TELic: A blog about Technology Enhanced Learning

Three stories about Virtual Learning Environments

By chance, I’ve looked at three stories today about the future of VLEs which are relevant to this University’s use of Blackboard.

The first was an article by Lisa M. Lane in First Monday, titled Insideous pedagogy:  how course management systems impact teaching. It argues that the educational assumptions implicit in the design of systems such as Blackboard and Moodle affect the pedagogic choices made by tutors new to teaching online. For example, Blackboard’s default ‘Course Resources’ content area encourages tutors to use it as a document store. Tutors can of course use the Control Panel to configure Blackboard to their own needs, for example by creating a content area for each course topic, but may lack the awareness that it is possible or the knowledge of how to do it. I see the answer as a partnership between academic staff and learning technologists such as myself, where I find out what they want to achieve and then provide the advice and support needed.

The second was a discussion at this year’s Educause conference about the relative merits of commerical VLE systems, such as Blackboard, compared with open-source solutions, such as Moodle and Sakai. The open-source speakers stressed the advantages of a wide user community, lack of licence restrictions, freedom to innovate and the decoupling of paid-for support from the licence provider. The commercial speaker seemed much more defensive and said that Blackboard were improving their customer support and learning lessons from the open-source community. It was interesting that a US University that switched to Moodle made a deliberate decision to maintain their VLE budget and spent the money saved on the licence costs on a programmer and some instructional designers to help the academic staff make better use of the new system.

Finally, an email from ALT arrived advertising a panel discussion with the inflamatory title ‘The VLE is Undead!’. Continue Reading Three stories about Virtual Learning Environments…