What is wrong with the VLE?

Defining what a VLE is seems like a fairly contested area, but to me the majority opinion is to very much see the VLE as an online school, a “digital representation of the institution” (Cousin, G. 2005). It interests me that confusion around definition appears in a lot of areas of e-learning, and I wonder if that has a part to play in success of adoption.
Personally, as a starting point for us I don’t think this simple definition was the worst thing in the world. Institutions were interested in extending learning beyond the classroom, and these virtual classrooms seemed to be a good way to go. It seems to me what is happening now, as the web (and our use of it) evolves, we are expecting more from the service and the learning that takes place. I don’t think it is wrong to expect our VLE to offer new ways of learning, but I think this is a wider expectation of the web as a whole. Is some of the criticism directed at VLEs just because this is the tool we know when we are in fact talking about learning online more generally?

Reflecting on how these tools were initially adopted I think we can start to see where the problems for the VLE as a learning tool in it’s own right began. The purchase/installation of a VLE was a major undertaking for an institution, both financially and in terms of how it would be used. This meant that largely they were adopted at an institution wide level, with large scale basic training (usually focused on IT skills rather than pedagogy), and vague policies covering how they should be used. Obviously I am generalising here for impact, but I don’t think it is an unreasonable description of what happened in many schools.

In my institution which I think reflects what happened in many, the bare minimum requirement when we started was to provide copies of resources used in the classroom. It was low impact in terms of time, appeared to have immediate benefit, and was easily measurable. This type of policy lead to the course based structure we see now, the tendency for VLEs to be glorified shared storage areas, and a position where the VLE very much pushes static content at users rather than engaging them in it. It is this unidirectional starting point which is why the VLE appears to exist in the “spirit of the broadcast phase of technology” (Cousin again).

My point is I feel it was an institutional decision to start like this as much as it was the fault of VLE system designers. We look at the VLE now and consider it restricting, institution focused, etc but was it actually such a bad place to begin and was it our fault?

Personalising Again

Personalising learning is something that has massively grown in popularity over the last few years in secondary education, for good reason. This individual approach to learning, and the student ownership and customisation that must go with it is now at odds with the traditional VLE design. We want our students to be able to personalise their space, to make it feel like their own, but in our institution-structured learning environments this is difficult to apply. Personalising the virtual space is definitely something desirable, but I wonder if it is any more of a challenge than making our physical space feel personal to a learner. Maybe the virtual is easier to modify which is why we are holding the online personalisation up as more of a problem? Perhaps the virtual world is the place to make learning feel personal to counter the more impersonal nature of the places we study.

My other question around personalising and customising the learning space is do the students actually want this? I want my iGoogle homepage to be personal to me, and my presence on the social networks definitely is. I can see argument for a limited level of personalisation online at Tesco when I am buying my weekly groceries too. But, my bank is still very much institution based and I have no desire for that to be any different. There are definitely questions around how far an educational establishment needs to go to support the wants/needs of the user. Where does a school or university sit on the Natwest-Tesco-Facebook scale of online personalisation? It also expands into a wider question about how much we should be entering into personal student spaces (should we be on Facebook for example?), but that is a whole separate debate.

Putting a Value on Time

Time constraints and priorities come into play when analysing the value of a VLE to both the learner and their institution. Linking back to this institution-wide adoption, how much time did we actually dedicate to developing the space? For the amount of time a given lecturer has spent on the online course does the value actually seem about right? If we placed a higher priority on the use of the VLE as a tool for learning how good would it be?

The opposite of this is of course the priorities of the student. How much do I need to be involved in the VLE to get the most from my course? Is there value there for me, a reason to use it? It would be really interesting to look at data from the first MSc unit I did- did the students who spent most time using the online tools produce the best assessments at the end? This will clearly vary across learning styles and personal preference.

We could introduce consistency by using the assessment stick. If the activities on the VLE become an assessed part of the course this immediately impacts, but with all the implications of assessing online activity.

Bidirectional?

Using the VLE for assessment neatly leads on to using the sites as more than a vehicle to deliver content. All the major players in the market have a vast range of tools available to course designers. We can include online assessment, activities and collaboration in many forms, all in a relatively efficient manner compared to achieving the same thing physically with students. Given our assumptions at the start of this post about how VLEs were initially introduced this type of an activity comes as an extension, maybe even an afterthought for course design. Clearly introducing these activities adds to the value of the VLE, and helps to move it towards a tool for learning rather than as an enhancement to the learning that takes place outside of it. It would be a fairly bold school that introduced a VLE and didn’t teach staff how to upload their PowerPoints first, but would they be better off? I’ll come try it with somebody if they’d like to volunteer…

Now we have to think about the tools built into the VLE itself. Is using the wiki built into Moodle for example a better tool for the job than setting the same thing up externally (wikispaces maybe?), and pointing students to it? The answer to this comes down to how well we link students to all these other places (an argument for the PLE later on maybe?), comparison of the features of the two tools, and our requirements of them. The features/requirements part is pretty simple but I do worry about the linking. Are schools increasingly getting themselves into a situation where students have to remember to go to Google docs for English, the VLE for Spanish, Facebook for something else, etc etc. Consistency of student experience is going to be one of my irritating phrases for the new school year.

The Way Forward

I don’t think as a tool the VLE is quite as bad as some of the press it is getting, it is more about how we are using it. When we took them on the idea of the virtual school didn’t seem like a bad one, maybe now we are looking at how our use evolves rather than killing it off entirely. As leaders in this sector we need to be thinking about how we counter the negative legacy that has been created (for both students and teachers), and more importantly how the VLE would sit as one tool amongst the many others for learners. We are clearly heading towards personalised spaces for learning- eportfolios for reflection, PLEs for knowledge gathering. In our enthusiasm for delivering in this way are we neglecting to consider how the institution exists in this set up? While the ePortfolio/PLE is where I represent myself as a learner, is the VLE where my institution represents itself as a learning body? I think we should be wary of killing it off too quickly.

Image sources- Empty Classroom. CC licensed on Flickr by athena, Money in Hand by Collection Agency, Personal Space by EssG, Don’t blame PowerPoint by CogDogBlog.