Saturday 28 November 2009

Virtual learning environments

We use WOLF and PebblePad: WOLF is more of a course management system, but it's reliable, fairly rich and useful: PebblePad is embarrassingly clunky, unreliable and closed (to maintain your records after graduation, you have to pay for it…)

We're having a really good debate on the use of VLEs, and the leaders are insisting on the primacy of purpose, rather than fetishing technology or using to fulfil the vacuous demands of the hierarchy. All very stimulating.

Are you using VLEs as teachers or as students? What do you use them for? What are they good for and what are they bad for?

2 comments:

intelliwench said...

Ha! Our department chair would like to "virtualize" the college's entire operations. He's trying to do the paperless office bit, but senior faculty, especially, are resistant (mostly because their incompetence at sending a simple e-mail without hitting "reply-all" becomes painfully obvious). And when the department secretaries work from home, student services are nonexistant. (It seems that actual "work" is nonexistant in those circumstances, too.)

Our university has its own virtual world, akin to SecondLife, where many of the off-campus graduate cohorts "meet." It certainly doesn't take the place of real-time, face-to-face interaction, and in our remote & rural area not everyone has access to the high-speed internet access necessary to make use of the technology. It seems to duplicate resources that are already available but without the fun of creating an avatar to hide behind. And some people experience motion-sickness when navigating about the space!

I've been on both sides of a Moodle-clone course management program, and I like the "green" aspects of it (why print out a 20-page syllabus when you can save the file to your laptop?) but nobody -- students nor faculty -- seem to have the time to really get full use of all its features. Plus there isn't "storage" available to keep the course info intact for much more than two semesters, let alone for perpetuity.

One thing seems inevitable: As soon as we feel competent with the technology we do have, someone will come along with the next great thing and we'll be starting at square one again!

The Plashing Vole said...

Hi Intelliwench - thanks for all this. The way I'm feeling after this course is that VLEs are good if you use them to enhance other activities, but reductive and mechanical if you use them to replace face-to-face contact, staff etc.

We aren't replacing paper for environmental reasons - we're just passing the printing costs on to the students, who already pay high fees. It's a sneaky and underhand trick to play, and it will alienate our students hugely.

File storage is a problem for us too, as is the embarrassingly out of date operation of suites compared with the software students use in the real world.

I like the idea of using online space for things like manuscript examination, concordances and so on: there are obviously really creative things we can do which just aren't possible in the classroom (like getting shy people to talk, for instance).