Virtual Learning Environments in Higher Education

Abstract

Higher Education is a global organization of partnerships and competitions amongst universities and colleges to support a rapidly expanding worldwide provision of teaching, accreditation, and research. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a new component in this complex system, introduced for a variety of reasons including providing more flexibility in teaching, and enabling students to learn off campus. This report suggests that the current generation of VLEs has had some success in providing flexible access to teaching materials, but is not adequate to support the increasing diversity of types of student, the sophistication of new teaching methods, the range of universities spanning multiple locations and cultures, and the need for personal technology to support a lifetime of learning and professional development. The main issues with current VLEs in higher education are: a lack of flexibility to support the wide range of teaching scenarios for an increasingly diverse body of students an inability to serve as a one-stop-shop for students and staff to access quality-assured, authoritative and validated university content and tools a lack of integration with social software applications and the personal tools that individual learners are using deficits in providing personal environments for lifelong learning and professional development a lack of support for cross-institutional research and the management of multiple sites problems with management, archiving and security of personal identities and records of academic achievement Universities differ from commercial organizations in that they must allow a higher degree of personal freedom for individual academic staff to choose the level of engagement with technology. They must also support a wide range of cultures and styles of working. The current generation of VLEs largely fails to support this variety of need. This report argues that the VLE concept needs to be revised to meet the challenges of higher education in the 21st century. A new generation of VLEs should build on the strengths of mature product features such as registration management, standardization of e-learning content and activity tracking, and then extend these features to meet the needs of higher education institutions. Business opportunities exist due to the mismatch between the actual needs of higher education and the features offered by current products. These opportunities are characterized by a shift away from inflexible course delivery towards models that allow the incorporation of data and tools from various sources to form a flexible teaching and learning environment. This change needs to be supported by stable backend services that allow universities to: manage core processes, sometimes across multiple sites and across multiple institutions provide trusted, authorized, and validated materials for students enable staff and students to customize services according to their needs and allow for different levels of engagement with technology enhanced learning connect with the tools and resources that students need as they move through school, college, university, and workplace Big Issues for VLEs in HE February 20th 2008 Page