The institutional VLE? dead and buried, or due a resurrection?

For about the third year on the run there was a general feeling that VLEs (or LMSs as the Americans refer to them) have had their day. You can almost get caught up in this negative mood, until you start asking whether there is an alternative. I don’t believe that there is, at the moment, as the open source options such as Moodle are hardly out of the box and up and running systems, and they do not offer the level of integration we currently enjoy. Never mind the DF levels of some of our staff.

The most interesting session I went to regarding this was “Disconnects Between Learning Management Systems and Millennial Generation User Expectations” – a panel of 5 universities including Georgia Tech. This session started out with the premise that LMSs were invented to assist Faculty teaching, and as such were about control of activities not about speeding up student learning. The session included videos of students at each of the institutions saying some of the things we have been thinking about for a while:

• Powerpoint is the best thing ever for me, if you can see it before the lecture
• Students don’t like Second Life being used for instruction, or lecturers invading Facebook with messages. They wouldn’t mind an “Academic Facebook” - to link up with students at other institutions, but don’t want to see the two together.
• Students like clickers (but would like to use their phones to do what clickers do) and back channelling if it is structured
• They like “anything” that promotes interaction with teachers and each other
• They want transcripts of what the teacher said so they can check things
• They want to be shown things like LinkedIn as they are important for employability
• Some new millenials cant use email, so have to be contacted by peers via MySpace
• They don’t want FAQs they want knowledge bases
• They like YouTube relevant content, especially as a visual reinforcement of practical competencies
  
• The day before I had gone to an “Industry Roundtable: Openness and Interoperability in Higher Education” with Chasen from Blackboard, a Sakai evangelist, and a couple of real people. One of the real people remarked that the world isn’t a simple as open source=good, vendors=bad. Three of us at the back applauded. Having said that, I don’t really know why Bb are trying to link with Facebook, or Moodle – why they just don’t fix the things that don’t work I will never know.
  

According to “The 2008 Campus Computing Survey”, based on 531 responses, the current priorities are:

• Security alerts and emergency notification (in the wake of Virginia Tech)
• Cuts in budgets
• Open source LMS are gaining traction
• There is only a slow migration to Web 2.0
  

The budget cuts were just about the main topic of an otherwise disappointing session on “Top-Ten “Gotchas” for the New CIO”, which included handy tips about how to maintain your diary (indeed), and highlighted a hiring problem in the US where anyone who is any good goes to the commercial sector. Lots of money was going into plagiarism detection, and e portfolios are taking off, slowly.

90% of institutions have a single LMS (though data is difficult to find re depth of deployment, or % of courses using the LMS). Moodle and Sakai have about 10-15% adoption, and the biggest growth is around Moodle. The speaker rather sarcastically noted that an open source LMS is not like being given a free beer, more like being given a free puppy. Hear hear, said I.