VLE or not to VLE?

Written on 20:18 by Unknown

I cant believe i am writing this post! I am a big advocate of the traditional VLE and have long since seen the deeper benefit of a carefully managed resource to help enhance teaching, learning and assessment. As a student myself I have seen other VLE's in action and also my job affords me the luxury of seeing other efforts across the region. I like the fact that you can manipulate the platform to meet your needs and use a variety of tools to better improve the features offered such as quizzes, online lessons and good integration with videos, photos and HTML etc.

But this is the problem. To better improve. As a lecturer and living in a fast moving technology based world I don't want better, I want best and I want it now! Furthermore the time and effort and potential cost put into shaping this environment is vast and generally creates a 'Marmite' type of appreciation.  VLE's divide staff teams and also does not offer a consistent approach for learners and its no surprise that Ofsted have started to chip away at the value of VLE's and have released an E-Portfolio of their findings from the past 3 years. It can be found here.


I could be here forever discussing the range of fantastic free resources for e-learning that are available on the web, that can be used in better ways than those present on a VLE. Google Docs for instance can be used in dozens of collaborative and sharing ways which resolves issues about sharing documents with learners. Furthermore it allows use of easily created forms which can be adapted into quizzes and populated to a spreadsheet for tracking purposes. If sharing resources is a must then Dropbox or Google Drive is of real benefit and if you want to share videos then uploading content onto Youtube and embedding on a group page is a must. Let's not forget Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook to name but a few that will allow you to create a dialogue with your learners. Other pages like Slideshare, Prezi and Animoto give a tutor the platform for presenting lesson content and as with many of the aforementioned they are also available on most main mobile devices and operating systems. With free web-hosting or running a web-server, hosting other packages is breeze too.

In short, times have moved on and perhaps the time of the VLE has come and gone. Its successor, 'The Cloud' has made it's battle cry, loud and clear. Perhaps as we increasingly live life in the cloud, its time for institutions to make that leap?

Posted in e-learning, educaton, google, moodle, ofsted, vle

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