Another nail in the coffin?

I will be speaking in a symposium at ALT-C in Manchester in September along with James Clay and Graham Attwell. The title of the symposium is 'The VLE is Dead!'. I'm looking foward to it because it promises to be controversial and should generate a lot of heat and (I hope) some light too. I was very interested then to spot a recent Ofsted report which suggests that e-learning is failing in many schools and colleges. The report is quite damning, suggesting that many institutional VLEs are being poorly used. The survey was conducted across a wide range of educational and training settings, including schools, colleges, work-based learning and adult and community learning centres. The results showed that the VLE concept was still a relatively new idea and that no institution had a VLE that covered all aspects of the curriculum. The best VLE deployments were generally reliant on single enthusiastic teachers rather than whole institutions. VLEs in most schools and colleges, says the report, represent only a small proportion of the student learning experience.

These disappointing results point up a number of issues, but most notably, many teachers, when forced to use something as complex as an institutional VLE, tend to take the short cut and simply dump their content into it (a kind of 'shovelware'). They then expect it to work in a similar manner to content delivered in a face to face classroom setting, which of course, it doesn't. The e-Learning Lounge Blog puts it rather well:

"The key lesson from the report is clear enough; good elearning programmes require good implementation. It’s about more than just the technology. There is little point in stamping VLE, DLE or elearning on something and hoping that everything will take care of itself."

I have previously argued that VLEs tend to constrain students into particular ways of thinking and stifle creativity. I also maintain that most proprietary VLEs have been designed by businesses not by teachers, and therefore are unfit for purpose. This latest report shows that in the schools and colleges surveyed, the VLE is hardly a popular or successful tool and that there is minimal uptake on its use. More to be concerned about however, is the vast amount of money that has been poured into providing tools which are just not being used appropriately or effectively. Is this yet another nail in the VLE coffin, and should we now be looking toward more simplified, personalised learning environments based on individual needs?

Related links:

Martin Weller The VLE is dead
JISC Advantages of VLEs for tutors
Steven Verjans The VLE/LMS is dead
Pontydysgu F-ALT09: Symposium on VLEs
Martin Weller Some more VLE demise thoughts
Anne-Marie Cunningham In praise of the walled-garden (VLE)
Podcast The VLE debate

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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.