Lauren:
If you had to describe Moodle to an alien from outer space, how would you describe it?

Scott:
I would say that Moodle is a digital environment that allows individuals to connect through a variety of activities for the purpose of learning together.

Lauren:
Love that. Okay. What was the best feedback you. You ever got from a teacher?

Scott:
You know, the best feedback you usually get is. Tends to be the hardest feedback at the time. I already said that I really liked to write, and I took a variety of, uh, writing courses in university specifically. But I consistently got, uh, feedback that I was way too wordy and way too overly complex with the language that I Use.

And I would like to think. I mean, it was always frustrating to me because you'd look at your writing and you'd think, that paragraph's brilliant. It's perfectly constructed. And of course, it's not. It's like 90% unnecessary. And so I would like to think that that's gotten better. I guess listeners can decide after they hear this whether or not I've gotten any better at being wordy, but I think that that's improved.

Lauren:
Uh, kill your darlings, right? Kill your darlings.

Scott:
Yeah, that's right.

Lauren:
All right, last one. Now, obviously, the reason we do all of this is for our learners. Right? Um, so what is your wish for every learner out there?

Scott:
Oh, that they are surprised when they begin to engage with whatever the content is or the new idea. I think surprise is one of the most underrated energies in all of education. Um, uh, sometimes surprise comes as shock. Sometimes it comes as, ah, euphoria. You know, in both cases, what it does is generate some sense of curiosity and reward that drives you deeper into what you're doing.

I think one of the pieces of language that's developed around education in the last five or ten years that I really dislike is the notion of, uh, learners as consumers. I think this is a real problem. I do think we need to be very careful about how we treat our learners because we have to be responsive to their needs.

But if you start to think about education as something you consume, you put education in the same bucket as YouTube or Netflix or any other streaming service where you sit and binge. And education doesn't work that way. Like, for education to work, you have to let it consume you.

And the only way that that happens is when you make yourself. You put yourself in a position where you can be surprised, and it creates this curiosity to dive further into it. So I hope every learner is surprised by something.

Lauren:

All right, well, Scott, this has been a pleasure. Your first time on the Moodle podcast. I'm sure not your last. So thank you so much for being here with us today.

Scott:
It's m. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Lauren. This was really fun.