Is there a Role for the LMS/VLE in the Emerging Personal Learning Environment? (part 3 of 3)

Learning Management Systems (LMSs), or Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), have become mainstays of university campuses for the delivery of learning materials. For some campuses they have become synonymous with eLearning and a low threshold entry for academic staff seeking to join the digital learning community. As their presence has spread, an arc of new software development activity centred in the cloud has gathered momentum. A burgeoning array of Web 2.0+ tools has sprung up to engage young and old in the last several years. Many of these have become successful because they meet very specific needs of the online community. Some of these applications are core productivity tools, such as Google Apps, the Microsoft Office Live Workspace, or Zoho. Others are specific purpose-built tools such as Gapminder Desktop, a tool for analysing and presenting development indicators based on the work of Hans Rosling from the Karolinska Institute.

It has been argued that the slow development cycle, proprietary licensing, and focus on the teacher rather than the learner have made LMS/VLEs obsolete. Instead, the diverse mix of collaboration tools, social networking, and discipline-specific applications can be fashioned to create a dynamic personal learning environment (PLE) focused on the unique interests and predilections of learners. Is the LMS/VLE a relic, optimised for a past era, a form of dead software still running - or, as some have colourfully proclaimed, a new species of "undead" software? Has the bewildering explosion of cloud-based tools marked the transition to a new form of PLEs that allow for a level of flexibility and customisation that enterprise environments cannot match? Or are PLEs a tautology of applications optimised for experts rather than the new students who enter our institutions each year? While there may yet not be a definitive answer, this talk seeks to lift some of the fog surrounding TLAs (three letter acronyms) and more clearly see both the opportunities and risks inherent in the choice between enterprise learning environments and personally assembled learning tools, including the false dichotomy of that comparison.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Blackboard
• VLE
• LMS
• PLE
• Web 2.0