what is a VLE?
VLEs are types of learning platforms that offer opportunities for creating learning spaces; authoring materials; on line testing; sharing and communicating through blogs, podcasts and forums. There is no need to worry too much about whether to use the term VLE or learning platform, and we will use them interchangeably here, but technically what we have at a Warwick is a learning platform (a mix of software providing the above functions) while many other universities have single items of software such as Moodle or Blackboard which bundle all the functions together. There are pros and cons with each approach. Schools have a mix of learning platforms (eg shared access learning material within a school intranet), single VLE and many have both.
VLEs offer access to: content, communications and management to support learning both within and beyond a school. In particular teachers can author materials; set up on line testing; create class and individual blogs and forums; access, mark and send back assessment tasks. Imagine a class learning about apples. As the pupils logs on he or she might see the following elements or building blocks:
My courses. This tells the student the courses he or she is following and very often links to profiles about teachers and an overview of the syllabus. Students may also find out about assessment deadlines and exam timetables here.
Week by week. The central focus for many students is the week by week guide to the course. Often the teacher will outline each session and will up load presentations, exercises, homework and sometimes will produce quizzes.
Assessment tasks: The student might up load documents to this area or up load assignments from work stored elsewhere. Often the teacher will access and annotate this work or access and send emailed comments. Various tracking documents might be introduced here.
Communication areas: Here are opportunities to mail teachers and set up forums or a class blog
Information areas: Here are opportunities to include links to outside sites or to internal libraries of materials.
The teacher's view is different from the pupil view as the teacher may access a wider range of assessment data and many VLEs allow links to teacher only support. Parents may also be given restricted access to a VLE.
Have a look at some of the videos showing learning platforms in use. These were originally made for Teachers TV and can now be found on several websites including:
http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/videos/
http://www.teachfind.com/teachers-tv/learning-platforms
A search for learning platforms and/or VLEs gives the Teachers TV programs (and other video clips).
(http://www.tes.co.uk also has them but they are not easy to locate)
Some VLEs are more user friendly than others, but most schools are feeling their way as they assess the merits of one against another. Commonly used VLEs locally are Moodle do and We-Learn(Kaleidos), others include Frog, WebCT (Blackboard) and Itslearning.