Hello and a very big welcome to the Moodle podcast. A couple of new hosts for you in this episode. So we're going to kick off with introductions for you, Shalimar. Well hi there, I am Shalimar and I am so happy to be here.

First of all, I work as the Global Head of Service Delivery Operations based in the US and was hosting the last episode of the podcast. So you might recognize my voice. Like I said, happy to be here.

And my name is Dan Lehner. I'm the chief commercial officer at Moodle, based in London, England, and I look after all of our frontline teams on the commercial side in Moodle and also the amazing team that supports our network of certified partners all over the globe and our technology partners as well. So it's a real pleasure to be in that role. I've been Chief Commercial Officer for nearly two years now, and it's an extreme pleasure to add this to the list of responsibilities I have. 

So you may have seen Shal and myself on the global stage.

 Um, so we are very, very pleased today to have, uh, a return visit from somebody who also graced that stage, gave an amazing talk up in Edinburgh last year. And that is Liz Starbuck Greer. Now Liz is Moodle’s director of global sales and partnerships. But beyond that, she's a doctoral researcher at the University of Bath and is going to talk more about that side of her life today. So Liz, a very warm welcome to you. Do you want to say a couple of words just to kick us off? 

Thanks, Dan and Shalimar. It's great to be here. As Dan says, I work for Moodle, but I am also doing some research on the side as part of my doctorate. My background is in higher education, so I've worked most of my career prior to Moodle for business schools, in particular, running graduate business programmes. And as part of that, I became really interested in the outcomes that learners get from higher education and how those might be different depending on the backgrounds that they have and the skills that they bring when they enter those programs.

So that's kind of how I got into the world of research, and I am excited to be here and talk more about that today. Excellent. And so primarily you're here to talk about digital capital. Just to kick us off with a quick summary of what you mean by Digital Capital. Yeah. So it was great to present at the Global in Edinburgh some exploration that I've done on the idea of digital capital. And this is a concept that builds on work by Pierre Bourdieu, who was a French sociologist. 

And anyone that's been interested in equality has probably come across him and the work that he's done. So I'm sure many of the folks who are educators in the audience will have heard of him. So he identified three forms of capital that people possess that determines in his belief, people's position in society. So, thinking about it being more than just money. So he was interested in economic capital, which is money and assets, but also things like cultural capital.

So the knowledge and skills, and education that someone might have that confers status in society and their social capital. So the network of relationships and connections they have, and this is the idea that it's not just what you know, it's who you know. And so, since then, many academics have developed all kinds of forms of capital to explain the different ways in which people might advance through society. 

Digital capital is one of those that has emerged as we've begun to understand more about the digital divide and the way in which technology can lead to equality, but also how it can be unequal in the way in which people generate benefits from it. So for me, digital capital is a lens through which I can try and understand the different experiences and outcomes that learners might have, depending on their access to technology. There are skills in using technology and how they can leverage those skills to derive benefit.

And essentially, it's just a lens that we can look through as we think about differences that learners might have and how we can design to support learners better.

 Your session at the Global Moot this last year was nothing short of a revelation for me. I recall being really moved emotionally. Listening to it just really gave me a lot of new tools for thinking about how we frame accessibility. Uh, and the framework that you presented highlights supportive networks as a pillar of high digital capital in an increasingly isolated digital learning world. How how do you think educators can help learners build those networks from scratch?

This is crucial. I know it's something that many educators, particularly in the online space, really worry about, and we know that online learning communities can be so enriching to all of us, whether in a learning capacity or not. But the research shows that student success in online learning can actually be heavily influenced by that kind of learner to learner engagement. So it's really important that we think about these things. From my perspective, looking at the literature and the practice that I see out there, I think learners with lower levels of digital capital may have less capacity to shape the community.

When you set up an online community in a in a course, you might think, well, I want everybody to engage. I want everybody to be part of this. And you might get frustrated that you see certain students not seeming to engage. But in fact, for students who have lower levels of digital capital, they may actually be kind of concentrating on trying to understand the norms of this community. Maybe they haven't experienced how to network online in a more professional capacity before, and that can be particularly intimidating if you're talking about a higher learning context or a workplace training environment. And so they might be anxious about engaging in that community. And when you see sometimes the same names popping up in your forums or in the discussions that you're posting, rather than kind of getting frustrated that other people aren't engaging, it might be worth kind of stepping back and thinking maybe they have some anxiety around this. Maybe they don't understand the best way to engage in this community. And this is where teaching presence is so important. And obviously, all course models are different.

And, you know, you may not actually physically be present with your learners synchronously as a teacher, but you can still give really clear instructions and model how learners can engage within a community and find ways to facilitate that inclusively, whether it's through yourself or through sort of peer to peer mentors in that community. And that really gives a sort of scaffolding to help folks that have lower levels of digital capital understand how to engage and to start to get the best out of these online learning communities.

Yeah. I remember you talking in Edinburgh about a kind of digital self-esteem, and that was a phrase that really stuck with me. So when you're when listeners are thinking about kind of designing learning activities to try and boost that self-efficacy and self-esteem and so on alongside the pure subject matter, how do you go about that?


 Yeah, it's really interesting. I find the whole concept of self-efficacy Just totally fascinating that this sort of you believe you can do it. 

So you do this idea that actually your your performance, your ability to do something is enhanced by your belief that you can do it. I just think that's absolutely fascinating. And, you know, anyone who's designed courses, whether they're online or face to face or worked with learners, will naturally think about how to establish progression from the basic concepts that they want to teach right through to the more advanced. So that comes very naturally pedagogically as an educator and sometimes in the online learning environment, we are less intentional about how we design learning activities to help build those digital skills. So, you know, really kind of basic idea is that don't jump to an activity that requires a lot of digital skill or may seem unfamiliar if you're very ofay with technology and you, you know, have lots of really exciting ideas for how you can use your LMS or other types of digital technology to to give people kind of exciting learning activities, you may miss out on the fact that you really need to do that same progression as you would do with your subject matter. 

So start with something kind of basic or familiar that may be modeled on things that people would use technology for in another scenario. And, you know, put lots of scaffolding in place for those early activities. So again, clear instructions, nudges, reminders about how to complete it, which you can remove progressively over time, just as you would do when you remove the sort of supports that you put in place for the subject matter. So I think a lot of it is just about being intentional. And particularly, as I say, if you're really okay with technology and you love learning technology, it's easy to get carried away and not think about how some of those learners might find that a little bit intimidating. I love that a phrase that like, stuck out to me, um, is autonomy without abandonment, right? Like that as a concept. 

Um, you were talking about teacher presence and and and things like that. That's to be really intentional about that is so, so important. And, that phrase just really, really stuck with me. Well, we often talk about flexibility in digital learning. So how do we ensure that flexibility doesn't unintentionally place more burden on learners who lack resources to manage their own digital environments?

Yeah, I think that's really key. And it's really challenging because we, you know, as as people who are keen to design good online learning experiences, we often talk about the concept of learner agency and how we can give learners choices in what they do. And that's also really important to to make sure that it's learner centered. And so, you know, these are sort of topics that we might discuss when we're thinking about designing a course. But I think the word burden that you use there is really important. You know, if you have lower digital skills or lower self-confidence, like we just discussed in your digital skills, that choice can feel like a burden. Um, maybe you're not clear how to navigate through those choices in the online course. Maybe, you know, you're not familiar in the environment of what would take you from one activity to another, or what you might be missing out on when you follow a different path. So, you know, while learners with a high level of digital capital may find it very easy to navigate a course, even if it's got a bit of an inconsistent structure, or even if it's not got a lot of signposting, that's going to be more challenging for a learner with lower levels of digital capital.

So some of this is sort of just good course design, but it's recognising that while something is probably helpful for everyone clarity, consistency, good signposting that might make more of a difference for learners that are less comfortable in the digital environment.

 And I guess a large part of this, you have to understand, you know, you've built this framework, designed this framework that technically you can kind of plot different people in your in your classes within that framework. But what's the actual approach you recommend people take? Should all educators out there be mapping their class in terms of their digital capital before they start this exercise?

Yeah, I think that's a real challenge to the work that I've done. And I should say really clearly that what I've done is look at something at a kind of conceptual level, because I'm not at the moment in the classroom or designing courses. That's not my current professional context. And I'd be really interested to hear from folks that are thinking about using this kind of approach in their course design. So actually, how would you operationalize this? Like how does it make sense to you, um, to bring this into your practice. 

So I sort of put that call out when I did the presentation at the moot, and I've had a number of kind of really interesting conversations since then. So really open to, to hearing from others about how they would operationalize this. I think some of the things that are worth bearing in mind are that, of course, you will have data about your learners, and some of that will be data that comes through the LMS, which is really useful. Some of that will be data on your learners backgrounds, and you can use that. But you also need to be careful about making too many assumptions about that. Um, so, you know, you can't data doesn't necessarily tell you the why.

And so if we go back to that example of the online forum participation, I might have a hypothesis that says maybe they're not comfortable in using their digital skills, but there could be a number of other reasons why they're not engaging. And so we have to be really careful about making too many assumptions.

 Yeah. You can you can draw conclusions from data that aren't necessarily accurate.

 Right. You need to you know, you need to get that connection I suppose.

 Yeah, definitely. I think it's a question probably of testing and learning. I mean, I'm primarily a qualitative researcher in the way I tend to approach these things. So I love the idea of doing focus groups and talking to your learners and and asking them questions to try and dig out the why. And then looking also at the quantitative data you might have and seeing if you can come up with some ways forward. But yeah, I'd be really fascinated to work with anyone who's interested to apply this at an institutional or a course level and see what we can learn through that process.

You're you're hitting on this like really interesting kind of confluence of, of, um, your capacity that in which you're joining us today as a, as a doctoral researcher and this very incredibly, you know, interesting field, but also you're a director at Moodle. So what's the overlap between your choice of research studies and your choice of employer? 

I love this question. I especially love the implicit assumption that I had lots of choice of employers to go to. So thank you for that. That's really increasing my self-confidence.

Oh no, I think there's a there's definitely a sort of a mission level connection. So of course, like, you know, my background as I say, is in higher education, I actually went into this sector because I was a first-generation higher education graduate and really wanted to give that opportunity to other folks who maybe came from a background where that was less common for them. So that was the starting place of my career. 

And so working for a company for whom access to education is the mission, you know, really there's a really clear alignment there. And I think it's exciting for me to kind of apply my skills in this environment. But there's there's also a more sort of tangible connection, which is that the learning management system, I think, is the place where you can make changes at scale. So if you want to do something like shift your institutional perspective on digital equality, you can do that through a tool like the LMS, because that is something that all of your learners will touch. And I think particularly if you have a number of kind of online courses or blended courses where it's a really critical tool that gives you an opportunity to make an impact, really at scale.

 And so I think that's a really tangible connection. And then when we talk about Moodle itself, like Moodle is intentionally built to adapt, and it's intentionally built for you to be able to customize it for your learning context. And so that's exactly what we're talking about here is saying, you know, understand your learners, think about them, be intentional about how you design their learning experiences. And that completely fits with Moodle's approach to how they design the LMS or how we design the LMS.

 And now I'm not an educational technologist, so I don't, you know, dive deeply into the sort of features and how they can be used. But I think that that sort of principal level of what Moodle is doing and how it approaches its product development is really important to me and the scale as well, I guess. 

I mean, we don't like to brag around here, but, you know, half a billion people studying on Moodle is quite a range of of different levels of digital capital across the globe and digital access, digital inclusion across the globe. But as you say, the ability to to make each of those different one hundred and fifty thousand sites different and tailored and then within that, the learning experience tailored to the individual so that these new developments adaptive learning and, you know, indications of progress, of building that confidence that you talked about and as you say, just the, I guess, the open source nature of it, just providing inherent equity of access. There's a lot there. I can understand the connections there.

 Yeah. And I think, you know, Digital Capital tells us that access is not the only thing, but it is definitely the foundational thing, right. In order to be able to think about how somebody can develop their digital skills and can use those digital skills to benefit them, to advance their life choices and chances. Access is the starting place. So I think that it's it's really where we can begin to think about how we build learners confidence, how we build their, um, ability to move forward. And so that's absolutely fundamental. 

And then we are, I think, contractually obliged to have a question in here about AI, but that's obviously becoming a core part of Moodle core, part of LMSs all over the world. How does that tie into digital capital? Does it sort of supplement this? Can it help close the gap or does it also have a role to play in kind of potentially widening that gap? Yeah, I mean, I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head there in terms of AI can do either, I think, and I think that's one of my concerns and hopes. That's the sort of flip side for AI in the future is that it can widen those gaps or it can close it. And we know that, you know, AI learns from us. Ultimately, it learns from what we have put out in the world, and our world is full of bias and inequality. And so I think the challenge to us as educators, as people that care about equality, is to persuade those folks who are developing things on the basis of AI, that we need to be addressing this as a bedrock, as a foundational thing. We need to be continually challenging what we get back from AI and making sure that it is something that can help close those gaps. And I know there's a ton of exciting developments out there.

There are lots of companies and social enterprises, and individuals who are working on using AI to help close, um, you know, those gaps and help to, um, support equality. And it's really important that they get the space and the publicity for what they're doing, as well as what what may be happening elsewhere. And again, I think that's really exciting part of what we do at Moodle. And we have this amazing ecosystem of partners, of community members. Um, and we can amplify those developments. So let's all get behind the idea of using AI to close gaps, not to widen them and support our community as they do that. 

Now, a lot of that, I think comes from choice as well, and it's something that, again, have have really put front and center of their principles for AI is around that transparency and control, so that you've got the agency of, of if and how and when and where and why AI is being used and making sure that's made at an individual level so that that we can so each individual teacher and each individual learner can understand. And I presume that builds trust and builds confidence and helps with this kind of challenge of digital capital.

Yeah, I think we spoke earlier about how choice can become a burden, right, for learners with low digital capital. And I think that also can feel that way when you're an individual educator, or you are within an institutional context where you potentially have a lot of choice. And so I think that is really valuable. That's one of the foundational aspects of Moodle is that you have this choice. But again, I would kind of temper that with making use of the community. So whatever your community is, whether it's a community of moodlers, whether it's a community in your institution. Have those conversations. Look at the options that you have and challenge the potential solutions through the lens of digital capital. What does this mean for our learners that have lower levels of digital skills, that maybe don't know how to use their digital skills to advance their life? Or even if they try to do that, they face other barriers? And how can we use these tools to address those issues, rather than necessarily through maybe lack of communication or not being intentional enough about it, bringing on tools that do the opposite? So I think, you know, definitely choice is really important. But I do recognize that that can feel overwhelming for folks. So like really I would say engage in whatever you're learning community is. And in the Moodle community, which is everywhere and is amazing, um, to to help you make those choices.

I love this. I love this conversation. I love the choice that I mean, obviously, I'm a big fan of Moodle, but I do love the choice. 

Are you a fan of Moodle Shal? 

Um, I'm kind of a massive fan of Moodle. Yeah, you could say that.

 I was going to ask you Shal. You've been around Moodle ecosystem, the Moodle product a lot longer than Liz or I. Where do you see the connections? Have you got any real world examples or points where you've kind of seen how the design of Moodle site can change access to digital capital?

 Oh my gosh. Well, I got my master's degree, uh, through a distance program on Moodle. And so I yeah, I have recent experience of what it's like to be a student with admittedly high digital capital, kind of the only capital that I do have a lot of, uh. Just kidding. Um, I was very privileged to be in a, um, international, uh, program. So, um, it was in English.

Um, but it was learners from all over the globe. And so kind of seeing that first hand experience of folks who are coming and connecting into this grad program, um, with, you know, like, we often talk about, like, internet stability and, like, device, um, like what kind of devices, like, are you coming in on a laptop with three external monitors or are you on a smartphone? And so, um, observing that with my classmates and, and really finding myself enriched by that and then, you know, attending Liz's talk previously and kind of reframing and looking back on that experience with this new kind of terminology and way to talk about those digital.

So anyways, I forget what the question was, Dan but yeah, I, I've had a great time with Moodle and I and all the choice. I also as a much earlier in my academic career, you know, my university was one of the first universities in the United States to use Moodle. So a very, very old version of Moodle, it was the Wild West. Every at that point in time in the conversation, everything was about, it was about choice. But in the like, let's make it our own. Every teacher is going to have their own way of using it, and it's so non-standard. So that gets back to what Liz was saying about how if it's unpredictable, if we're like, every class is different and it's all working different.

It's this high barrier for people. And it was for us at the time because we were going from zero online education to this crazy thing called Moodle. At the time, the like conversation, I think, um, in spaces was about that flexibility as like and everybody was really against templates/ templatizing. Right. Like nobody wanted to use templates because it was like calling it in or whatever. Um, but that was a massive burden on educators. Right? To everybody. Just figure it out for yourselves. So I really love the shifting conversation over the years from this, like, ruggedly and detrimentally independent kind of philosophy of how we're going to approach learning spaces to, hey, guys, uh, we've had some time to research, and it turns out let's make it easier for everybody. I guess that's the thing, isn't it? If you if you create this platform that allows for choice, but you just hand that over to the educators and the learners, and that's where you get this paradox of choice or this, this fear that comes with with too much choice.

We've got a team, the learning designers, that you sit with every day in Moodle HQ. They've built up the body of evidence over the years and the understanding about how you use these tools. I guess that's where the magic really happens is when they come together.

Right. And they're providing that expert guidance. And we've seen this before and we've seen how this works, and we've seen what happens if you set up a course in this particular way.

Absolutely. And I would echo that, you know, I've worked in a number of different higher ed institutions over time. And in most of those cases, the individual academic was working pretty much on their own to build their course within, you know, a range of different levels of like flexibility and control. But what they were most of the time was somewhat unsupported.

 Right. So I think that idea of like bringing on board professional support that you as a, as an academic or as an educator might know what you want to achieve and really know your subject matter and also know your pedagogy, but how you make that work in an online learning environment is not something that everybody is familiar or, you know, advanced at doing, and it is a different skill. So, you know, I absolutely echo that. I think there's something there about, you know, understanding best practice. And as an institution, having a view about what that should be and thinking about your learner body across the whole institution and where you might need to put guardrails in place to make sure that the experience is as equitable as it can be, or that it accounts for difference, I think is probably a more accurate way of of explaining that, but then also giving support to those colleagues who are out there designing courses or, you know, putting material on the LMS, which is kind of the way it's sometimes considered, like I just put my stuff on the LMS, um, you know, actually giving them that sort of professional support where if you have in-house, that's great. Or if not contracting with with a provider who can bring that expertise, makes such a huge difference to the learning experience. And if you put your day job hat on briefly, I guess the the certified partners of Moodle all over the world have a lot of that as well, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's partly why I'm here, I guess, is that I get to work with so many people who do have expertise in this, uh, in this field, both that are employed by Moodle and that are, you know, part of our certified partner network. And there is a ton of exciting work going on out there. So definitely it's not something that you need to suffer alone with. There are a lot of ways to get support and get guidance and that, you know, it's really exciting to see the ways in which people are using Moodle, um, to address some of these challenges. I love that about my job.

All of these questions have been fun, but I want to go a little bit more fun. I'm going to lean into the fun. Okay. And I'm going to ask for a hot take. Liz, you're going to have to give me a hot take. 


 Liz is looking nervous.

 I'm taking a deep breath. If this is about my favorite pizza topping, you may be upset when I reveal the answer.

 Uh, are you saying that your hashtag Pineapple gang or what's up?

No, there could be a little bit of pineapple on there.

Okay, well, confirm or deny. We're not trying to make enemies out here on the podcast. No, this is, uh, it's a little bit more on topic, but still fun. I would really love to know if you could strike one phrase from the Educational Technology Dictionary to make the world more equitable. What would it be and why?

Oh, this is a really good question, and I don't know that I'm going to be able to articulate my answer in one phrase, but I do have a thing that really bothers me, which is that we are having good conversations about how we can support learners with different needs in the course, content in how they learn, and then when it gets to assessment, we say, nope, everybody's got to hit the same bar. And I don't think there's a kind of phrase in the in the dictionary there to to accommodate that. 

But I think we need to think very carefully about what we want learners to learn, what the outcome should be and how that applies to what they're going to do for the rest of their lives. With this knowledge that we help them develop, instead of setting kind of arbitrary standards. And I think that's that's an education problem as a whole. But I think it becomes really quite focused in the online learning space where we have lots of concern for holding standards, because there's still this perception that maybe online learning isn't as good as real learning, face to face learning. So we can become quite reactive about like holding assessment standards. And so I guess I would be encouraging us to think about how assessment can be equitable, rather than holding fast to like everybody needs to hit the same standard in the same way. And I think that's something that we have lots and lots of amazing work going on in the Moodle community. 

We have lots of great partners who work in this space, but it's something that I think we still, as institutions, as a sector, haven't quite come to grips with yet.

 Agree. Also, I just would throw in there that I've been Moodling for very near twenty years and everybody, it's like a multiple choice. Questions, right? Everybody's hated them for so long. But we're here. I'm twenty years into this career, and we are still struggling with the multiple choice questions, which, by the way, humanity is terrible at writing unless you are incredibly trained in how to do so. That was a big eye opener for me early on in my career is how much bias we bake into those assessments. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because that's something that, um, people think of as being a really simple and easy form of assessment, and it is so difficult to do well. So yeah, I think that's a really interesting one. And yet if you do it well, going back to an earlier point about sort of simple learning activities as a formative learning activity, that can be a nice entry point for people who have lower digital skills because they probably have done an online quiz at some point to, you know, assess what their spirit animal is or what, you know. Um, and so that's kind of a really nice entry point. Um, so, so there is a role for multiple choice. But yes, they are very easy to, uh, to get wrong and to underestimate for sure.

 On that note, though, just to follow that thread with a very important question, what is the most recent online personality quiz that you took? Was it your spirit animal? For me it was. Which Power Ranger? Uh, am I uh, so throwing that out there, and the answer was the pink Power Ranger. Obviously. You see how Shal throws these things in? I was on stage with her in Mexico eighteen months ago, and out of nowhere, she started asking me to do my best impression of Chewbacca. These questions that come out of left field.

You gotta follow the joy, the whimsy. You know what I mean?

I feel like, uh, I, I haven't done any fun online quizzes for a while. The last one, it was really boring. It was about when I should be intermittent fasting. Um, and then, uh, the answer was kind of that I shouldn't. So actually, that was great because I didn't want to anyway, but it wasn't very exciting.

 Well, I'm going to play teacher here and give you the homework assignment to take at least one online assessment that is absolutely frivolous before the workday is through. Tall order, I know, but, um, if you could if you could get me those results by the end of the day, that'd be great. 

All right, well, you know, I love to overachieve, so I will make sure in the next hour I send you those results. Oh, perfect.

Um, so my job bring things away from the fun. The fun questions. Now, I picked up on something you said earlier about the difference between online learning and sort of traditional learning, and that must play a role in all of this, right? And, and one thing I think that really strikes me as a, as a challenge in online learning is how you really spot whether someone is engaged in their learning, and particularly in relation to this subject, how you distinguish between a disengaged learner and a learner with low digital capital, for example, and using kind of hard just raw data from Moodle have got very good analytics. Lots of lots of LMSs do. But how would you go about that? How do you differentiate between disengagement and low digital capital?

 Yeah, I think this is a really tricky one. And in part, as you say, it can be more of a challenge in online learning because quite often online learning is designed to be delivered at scale. And that's one of the reasons why that mode is chosen. And so you may have a very large number of learners going through your online course. And that's why these analytics are so critical, because you're working with a large number of learners. You need to have as much data as possible about them. But you know, as I said earlier, it's really easy to jump from correlation to causation. So I think it's about looking at the data that you have, where you see that something correlates, where you see a potential match, then ask yourself, what else could have caused this before you jump to the conclusion that x caused y. And I think that's a really important discipline for us all to go through. And again, I think that's something that you need to do as a community of educators. So, you know, one person looking at the analytics from their course is not as valuable as three people looking at the analytics and challenging each other on their assumptions. And so, you know, I would really encourage those of you who are doing that work to do that in a community and ask those challenging questions about what you think you're seeing in the data. And then, because I am primarily a qualitative researcher, I will again encourage you to have some focus groups or talk to your learners and test some of the things you learn. You think you've learned from the data. Um, but absolutely foundational to that is having really good data to challenge. 

Um, and so that's where I think having the kind of analytics you get from Moodle is really important. And, uh, you know, you need that as a starting place, but it shouldn't be the end point. I very often, uh, pour over spreadsheets as a part of my work here at Moodle. And when something goes wrong in a spreadsheet, I tend to ask the question “What else could have gone wrong?” And nine times out of ten, the answer is Dan. 

Dan got a hold of this spreadsheet and, um, something went wrong. Sorry to put you on blast on the podcast, Dan, but there it is.

 Shamed. Shamed in public? Uh, yeah. No, that's fair enough. Okay, let's fast forward. Liz, let's fast-forward to 2030. How do things change? What does a truly equitable classroom in twenty thirty look like? And how do institutions go about taking your approach and your framework here into day-to-day activities and design standards?

I would say that a more equitable classroom looks like a place where all learners can feel confident to engage, can feel open about the skills that they have and the skills that they don't have, and can know that they will get support. And I think that I say a more equitable classroom, because I think it's really important that we don't assume we will get to equity. This is a struggle that we have to continue. It's a fight we have to fight. And so sometimes by saying, yeah, we can do what we can tick all these boxes and therefore things will be equal. We you know, we minimize that. 

So I think to get to a more equitable place and not an end point, not a place where we stop fighting, but a more equitable place is about making sure that we have that that consistency, that clarity in what we're doing, that we're helping learners to progress and that we're creating a space where they can feel safe and that they belong. And that means that they can be open to ask the questions, and that when they ask those questions, the support is there for them to move forward. Yeah, that bit about kind of how proactive versus reactive you are, I think is really interesting that, you know, there's a lot of concern about, you know, surveillance approach to, this that, you know, the amount of data that's being captured or the amount that they're being watched almost. So I guess that's you wouldn't advocate for that as the approach, but it's about being there as and when needed. And I guess the way that the LMS is set up again can allow for certain. Moodle workplace has a series of rules, you know, dynamic rules that say if if X, then Y. Yeah. And I think that's about having that conversation. And you know, although I say that as though it is something you have on a one to one basis, of course, there's all kinds of ways that we can kind of automate that and do it at scale. But having a conversation that says, I noticed this, I'm wondering how you are. I'm wondering why you haven't felt that you wanted to engage in this, or is there anything I can do to support you? Because I have noticed this and that is, you know, something that you can definitely get from from your analytics. It doesn't make assumptions. It doesn't say, I have spotted you haven't engaged in this course, and therefore I believe there's a ninety percent chance that you will not complete, you know, it's not making those kind of assumptions. Um, it's actually saying, where are you at? How can I help you? You know, let's let's meet you where you are. And that's the sort of the basis of that conversation, I think. 

Yeah. Everyone loves being a statistic, don't they?

I know, I do.

Thank you so much, Liz, for sharing your expertise and your time being here today. I know Moodle is so much better off with you here, both in the podcast and at the organization. We just love your contributions.

Uh, for those of you who are listening, who are interested in catching that very impactful session from last years, we will link that in the show notes today. Thank you so much. 

Thank you for inviting me. And just before I leave, I'm going to make one request to anyone listening to the podcast is doing work in this area, is interested to share thoughts or ideas, or wants to kind of operationalize the stuff we've been talking about today. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to be part of that discussion. Um, so please do get in touch.

Amazing. Well thank you, Liz, thanks for your time.

Listeners, we will be back for the next episode of the podcast coming very soon. Um, we're making plans as we speak to find the next great guest for all things related to learning, moodling and education technology more generally and making the world a better place. So thank you very much for listening and we'll be back very soon. Bye.