Thank you for your attendance

Thank you for attending our webinar on 6th September 2023. For those who missed the event, don't worry - we have made the full transcript available here. It provides key tips to optimise your Moodle LMS for the academic year ahead, ensuring a smooth and successful learning experience. 

Webinar Agenda:

• Introduction of Skooler and Overt Software
• Why did we launch mConnect?
• The reason for doing this in collaboration with Microsoft
• 4 key areas mConnect will improve for your organization
• Live demo of mConnect’s key features
• Overt Software presents 'Mastering Moodle: Essential Tips for a Year of Academic Excellence'
• Q&A
• Special offer from Overt and mConnect

In addition, if you would prefer to watch the recorded version of the webinar, simply play the video or click the button below and you can view the video straight away. 

Once again, thanks to all who attended the webinar. We hope you enjoyed every moment and found the session provided valuable insights to master Moodle LMS and enable an excellent academic year ahead. 

Overt & Skooler Webinar - Mastering Moodle: Essential Tips for a Year of Academic Excellence 

Helena: Thank you everybody for your patience while we're waiting for a few more to join it looks like we're a little light on the water today so if you have any questions or feel free to pop them into the text chat and I'll let David and Sam know and as I'm the house mediator today.  

So today we've got Sam Langridge with us from Skooler we've got Sam Godbhere here from Over software Solutions. I'll pass over to David to introduce  

David: Thanks Helena. So as was mentioned my name is David Langridge, I look after the alliances and Market development at Schooler and my pleasure to give you walk through the initial part of the presentation today which is talking about mConnect. So initially we're going to introduce obviously ourselves Schooler and an Overt Software really covering who we are why we're on this call today with you and why we launched MC connect how we've done this and why we've done this with Microsoft focusing on a number of key areas to improve the overall management of Moodle and teams together because that's what mConnect.  

All about giving you a look through the system itself so you can then see from an education side teaching learning type side as to how that actually works within the environment but also then covering off the it aspect of it as to how you can manage those those Moodle and teams materials to ensure that it it works for you within your setting.  

And then Overt Software we'll go through five key points with regards to upgrading to Moodle 4.1 and then there's a Q&A and of course, special offer so just let Sam cover off the over piece initially and then I'll dive in and give you the an overview of Schooler and then talk through the mConnect solution. Over to you Sam. 

Sam: Yeah, thank you very much David. So yeah hello everyone my name is Samuel Godbhere here and I am the VLE operations manager at Overt Software Solutions.  

So for our part of the webinar we plan to keep things quite short as you know it's very busy time of year for staff at the start of the Academic Year. So accordingly as David has mentioned we're going to be covering some tips on what you can do to ensure your Moodle continues to run smoothly in 2023 which we'll be covering later on in this webinar. 

If I just briefly go through just who we are, about Overt Software if you're not familiar already we were co-founded in 2010. 

We have a strong foundation in the education sector having LED and being key contributors on Innovative projects of JISC.  

Our HQ is based in the UK with experienced technical support teams located in both the UK and recently Indonesia. As a company we have the privilege privilege of providing our Support Services nationally and internationally we're also specialists in the areas of Learning Management Systems plug-in development Federated access single signon and security functions such as multifactor authentication where of you might have sport contracts of us or that might be something you'll be interested in looking at. We have an ethos of exceptional services, honest expert advice.  

Hence the name Overt and we can be clearly seen for our worldwide community involvement. And finally we're also proud to share that we've earned our Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO Accreditations to ensure that we're following best security practice. 

So if I pass it back to David.  

David: Thank you very much Sam and we'll carry on with the presentation from Skooler perspective.  

So as mentioned I'm from Skooler. We've been focused on the education sector and we're actually founded in Norway. That's the headquarters of Skooler. I know I don't sign overly Norwegian because I'm not. I'm based in the UK and run the UK operation as well as the Market development for Schooler. 

We develop a number of different solutions. We've got primarily three different solutions one focuses on the primary and secondary sector which is the mConnect product on anything to do with Moodle and connecting that to teams and then the third solution Works across all education settings and also commercial. We help by connecting teachers and students to support their whole collaboration using technology but specifically how people want to work. And hopefully you'll see that in the presentation today as I've already mentioned we've got offices in Norway UK plus also us and Sweden and we are of course supporting customers worldwide there is a significant demand in the market. 

Collaboration is very much here to stay. Organisations very much are looking for solutions to help them in managing that transformation and how they work with the whole teaching and learning aspect as well as the collaboration aspect, not just in the short term, but also long-term.  

As well, the beauty with this solution is it does keep all of your investments in Moodle. We're not scrapping Moodle in any way, shape or form. This is very much using the power of Moodle and the power of Teams and moving them together.  

More than 10,000 learning institutions have downloaded mConnect since April 2020. You'll be aware that March April 2020 was a fairly significant time, which is when we launched mConnect. To say it was timely, just one of those curious happenstance moments I suppose, to a certain extent, that we'd been talking to Microsoft about this solution, and it was launched in April 2020 when obviously the whole pandemic kicked off and everyone went into an online method. This obviously helped immensely and so an awful lot of people downloaded and started to use the mConnect solution from that time and is still continuing to use it today. 

We are fully supported by Microsoft. I mentioned that this was done jointly with Microsoft. They helped fund the production of this. They realised in late 2019 that there was a hole, if you like. They built a solution themselves to actually connect Moodle with Teams, but it was very much something that had gone into maintenance mode, didn't really deliver on what they were looking for. And given our work with Microsoft and work with Teams, they came to us and approached us to write this solution, and hence mConnect was born.  

We talk to them on a regular basis about further enhancements, etc. to the solution. We've got lots of users as I mentioned all across the globe, large and small, further education colleges, higher education institutions, some schools even. Anyone that uses Moodle can obviously use this solution very, very easily.  

Most people today very much are working in two disconnected systems for learning. So you've got your Moodle environment, you've got your Teams environment, and the two aren't connected. What this does is to actually connect them together because it is better, we would suggest, working in a connected way. And hopefully you'll agree.

So essentially what this is doing is it's bringing a screen of Moodle within the Teams environment so you're still Moodle is still very much the king in this in as much that you use Moodle to generate your Teams from your Moodle courses etc. You're in control as to which ones it creates, doesn't just do it blanket, you decide which ones you want to want to turn into Teams. And then once you've done that you operate those those Moodle courses within the Teams environment and so you've got the benefits of both worlds, all the benefits of Moodle because you're just running Moodle within a within an iframe screen within Teams, and of course all the Teams capability that you've got and I'll show you this working in a moment. 

So four key areas that we were focusing on, very much wanted this one workspace, not having to switch between two screens and actually running it all in one place so it's very easy to drive. So you've got access to all your Moodle courses, all the topics, the assignments, calendars etc and they're all viewed within the Teams channel relevant to that Moodle course. As I said, it creates the Teams channel from that particular Moodle course, bringing across all the students and lecturers, professors etc to then give you this this combined view so you really drive an improvement the whole communication side, productivity and teamwork by integrating those tools and gives you the full power of of Microsoft Teams and the benefit of of all the good pedagogical aspects that you get within Moodle. 

There's a really great set of controls and I'll be running through these in the demonstration in a moment so it saves you time and in particular headaches to actually manage those courses, manage those elements, those those Teams channels or tabs within Teams, depends on how you've got it set up. And it will create those courses at your behest and with the and it ticks a number of different boxes so you haven't got to go through and do a lot of management, a lot of it is taken care of in the initial setup. And of course simplified sign on, so once you're logged into Teams, gives you automatic access into the Moodle system as well. 

So in today's demo we'll cover you know how to manage that integration, how to connect those existing Teams, how to create new Teams, and then a view as to what it actually looks like within the system itself. So you can then see how that operates getting ahead of myself. So without further ado, let me show you what it actually looks like.  

So hopefully you can still see my screen and everything is clear. This is essentially what it looks like. What I've got in front of me or in front of you is my standard Moodle dashboard. Whatever your Moodle dashboard is today, it's then replicated within the system. If I switch screen, so if I go it, you'll notice my last tab here is my I've logged into my Moodle system, so there's my standard Moodle dashboard, and it looks exactly the same as this one but it's just running within Teams.   

So all we do is we replicate. So if you're running a particular theme in Moodle, that is just replicated because you're just running Moodle as an iframe within Teams itself. And as I said later on in the demonstration, I'll show you how the system itself is generated, so how you create your Teams environments from your Moodle courses, so it keeps everything together. 

So as you can see, of course being Norwegian, one of the courses we've got here is the history of the Vikings. Clicking on the history of the Vikings goes into our system and I've got full access to all of my items as you would expect. I can go obviously back to my dashboard. I can access the feed, so this is the standard Moodle feed, and I can then go and create Teams etc from within here if I want to, but I'll leave that Teams creation when I go through the other area.  

So essentially this is really it, it's running within Teams. You've got your your standard Moodle course running within Teams with full access to anything you want to. There's nothing to stop you running it natively within Moodle as well if you want to, it doesn't affect anything. 

It's just that what we're doing is, if you're trying to improve the whole collaboration aspect within the institution, then teams are the way to achieve that. This will provide you with all the benefits of doing so while running Moodle within teams itself. So, we're going to set it up just so you can see how the system operates. 

What we have here is our own Moodle system running within this environment. You can see it displays my setup, showing where we're based. The school is located in Norway, and our Microsoft 365 system is here. I have a number of Administrators in the statistics box and a number of Azure users, which directly corresponds to the Azure active directory within the institution's Azure system. There's also a count of the teams we have running, which is 105, and the number of managed teams, which is five – these are the ones managed by mConnect. 

You don't have to do everything if you just want to set up a trial or a proof of concept, especially if you want to do this for one specific lecturer or faculty member. You can do this quite easily. If you want to try out different courses in a test environment, you can start with that initially and then go live when you're ready. We have our Microsoft 365 tenant here, and I can test my permissions, performing all the necessary checks and balances as an administrator. 

Below, we have our Moodle environments. Currently, I only have one active environment, as you can see. I did have another one, but I've deleted it. Typically, this is what most people have in their institutions – a live environment used day-to-day and a test environment. You can connect both of these, making it simple to experiment with anything you want. Managing administrators is also straightforward, as you can see. I have several different administrators with various roles, so we can set up permissions for what these administrators can do. If I want to retract or remove those administrators at any point, I just need to click on the button, and as you would expect, they get removed. 

One of the first exercises we do with you as part of the setup is to explain the whole user matching process. When you're creating your teams from your Moodle courses, it's essential to understand who the users are. We don't create another database of users; instead, we look at the Azure active directory within Microsoft 365 and the Moodle directory within Moodle. Then, we match them together, providing synchronisation. I can show you that structure if you'd like. 

So, this is a simple cron job that runs on a regular basis. In this case, I've set it up to run daily. I have my Azure directory active directory matching field here, which matches the user principal name with the username in Moodle. This allows me to check and ensure that everything works correctly. 

You have several different options here in the drop-down menu, so for you, the mail field may be more appropriate, or the ID may be more suitable. We usually find that the user principal name and username typically work best for most organisations. You can also choose to skip the domain part if necessary. I can test the configuration, so if I enter my information here just for demonstration purposes, it will display my details, including my ID, user principal name, email address, Moodle username, and more.  

This is how we conduct the user matching exercise. We can also see when the next synchronisation is due, whether the last sync was successful or not, and, of course, drill into the details if it failed for some reason. 

Clicking that button will initiate the user matching exercise. I can generate a list of all the users in the system and view it from the perspective of users without a Moodle match. This helps identify if there have been any issues in matching correctly. So, I can view those without a Moodle match or matched users. 

Additionally, I can review my sync history to see that it has successfully run on a regular basis each day. Once we've completed the user matching exercise, we can move on to something called batch team creation. I'll go through this screen in a moment, so don't worry too much about it for now. I just want to show you how we search for and create those particular items. 

As you can see here, I'm searching for both TE and Moodle courses, but you can choose to search for teams or just Moodle courses, depending on your specific needs in this batch creation process. You can also select categories to base it on, such as categories for particular faculties, for example. 

And then, do I just want to look at active courses, archived courses, or deleted courses? So again, you've got the flexibility to select, depending on the state of those. 

And then, do I want to just look for things that are currently managed or not managed? So again, if you're doing this batch exercise initially, typically, it would be looking for stuff that's not managed. I want to show you both, so I'll keep them both active. 

I'm just going to click on "test” and search for “test," and it then produces me a list of courses. As you can see here, what we've got are courses that have "test" in the title, and you've got greyed-out symbols as well as nice brightly coloured symbols. 

So, as you can see, this first one here is a Moodle course. It's not a team currently, and it's not managed by Mconnect currently, but it is queued. In other words, we've actually clicked on this button here to add it to the queue, and that's then queued, ready to run the batch. 

Here, I've got a team that's already created but not yet linked to a Moodle course. So, if you've been proactive with teams up to this point and you've got a number of them that notionally are sort of matched to a Moodle course but not obviously linked, then you can link that course. The simple way of doing that is to click on "link a course," which allows me to then search for a particular course if I want to. It's obviously brought up this one; I click on that, and that would then match those two together. What it then does is it will perform an exercise of checking to make sure that the student list is correct, for example, the lecturers or assistant teachers or whoever is in that system, and it will then manage that going forward. 

So, if a student drops out of a particular course and moves to another course, it will remove them from Moodle. Subsequently, this will remove them from the corresponding team and add them to the new corresponding team. One such example can be found towards the bottom of the screen, brightly coloured to signify it's an active team, an active Moodle course, and currently managed by mConnect. You'll also notice a button on the right for archiving it at the end of the academic year. This helps keep everything neat and tidy within the administration side, ensuring easy access to different areas. 

You can view your team creation history, categorised by queued items, those in progress, and those that have either failed or succeeded. Additionally, you can search for specific items if needed, and the option to export them is available. It will display your membership sync history from this screen, illustrating how it syncs using the template concept. When it creates the team from the Moodle course, you can set various switches, including member settings and messaging settings. All of this is handled automatically in the background of the team, streamlining administration tasks. You can create multiple templates, tailored for specific individuals or faculties, providing flexibility in your setup. At the bottom, you can choose to accept co-teachers as owners within teams, and you can decide how to create channels, either from course topics or course groups. This choice depends on your Moodle configuration and preferences. 

I can also make those group channels private if I want to. Additionally, I can create tabs within my general channel as well if I want to. There are lots of different options available. My suggestion is that when you set this up in a test environment, you should experiment with the different switches to see what they do and how they affect the creation process. You can then decide what works best for you. 

As you can see, we have a number of different templates here. There's one without channels, which creates tabs. Another option creates a course without tabs, focusing on channels. The choice depends on how you want to use teams and what suits your specific needs.  

From a summary perspective, the summary screen shows you the number of teams, managed teams, and templates within the system. You can also access the sync history and team membership sync from this screen if needed. Additionally, you can view the creation summary, which indicates that we've completed 26 successful creations. This is a two-step process; it first cues the team creation, then creates it, and finally, it shows you if it has failed for any reason. You can click on this to access details explaining why it failed and then proceed to add the team membership, channels, and tabs.  

We have a separate screen for archiving, allowing you to search and archive items from here. You can also review your archive history. The Moodle web hook logs enable you to search for specific items within the system since it uses Moodle web hooks to gain access. 

That was a quick overview of the system. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask via the chat. Helena, are there any questions? 

Helena: No nothing so far. There may be a few at the end yeah. 

David: Fine, thanks Helena. Hopefully, you found that provided a good indication of how the system looks, how it's set up, and the straightforward process involved. It's something that both we and those we work closely with do frequently, so we can provide as much guidance as needed. 

Some of the key benefits of mConnect Plus are important to note. There are two versions of mConnect: a free version and a paid version. The free one essentially serves as a trial, with limitations such as accommodating up to 100 users, 100 teams, and lasting for 30 days. Afterward, you can opt for the full mConnect Plus, which grants full access to support and provides you with an annual license. There are several features that you can't access in the free trial version, but it's straightforward to switch to the full paid version, unlocking all the available facilities. 

So, at this point, I'll pause and let you hear a different voice as I hand over to Sam.

Sam: Thank you very much, David. 

Yeah, so now we're going to go through our five key points for academic excellence on Moodle. These are things you can do to keep things running smoothly and that you should be aware of going forward. So, let's move on to the next slide. 

If you haven't already done so, you should strongly consider upgrading to Moodle 4.1, or at least plan for how you're going to carry that out in the near future. If you attended our previous webinar, you're probably already aware of this, or as an Overt company customer, you will have received emails about this. It's something we've been emphasising a lot. The primary reason for this is that Moodle 3.9, which is the current long-term supported version of Moodle, will reach its end of life on December 8th. 

This means there will be no further security patches or updates. Now, with the academic year for most starting, if you do want to upgrade to Moodle 4.1, you're going to need to consider half-term periods and the testing that might lead up to those. I understand right now it might be very busy, but maybe later on in September, that's something you could look at, possibly aiming for around Christmas. 

This could be applicable to those of you who are not following the academic timetable as closely, such as if you're adult training providers or similar organisations. It should be noted that the end-of-life status does not immediately mean Moodle will be at risk when that date arrives, but the longer you stay on Moodle 3.0 when it is out of support, the more risk will be involved, and upgrading will likely become more troublesome since plugins will become older, and there will be more and more changes between the version of Moodle you're on and the latest version. 

So, we would say from experience, I'd say it's very important that you keep up with the long-term support version of Moodle, as the grading will become more troublesome the further behind you fall in relation to the latest version. With that said, it's also strongly advised to test Moodle in a development environment, especially because moving forward, it's likely that the underlying software for your Moodle version is going to change. 

You might need to upgrade to a newer version of PHP or a newer version of MySQL or PostgreSQL, depending on the database you're using. As always, we'd recommend testing as it's vital to avoid any nasty surprises. This applies to Moodle itself, the plugins it's using, and also the MSSQL. 

Again, if we move on to our next slide. 

So, an important area that we feel should be monitored from the admin perspective includes the following: automated course backup reports. These can be found as an administrator under the Site Administration tab, then Reports, and finally Backups. This indicates if you have any automated course backups failing or being skipped. This should be checked regularly for any unexpected behavior to avoid missing backups when they are needed. 

The last thing you want when you have an issue with a course that needs to be restored is to find out, "Oh no, the course backups have been failing, and we weren't aware because we weren't checking the reports." So, that's an important report to check regularly just to stay on top of your course backups. 

And along the same lines, of course, there are the settings for the course backups themselves. These can be found at Site Administration, Courses, Backups, and then Automated Backup Setup. It is, of course, strongly advised to enable that, except under extenuating circumstances where perhaps you don't have enough disk space or you have some alternative method of providing backups. 

You should also always consider the implications of your current backup settings in terms of retention versus frequency. We advise always backing up to a specified directory for automated backups directly to the server that you're on, rather than to the course itself. If the course is deleted or lost in some way, that might make the backup impossible to retrieve, which would defeat the purpose of the backup. 

We'd always advise backing up to a specified directory, even though that does mean that you'll need to access the backups via the back end. This can be worked around by using repositories. In general, alternative backup approaches will likely not be as convenient as course backups. For example, if you use VMware or snapshots of some kind, that's likely to be disruptive to the entire Moodle. With course backups, it's just a specific course. If there's an issue with a course, you can restore it without disrupting the rest of the site in any way. 

Finally, we also have the scheduled tasks and task logs. You can access these in Administration, under Server Tasks, and then Scheduled Tasks. On this page, you'll want to check if there are multiple tasks stuck on ASAP or if they have a high value for their fail delay value. In either case, that likely indicates issues with those tasks. 

If you have scheduled tasks that are failing, it can cause issues, such as enrollments not going through or emails not being sent out. It's an important area to also regularly check to ensure that things are working properly because issues in this area may lead to problems elsewhere. If you discover any problems, you can contact your support team to investigate further and determine the likely causes. 

Moving on to our next slide, there are some other notable settings to be aware of as you enter the Academic Year. One of these is the "keep logs for" setting, which you can find in Administration, under Plugins, Login, and Standard Log. This setting determines how long logs are kept for Moodle. These logs are used to track and display information in your course reports and site administration reports. 

Setting this value too high in terms of retention can cause the logs table in Moodle to become very large. In cases where you need to restore the Moodle database or even back it up, the size of that table can cause issues. Restoring a Moodle may take a few hours, but restoring one with a huge logs table that's several gigabytes in size can significantly increase the time it takes to complete the process. 

So, it should never be set to "never" unless you have some process in place to manage the logs table size. Setting it to "never" can eventually lead to an unmanageable logs table. It's best to keep it under control and retain logs for a reasonable number of years, ideally shorter than that. A common setting is usually about three years. 

Moving on from that, we also have some newer functionality in Moodle now, such as asynchronous course backups and restores. You can find this in Site Administration, under Courses, and Backups. While conducting a backup or course restore, it's generally very useful. It's a new feature, and there are a few issues with it, but it can cause performance issues if many different users are using it simultaneously. So, keep this in mind, especially if you're collaborating with staff to move courses or perform backups and course restores. Generally, it's a helpful feature since previously, if you needed to do a course restore as a staff member or admin, you couldn't work on another task in the same session since your session was tied to the course backup or restore. 

Along the same lines, we also have concurrent schedule task settings. These can be found in Site Administration, under Server Tasks, and Task Processing. As the name implies, this allows multiple tasks to run simultaneously. It's very useful for high-performance servers with a busy Moodle that need many tasks to be cleared quickly. 

However, when it comes to emails being sent out or enrollments not processing quickly enough, adjusting this value should be done with caution, as setting it too high can potentially cripple site performance. It's something that should be carefully adjusted in small increments. You can always contact your support team to check if the server's specifications can handle the change. 

Lastly, we also have the "use enrollment behavior for external database enrollments." This setting can be found in Site Administration, under Plugins, Enrollments, Manage Enroll Plugins, and then External Database Settings. If you use an MIS system or another system that feeds enrollments to Moodle externally, you should be aware of this setting. 

From our experience, if you have issues where your external MIS link to Moodle disconnects or if unexpected changes are made to that table, it can result in users being unexpectedly enrolled or disabled in Moodle. This can be a significant issue when it happens suddenly, with users finding themselves unenrolled from a course overnight.

It's quite simple to change that setting. You can easily adjust it so that it keeps the user enrolled, even if they're missing from the external table by default. Then, whenever you need to do the academic rollover for the next academic year, you can always set it to unenroll as needed. Generally speaking, we would strongly advise keeping that set to keep users enrolled, as the other settings will likely cause issues. Definitely, do not have it set to unenroll. 

Now, if we can move on to our next slide. A newer feature in Moodle is the recycle bin, which can be found in Site Administration, under Plugins, Admin Tools, and then the Recycle Bin. It's very useful for accidental deletions of courses and activities, and it works pretty much as you'd expect based on the recycle bin in Windows. 

Now, if we can move on to our next slide. A newer feature in Moodle is the recycle bin, which can be found in Site Administration, under Plugins, Admin Tools, and then the Recycle Bin. It's very useful for accidental deletions of courses and activities, and it works pretty much as you'd expect based on the recycle bin in Windows. 

Helena: Sorry, Sam, we lost the last sentence.

Sam: Did you hear "how long the retention time should be?"

Helena: No, we didn't, sorry.

Sam: Okay, so you should consider how long the retention time for the recycle bin settings are in relation to the amount of disk space your server has available. Keeping the value too high can result in unnecessary disk space usage. It's best to keep it set to something reasonable, such as two weeks. 

Also, while it's useful, it might not be appropriate for when something occurs to the course that isn't actually an accidental deletion, such as submissions being deleted from an assignment or a course format being broken. If a course gets messed up, you're usually going to want a course backup rather than relying solely on the Recycle Bin. It's important to keep in mind that it's not a true replacement for course backups, but it is a more convenient way of being able to restore from an accidental deletion. 

Now, if we move on to our next slide. 

Something you'll want to keep in mind, which you might not be immediately aware of, is the disk usage that's occurring on your Moodle. From the perspective of a VLE librarian, you may not be immediately aware of the disk usage on your server or the amount of disk space available. However, it's important to be aware that if disk usage suddenly increases or spikes on your server due to files, assignments, submissions, and so on being added to the site, it can become very inconvenient to expand or migrate your Moodle to a larger server during the academic year. This is something you'll want to avoid. 

The primary way to address this is to use the Configurable Reports plugin, which you can find at the link provided on moodle.org. With this plugin, you can create a query that shows you how much disk usage is being consumed in Moodle, based on the course content. This allows you to identify any courses that may be using up more space than necessary. 

Other plugins that can help include the Edwiser Block Site Monitor or the Report Course Size. You should be able to find these plugins easily through a Google search. So, if you just search for "Configurable Reports Block Moodle," "Edwiser Site Monitor," or "Report Course Size," you should be able to locate and explore these plugins. They are definitely worth looking into to help you monitor and manage disk usage on your Moodle. 

You can also try adjusting the maximum size settings for uploaded files to Moodle to moderate the size of files that staff and students can submit. If this setting is not restricted, you might have students submitting files that are excessively large or adding videos to course resources that consume an inappropriate amount of space. 

Alternatively, you can make use of third-party plugins such as EAM or Big Blue Button, so content is not stored on Moodle itself directly but is instead embedded. Another choice is to use YouTube to upload videos there instead and then embed them from YouTube. 

You may also try tweaking the default file types allowed for assignment submissions to again discourage the use of large media files for submissions, in favor of just Word documents or PDF files. 

While the course backups mentioned earlier are very useful, try not to keep too many copies of those, as keeping more than two or three is likely to take up more storage space than your current live Moodle data itself. At that point, you're essentially making an entire copy of your Moodle site again. So that's something to keep in mind when adjusting the course backup settings; increasing that could result in finding out the next day that your server is down because Moodle's storage is completely filled, which causes it to no longer load properly. 

So that's definitely something to keep in mind. If we move on to our next slide. 

I hope you found the points we've gone over helpful so far. As part of our webinar, we're also offering a free Moodle health check to anybody interested. In this health check, we will cover with you your Moodle 4 readiness, as well as whether the environment you're working in has any database vulnerabilities or any other kind of vulnerabilities that might be present, as well as any configuration issues or potential concerns within Moodle, such as what we've covered in the previous slides. 

Thank you for your attention, and I believe we'll be coming around to the Q&A shortly, sort of after some finishing bits from David. So if I hand it back over to David now.

David: Thanks, Sam.  Yeah, so really just wanted to cover a special offer we've got. If you do take out a one-year agreement as a result of attending this session today or listening to the recording and contacting either ourselves or Overt, then you would get an additional month free. So that's 13 months instead of 12. 

We would, of course, onboard the system for you, which normally costs $500. And then you obviously get your mConnect Plus benefit straight away, and of course, you get the 30-day money-back guarantee, so if there's any issue, then no questions asked, we will do a full refund. 

Thank you very much for your time. Really just open the floor for any questions and or if there are any questions that come in via the chat, Helena. 

Helena: Unfortunately, I think we haven't got any questions from today's session. Just to let everybody know that if you do have any questions, feel free to contact us via the emails shared later on or on the slide at this present time.  Yes, and I'll pass over to Dave to end this session, so thank you, everybody, for attending. 

David: Well, thanks very much, Helena. Thank you to Sam, and thank you to you for attending and all listening to the recording of this session. If you've got any further questions, obviously, you can reach out to myself at  www.skooler.com if there are any mConnect specific questions, and of course, Sam from an Overt perspective.  

But thank you again for your kind attention. If you have got any questions, don't hesitate to reach out, and hope you have a good rest of your day and a productive and not too stressful back-to-school, university, or college, whatever is appropriate.  

Thank you very much for your time. Take care. Bye-bye,  

Helena: Marvelous, thank you.  

Sam: Bye, everybody.