Virtual learning

What about the students?
One of the most important things that students get out of VLEs is improved access to learning.

With a VLE in the classroom, those that want to get on with their work can do so, while the teacher deals with the others.

With access to a VLE outside school, students can go over things they didn’t grasp first time, repeat exercises and, using the communication systems, they can have conversations with other students about the work they are doing.

This enables students to become autonomous learners, which is how adults behave at work or in higher education.

Adding resources to a VLE is a challenge for many teachers, and in some schools students are being recruited to help. This is a win-win situation; the teacher’s immediate problem (“Can I get this Year Seven homework uploaded for tonight?”) is solved, and students have the chance to develop their IT skills. One school we know of has no official VLE, but two students have set up one using the free open source Moodle, hosted on a friend’s server.

The VLE boom
Research carried out on behalf of Becta (see section entitled Resources) and published in March 2006 found that 32 per cent of primary schools and 62 per cent of secondary schools in England had a VLE already. Of those without, 44 per cent of primaries and 52 per cent of secondary schools said that they were planning to set up a VLE in the next 12 months. VLEs are much more common in further and higher education, where 56 per cent of UK Further Education (FE) colleges use Moodle, and the rest a selection of commercial offerings, particularly Blackboard, WebCT and Firstclass.

Moodle is the most popular VLE system; it’s used by more than 20,000 establishments from primary school to university level across the world, but Becta doesn’t approve it – not because there’s anything wrong with it but because Becta’s procedures favour large companies with the time to jump through certification hoops. Open source projects just don’t have the staff, time or money.

Content standards
The content available for a VLE is crucial – but thankfully there are standards that mean you’re not tied to proprietary systems. There’s a standard for VLE content called Scorm (Shareable Content Object Reference Model). It was created by ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning), which is a US government agency. Thanks to Scorm, commercial content providers don’t have to tailor their products to different platforms, and teachers who create their own content can take it with them when they move to a different school.

VLEs in action
From the student’s point of view, a VLE is just a website accessible via any browser. The school gives them a username and password, granting them access to the courses they are studying. Behind the scenes, this needs organising. Schools administration has been computer based for years, and information from the general management system can be imported into the VLE.

The market leader in schools management is Sims (Schools Information Management System), produced by Capita, which also produces the Learnwise VLE. Schools with not much in-house technical support find buying a system from a single supplier makes sense, but some other VLE providers have arrangements to simplify the import of Sims data. Schools going it alone with Moodle need to set up a link to their management system, which is where a network manager comes in useful.

A teacher’s involvement with the VLE can vary enormously. They have a login giving access to all the courses they teach, class lists, mark lists, reports and so on. Any curriculum planning, lesson notes, handouts and worksheets that exist in electronic format can be uploaded easily, but it makes sense to have the basic format standardised first.

Simply putting text on a VLE is not really what it’s about; interactive content that grabs students’ attention and requires them to do something is where VLEs score points. It is also the area that teachers find most worrying. There’s new technology to learn, which doesn’t always come naturally. Some schools have had their VLEs running for a year or more and still have very little content.