Learning in a Virtual Environment

Brave New World - Professor Huw Morris

The Publishers’ Association organised a conference at University College London to discuss the VLE in Higher Education.

A VLE is a Virtual Learning Environments such as WebCT or Blackboard (actually they just merged) and the question forthis conference was officially:

Will VLEs transform the landscape of learning?

However, a good part of the conference was targeted at the many publishing companies who were represented in the audience. Publishing companies are wondering - how will we continue to make revenue from text books if the Higher Education sector increasingly adopt these technolgies?

furthermore...

VLEs have been greeted with a mixed response from both academics and publishers: enthusiasts think that they can harnessed to deliver teaching and learning programmes to greater numbers of students. Sceptics believe that they are clunky and that they are difficult for academics to use.

Professor Huw Morris from Manchester Metropolitan University introduced us to VLEs by giving the following statistics:

  • 95% of all Higher Education Institutes are using VLEs
  • 35% of University Lectures use the web in their teaching
  • 68% of this usage is authored by the lecturers themselves
  • Only 15% of publishers' companion web sites are used frequently

Professor John Slater gave us an overview of the use of VLE's in UK higher education and I learnt from his talk that:

  • Learning in a virtual environment means work and play alongside one another.
  • The current generation of university learners (known as millenials) can multi-task, do like group activity, have short attention spans, care not as to the provenance of their sources and believe that everything should be free (he called this eMarxism). I agree with this. Millenials are some time referred to as HomoZapiens after this novel by Victor Pelevin.
  • A VLE is particularly useful for managing large numbers of students, in particular, dealing with issues of assignment and assessement. Lecturers are generally no longer excited by the technology (the fun has gone) but are looking for ways to remove the drudge of repeating tasks. The most popular type of VLE sems to be the 'Model T' (Slater's term) - rather than the smart expensive systems. Typically then WebCT/Blackboard is the stystem that most are now using although some early adopters, who created their own systems are reluctant to throw those away.

David Parkes from Staffordshire University gave us the view from the leading edge. In his university, they seem to be using a whole gamut of technologies to help deliver learning. I suspect that many of these are just tinkering at the edge and mention of everything like blogging, WIKIs, chat rooms, social bookmarking and SKYPE made me suspect that Parkes, like me, is a bit of a 'techno-enthusiast'. But seriously, I agree with him that students are creating and using their own 'Personal learning Environments' - PLEs, and this may be more significant. The question is, can the student's PLE cross link to the VLE?

David was not the first speaker to mention Moodle, and I have already seen this myself. Some universities are making use of this and, in fact, the OU are very keen on this approach. A system called Elgg calls itself a 'Learning Landscape' and although this open source system is early in the development, it looks like an interesting way to go. There is some integration with Moodle also, but, as yet, I would say that Elgg is just beginning.

There were some really good ideas in David Parkes presentation and so I list my noted ones here:

  • Millenials consume, create and share online. This approach to the web (Web 2.0?) needs to be considered when developing courses within VLEs.
  • Scott Wilson over at Bangor University has work that I should look at.
  • Staffordshire's ASK (Assignment Survival Kit) on the web, gives student that final bit of help after all the lecturing is done. This seems like a good idea but I cannot find it. Maybe this is a hidden feature of their implementation of Moodle.
  • BookCloud looked interesting and I was amazed to see that this is supported by Blackwells. The trouble is that this web site looks terrible right now.
  • The final slide from David Parkes showed the book Cluetrain Manifesto - the ideas in this book started the dot.com bubble, so I have added to my booklist.

David Blight from the Coventry Business School gave us a run through of some issues facing his situation. The main lesson here was that 'Blended Learning' is the only way to deliver courses to large numbers of students. I was surprised by the use of the word blended, though because a lot of this was about situations where students and teachers never meet face to face. Blight was being very realistic or even cynical when he said:

Ultimately it will boil down to whether it makes a positive contribution to the University's finances

The final speaker (Shona Mullen from McGraw-Hill) reminded me why we were here:

The theme of the conference relates to publishers response to this kind of learning and how they might protect their current revenues in the area of text books. Shona put the reactions by publishers into sharp focus by going through the alternative responses in the form of opportunity / threat. Clearly the most useful, scenario is one where VLEs are a threat to the traditional publishing model but offer good opportunities for publishers to provide content. The difficulty here is that the exact nature of this opportunity is unclear. 'More work to be done' was one bullet point, and the final suggestion was a forum for further discussion.

Some key items that I picked up from Shona (apart from her business card) where these:

  • Wiley Publishers created their own VLE in the USA although I can find no mention of this on their web site.
  • Publishers like McGraw-Hill create 'cartridges' for applicatiuons like webCT and Blackboard. This sounds like a physical thing although I suspect this is simply some kind of plug-in software that is installed on the server. This seems to me to be strange terminology and OUP on their site refer to packages as well as cartidges. WebCT refer to e-packs and I guess this is the same thing! I notice that searching Google that all the side ads coming up are for ink cartidges!
  • The CETL initiative here in the UK have funded a project resulting in the concept of RLO's (Reusable Learning Objects) defined as a 'web-based interactive chunk of e-learning designed to expain a standalone learning objective'
  • One possible model for publishers might be the ALEKS system for teaching math to school children

Shona Mullen left publishers with a question. Are these products publications? and an opportunity for further debate.

After questions to the panel I took a photo of the John Flaxman sculpture in the corridors of UCL

Posted on 29 Jun around 10am

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