Bostock, S.J. 2003 Educational Developments 4.4 p.28
With thanks to James Wisdom, Paul Bailey and Karen Fill
For 20 years or more forward-looking businesses been thinking strategically about integrating their information systems. HE is far behind in this endeavour, maybe because our ‘product’ (learning) and our processes (teaching) are intangible and complex. Anyway, attempts at integration is now called the Managed Learning Environment. The sharp end of this system, experienced by students, is the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), an area now dominated by two commercial products from the US: WebCT and Blackboard. But they are not the magic bullet for e-learning, if we aiming for learning rather than just ‘e’.
The first of the 22 Briefing Papers on VLEs from JISC1 states that “the complete VLE needs to deliver” the following 5 functions (italicized).
1. Support of on-line learning, including access to
learning resources, assessment and guidance. The learning resources may be
self-developed, or professionally authored and purchased materials that can be
imported and made available for use by learners.
Tutors can upload their own files into a VLE, much as they would place them
on a traditional web site, and their institution might acquire further resources
commercially. One problem is ‘locking in’ these resources to a particular VLE, which
might go bust! If all VLEs adhered to interoperability standards4 this would allow transfer to other systems,
but a safer approach is to keep master copies elsewhere. The need to re-use,
repackage or re-brand content is being addressed technically by the ‘learning
objects’ project. However, the difficult problem is not technical but one of
educational practice; integrating resources is part of curriculum design.
2. Controlled access to curriculum that has been mapped
to elements (or “chunks”) that can be separately assessed and recorded
VLEs allow teachers to control access to specific resources depending on
individual student activity and performance in online tests. But how many HE
teachers really want to do this? Is it compatible with encouraging independent thinking
and self-management of learning? Would this ‘chunking’ of a curriculum prevent learning
outcomes involving synthesis, for example?
3. Communication between the learner, the tutor and other
learning support specialists to provide direct support and feedback for
learners, as well as peer-group communications that build a sense of group
identity and community of interest
Online text ‘discussions’, synchronous or asynchronous, has been used for
decades. The discussion boards in VLEs tend to be simple, which may be an
advantage or a disadvantage.
4. Tracking student activity and achievement against
these elements using simple processes for course administration and student
tracking that make it possible for tutors to define and set up a course with
accompanying materials and activities to direct, guide and monitor learner
progress
The need for automating the tracking of students increases when personal
contact diminishes. VLEs will tell you when students have arrived (online) and
what they have done there. Will teachers use this tracking information? Will
students feel oppressed by the detailed monitoring of their activity?
5. Links to other administrative systems, both in-house
and externally
It is clearly efficient to register students in a VLE course from central
records but, for some, ensuring those records are complete before the course
starts – so that staff know who they are teaching – is more a hope than
reality. Also, before the results of summative testing in a VLE are returned to
central records they must be subject to the judgement of assessors in examination
boards.
Much of what VLEs do is available elsewhere as individual software tools, such as objective testing and discussion boards. So most of the research and debate about the appropriate uses of technology in learning and teaching is relevant to VLEs. What is novel about them is their integration with other MLE systems and their integration of tools within a single web interface, for teacher and students. Integration with other systems should bring efficiencies and save administration for teachers. Integration of tools within an interface is the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ effect – you never know when you need to pick stones out of horses’ hooves so the pocket knife includes it just in case. A VLE provides more tools than most teachers need, and with the convenience of a common user interface.
However, a VLE is not pedagogically neutral in the teaching-learning activities it supports. Although teachers can develop the resources, discussions, quizzes, etc. in a VLE with relative ease, it does not absolve them from the responsibility of designing the teaching-learning activities. As staff and educational developers we should keep in mind the ultimate goal – student learning – as we grapple with the mechanics and the strategic implications of VLEs.
1. The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) MLEs
and VLEs explained
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=mle_briefings_1