Information – Present and Correct

In recent years, the development of the Web 2.0 principle has led to an explosion of software available online to do just about anything you could possibly want it to. Simple websites providing simple functions hosted entirely in the cloud, normally completely free – what’s not to like?

An example of Web 2.0: Google.

Having the functions available is all very well, but knowing what to use for any specific task is a skill which makes the difference between a very poor result and an exceptional one. Recently, I have been looking into ways of presenting information (not data*) which has been processed from the results of our VLE surveys, and finding a range of tools on the web to do it.

What is to like?

A basic web search for creating presentation tools brings up eight online services in the top 10 search results, and all of them have at least a basic version available free. We all like free stuff, and we like finding it quickly – getting started on a presentation online takes less than a minute.

With a huge range of tools out there, there must also be something which does everything you want it to, and which can create a presentation exactly how you want it to look – whether you want to export it into HTML, download an image, or combine the two and make an infographic in Canva to use as the background for a Prezi. Whoa – fancy!

HaikuDeck

These tools are great to use, too. The market is so competitive that they have to be comfortable to use – familiar from the outset, fast, and designed with the user in mind. There are none of the old standards which come with desktop programs, gradually migrating from one version to another and trying to keep an archaic interface ticking over.

The ease of having this functionality available online, free, 24/7 means that some of the traditional boundaries to collaboration are broken down – compatibility and access. One of the principles behind web 2.0 is ‘Software as a Service’ – the software is provided as a service online, which is accessed whenever it is required. When not required, it goes away, unlike desktop programs and apps which stay behind on your computer. It can be updated whenever the owner wants, because that just means pushing new code to a server somewhere on the Internet – much easier than trying to get several million users to download an update to the program they currently use locally on their computer. Everyone uses the same version of the software, and that means there are no compatibility issues, as you might get with PowerPoint 2007 and 2013.

If someone has access to the World Wide Web (not the Internet*), regardless of where they are in the world, they can use the software. This means collaboration can take place across the world, and it doesn’t need any specialist software installed on machines so internet cafés do the job just as well as personal laptops. Having information stored in the cloud also means that the latest version is always the one being worked on – no more trying to merge changes when you mistakenly open the copy you saved last week.

So what’s not to like?

Each of these tools is excellent at what it does. They all know exactly what they are trying to achieve, and execute it very well. The problem is, this is usually of limited scope. For example, if you want to animate the arrival of text on a page, you’ll find that isn’t covered by Haiku Deck, or Canva, and pretty soon you’re going to be wishing you’d just fired up PowerPoint anyway.

If you’re like me and loathe to give away any sort of passwords or personal information, these sites will not be for you. Each one will require a login and a password, and since you only found them through a search and spent all of half a second scanning the description, giving away an e-mail address and password seems premature. That’s not to say for one minute that these sites aren’t secure – I’m sure they are – but be careful. The more places you give out an e-mail address, the more likely you are to recieve spam.

The biggest gripe…

Despite this, by far my biggest problem with these sites is the effect they have on the presentation you are trying to give. Too often, the train of thought runs, “I need to create a presentation on this year’s sales figures. Prezi’s cool. I’ll use that.” The result: a presentation which takes longer than it should to create, longer than it should to deliver, and doesn’t get across the key information in a logical manner. You should be presenting figures – the information needs to be clear, the presentation style can be entirely forgettable.

Similar things can occur when trying to deliver a lecture, with plenty of information available, using Haiku Deck. Sure, it looks pretty, but one line of text per slide along with a vaguely associated image is not enough to deliver a powerful message. Great for showing off a gallery of photos, rubbish for teaching anything meaningful.

These are just examples, and it is of course very easy to create a bad presentation in PowerPoint, but be aware of the basic point – use the right tool for the job. Decide what you want the presentation to look like, and then use the luxury of Web 2.0 and the huge range of available software to create it, rather than letting the tool dictate the way the presentation flows, and the content you put in it.

What will we use?

During the course of my research, I have come across a range of sites which provide a useful functionality for presenting our information. Once the survey data comes in, it will be analysed and processed to turn it in to information we can present and draw conclusions from.

While the overall review will have to be summarised in a word processed report, for distribution and maintenance of records, we will also be trying to come up with innovative ways to get our conclusions across to the academics and students who will make most use of it. This means we are looking into good ways to present information clearly, and most importantly visually.

An infographic created using Canva – using mock data.

As a result, infographics have come up a lot as a good way of getting the information across. There are a number of online sites which can be used for creating the graphic. The first result that appears in a search is VisMe, but a limited number of stock templates, limited adjustability, and fairly poor user interface, mean it is difficult to get the desired result.

Instead, Canva has far more customisation tools and adjustability, and the ability to download the resulting graphic as an image file to be imported elsewhere. All of the functionality is free and only premium templates and graphics are charged for – it is easy enough to generate a well designed graphic without spending a penny.

When it comes to a tool to present the infographic, this is where Prezi comes in to its own. Being able to zoom in on a particular statistic, talk about it, then zoom out again and show the whole poster to see how things all fit together, is a fantastic way to show off a large amount of connected research and statistics. I would look no further.

Example of an infographic used in Prezi

We can also distribute the information and conclusions through the World Wide Web. This was initially designed specifically for the purpose of linking together a collection of multimedia files – exactly what we intend to do. Building a website through HTML is therefore a very feasible way of connecting all of our work together. Best of all, it can be accessed on a range of mobile devices, increasing its catchment.

But hold on – before going diving into a text editor and writing the html from scratch, there are yet more sites which will let you create a presentation-style set of pages, and export into fancy HTML5 format. These range from very professional systems to hobbyists writing code for Github in their spare time. One of the most talked about is impress.js, which is essentially a javascript library which renders html pages in an infinite canvas. It requires reasonably advanced html knowledge to get the most out of, but more than pays that back.

Graph generated with the Google graphing libraries. Data not representative.

Presentation of information in an attractive format does not come as naturally to html as it does to other tools. However, the beauty of open source is that if something can be made better, somebody will write a library that does it. Step forward Google, who have created a library for creating interactive graphs of every type under the sun. An example of what is possible is shown in image format on the left; it can be found in interactive form at this demo page.

In Conclusion…

There are a lot of ways to present information. Collecting it is only part of the puzzle; there is far more that needs to be done to get the point across in a succinct and memorable manner. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available to do the job… but they have to be used correctly in order to be effective.

We will be using a combination of tools selected because we have chosen how we want to present things, and what we want to look like, and then chosen the tool which completes that task in the simplest way possible. When the presentation is done – keep an eye out for updates.

Footnote

*Data and information: data is raw, unprocessed numbers. Presenting someone with data, e.g. 26.33, will mean absolutely nothing to them. Data is processed and given context to convert it into information, which is meaningful and understandable. In our case, data would be the numbers of respondents in each category – information is the percentage these numbers represent, linked to the categories, so that a trend in the answer can be established.

The Internet refers to hardware. It is the cables, servers and routers which provide connections between all computers connected to it. The World Wide Web is purely data – it is binary data which is transferred over the internet and rendered on web browsers to produce information which can be viewed. The data is in the form of multimedia files which are linked together using hyperlinks, generating a software network on top of the Internet, which is a hardware network. This distinction means very little in common language but is important when considering the availability of software and data.

Active Suspension – Formula Student

In racing terms, Silverstone is long in the past and the Formula Student team has already moved on to designing for next year. It was always my intention, if I was elected as group leader, to develop an active suspension system for the car.

Why?

Active suspension has previously been used most extensively on aerodynamically dependent cars, such as Formula 1 cars, where providing a stable platform – and crucially a consistent ride height – is key to getting the aerodynamics to work effectively.

In Formula Student, we are not aerodynamically dependent. However, we do see a variation in vertical load in excess of 10% of the weight of the car over the course of a race. The endurance race requires a driver change and will burn approximately 10kg of fuel, contributing to up to a 20kg change in vehicle mass.

We also run on a range of tracks which can be very bumpy – we race on a small autocross track set out on part of Copse corner, crossing onto and off of the track and the pit lane, for example. For our small, light car, the seams in tarmac and the inevitable build-up of debris causes bumps and ridges which must also be negotiated.

To design the car to cope with bumps, which are high frequency oscillations, requires soft suspension. This allows each corner to act individually to absorb the bump smoothly. To control the weight change, which is a low (zero) frequency change, very stiff suspension is needed, so that the car setup does not change significantly between drivers and as the fuel burns off.

Getting a balance between the soft, compliant suspension and stiff suspension normally requires a compromise closer to the stiff end, resulting in poor performance over bumps. Using active suspension, we can let soft springs do all of the work over bumps, and use active control of actuators to maintain the ride height, and setup regardless of the static weight.

We also compete in a variety of different events: the autocross (sprint) requires excellent cornering performance, but the acceleration test is simply a 75m drag race, and requires good traction. Different suspension characteristics are optimal for each, and the ability to do things like raise the car’s ride height while doing the straight line test to reduce drag will help improve our times. Likewise, the skidpan is a figure-eight circuit which we complete against the clock, and controlling body roll to reduce ‘snap’ as the car changes direction is key here.

How?

There are a number of different implementations of active suspension, which I have broadly characterised into five different groups.

1. ‘Fully Active’ actuated suspension: an actuator is installed in parallel to the primary spring-damper mechanism. This is directly linked to the wheel and hence has direct ride-height control through the variation of position. This system is a simple application which is nearly as effective as (3).
2. ‘Semi-Active’ actuated suspension: an actuator is installed in series to the primary spring-damper mechanism. This must act through the spring and thus has direct control over spring rate, but only indirect control over ride-height. It was used by Leyton House in Formula 1 to control their sensitive aerodynamic platform.
3. Active springs: the spring rate is directly controlled using mechanical or fluidic means to achieve similar results to arrangement (2) in a more compact mechanism. This was used by Williams in their exceptionally successful FW14 from 1991 and 1992, and the FW15 in 1993.
4. Active dampers: the damping in bump and rebound is modified by variation of orifice diameter, fluid viscosity, or other means. This cannot control wheel position but can control the rate at which the spring extends or retracts. This is a common system which can be implemented simply, and it is seen on many performance road cars.
5. Full authority active: there are no springs or dampers and the system has full control over wheel position. Lotus exploited this system on their Formula 1 cars in the 1980s with some success.

The intention will be to use either system (1) or (2), due to the comparative simplicity of the mechanical side of system. They have the coil-over dampers installed as a failsafe system so that the car will remain controllable even in the event of a failure. With reliability so critical to the endurance, this is a key requirement.

Further posts at a later date will confirm which system we use, demonstrate proof-of-concept using modelling, and start to produce some designs. Until then, here’s a taster:

Modelling of a possible type 1 active suspension system, including layout and kinematics.

Formula Student UK 2015

Welcome to Silverstone Banner

At the University of Southampton this year, I have been part of the ‘SUFST‘ Formula Student team. We compete annually at Silverstone and this year the event was held from the 9th-12th July. The team is in its third year and continues to grow and improve, bringing in more team members, more knowledge, and more expertiese each year. This year it has also seen the departure of some members to destinations including Formula One teams – testament to the value placed on this kind of engineering challenge by employers.

The Challenge

Formula Student, an IMechE sanctioned event, requires teams from universities to design and build cars from scratch each year. The ‘formula’ is defined by standardised SAE regulations from the USA, modified for European competition in order to suit local racing authority requirements. It is a very open formula with a wide variety of cars competing, with different chassis types, electric and petrol vehicles, and a wide range of aerodynamic assists permitted and racing together in the same class.

The variety and international nature of the compeitition is what draws so many people together to compete. Universities from India and Turkey were present at the Silverstone race, as well as several from Western Europe. The competitiveness drives huge improvements in technology from year-to-year, including a nearly 10% improvement in lap time from the fastest cars this year.

To compete, cars must be designed from scratch each year, and every part must be accompanied by a design report and a cost report. At the event, the design reports and cost reports are presented to judges who assess how effective the reports are at detailing exactly how the component could be made industrially, and use them to make a judgement on the quality of vehicle design. There is also a business presentation, where the teams attempts to gain sponsorship and interact through social media are assessed.

Scrutineering

Scrutineering sticker

Once the judging is complete, cars take part in six stages of stringent scrutineering. Firstly, they must pass chassis inspection, which ensures that the chassis will withstand the loads required in the event of an accident. Technical inspection is the hardest to pass as it checks that all parts of the car conform to the substantial technical regulations document, and are safe and well designed. Once this is complete, a final safety inspection checks that drivers will be safe in the car and that it conforms to local (MSA) regulations in the seat, harness, and driver egress areas.

Three dynamic scrutineering events follow. Firstly, the car is filled with fuel and tilted to 60 degrees to simulate a high-g turn. Fluids must not spill out below 45 degrees, and then the car must stay on all four wheels up to the full 60. The drivers have a lot of fun at this point. Next is the noise test – the car must be below 100dB at idle, and 110dB at 75% of the redline. Often exhaust muffling is required to get the car to pass this point, because the motorbike engines are fitted with long exhausts and large diameter exits to improve power. Finally, the car must accelerate up to speed and lock all four wheels simultaneously through application of the brakes. This is required to demonstrate that the brakes have enough power to stop the car as quickly as possible, and is often the hardest test to pass. The brakes need to be well balanced and the driver needs to be fully committed. It is also the first time the car runs under power at the event, which makes it a stumbling block for a lot of cars.

SUFST 2015

It has been a remarkable year, taking the car from designs and ideas, sketches and concepts, through to a manufactured, working racing car. From paper to track has taken just 10 months, involved nearly 100 team members and many more working to supply the team with components, sponsorship, logistics, and software. It is a triumph of engineering that the team is simply at the event with a car, even before the remarkable achievements and innovations on this year’s car are considered.

Stag 2 parked in the garage

Despite using the same engine and gearbox as in the 2014 car, the total weight was reduced from 282kg down to 223kg – representing over a 25% reduction in chassis weight. This is a huge gain, only possible thanks to the exceptional engineering skills of the team and the dedication to the task.

The Week

The finishing touches to the car were applied at the start of the week in Southampton: final suspension components and driver controls were added. The car was loaded into a van an taken to Silverstone on Wednesday night, while the team set up camp at the Copse Grandstand campsite. A barbecue is the clear choice of dinner for a hungry group of sleep-deprived engineers.

On Thursday morning the garage was assembled and the car unloaded. Work began to prepare the car for scrutineering – completing checklists, checking regulations, and testing components before we were sure the car was ready. Thursday and Friday also host the design, cost, and business presentations. Throughout the car build, each part must be designed and costed accurately and then the resulting reports presented to judges at the event. Marks for these reports form nearly half of the available points at the event, so doing well is critical.

After a fast food tea in Towcester and a night back at the campsite, work continued to prepare the car on Friday. By this stage the exciting bits were going in to place: the throttle, clutch, and the fancy electronics in the steering wheel. The car made it to scrutineering on Friday evening and passed chassis inspection before scrutineering closed for the night. A range of recommendations were acted upon in the evening so that the car was prepared for safety and technical inspections on the Saturday morning.

On the way out of the circuit on Friday night: a good omen. The spectacular setting of Silverstone in rural Buckinghamshire can only be improved by an even more spectacular sky, as the sun sets over Woodcote corner at the North East of the circuit. Red sky at night and the weekend was falling in to place.

Sunset from Battery Bridge at the entry to Silverstone

Another early start on Saturday morning brought the car into the line for the final scrutineering inspections. The team watched eagerly as scrutineers checked everything from bolt lengths to suspension geometry. Then, to complete the safety inspection, all four drivers must perform an egress test: they must exit the car in under five seconds so that in the case of a fire there is no risk of harm. Here, we set a record for the weekend – driver Titas managed to get out of the car in 2.41 seconds, the fastest egress seen in 2015. He had time to get back in before the clock stopped!

Tilt testing: the car is tilted to 60 degrees to ensure it remains stable. The right-hand wheels must not leave the table.

Once the inspection stickers had been added, we were ready to take on the dynamic aspects of scrutineering. Firstly, the car was filled with fuel and all other necessary liquids so that it was ‘ready to race’. Then, it was tilt tested, which was spectacular but was passed without incident.Titas jumped out with a grin as wide as the helmet when we had finished.

Next up is the noise test. Modern road cars have no trouble with this because the exhausts are insulated, silenced, and carefully designed for noise reduction. In Formula Student, power rules all so the exhausts are very noisy and often muffling devices are required. In order to do the noise t  est, however, the engine has to be running (for obvious reasons). This proved to be somewhat of a challenge; due to the air intake design the car was very sensitive to fuel mixture, and required a lot of throttle to idle. It took a couple of batteries to run flat in testing before we managed to fire up, at which point it became clear that we had a lot of noise cancelling to do! A quick trip to some other teams to ask for advice and then some careful exhaust packing did the trick, and we passed the noise test with seconds to spare before the mandatory engine shutdown at 6pm.

With only the brake test remaining, all that separated us from racing on the Sunday afternoon was a bit of suspension setup and a heavy dose of burnt rubber – locking all four wheels simultaneously within a defined area is no simple task. The suspension was designed with adjustability in mind – as such it was very easy to set camber, toe, and ride height to optimum levels for the brake test.

On Saturday night, in stark contrast to Friday, a heavy rainstorm forced us to abandon the garages early and retreat back to the campsite. In the end, the rain passed relatively lightly, but everyone was glad of an early finish.

Sunday morning – race day. We arrived at the track early to get the brake test finished and get prepared for the race. Wheeling the car over there was a real sense of optimism in the team that things would go to plan and we would be in the race in the afternoon. Unfortunately that wasn’t to be – the car had other ideas and broke its diff carriers during the acceleration run.

With limited testing available before the race weekend, such component failures are simply a part of racing and we learn to accept them. While disappointing, the team can take a tremendous sense of satisfaction from the improvements made to the car over the last year. There is much more to do and the focus is already on next year.

An afternoon off gave us the opportunity to take some team photos and watch the endurance event. In a drama-filled afternoon, Bath University combined exceptional driving with perfect timing, completing their 22-lap run just as the rain came down. That left the top universities, Delft, Zurich, Stuttgart and Graz, battling it out over lower placings as they could not match the pace of the Bath car in the dry. Delft still set a fastest lap of the weekend, but the electric car could not maintain the pace and also fell behind Zurich.

When all looked to be settled with just two laps to go however, Zurich ground to a halt on the far side of the track with a faulty isolator switch, handing the endurance event win to Bath, the dynamics win to Delft, and the overall event win to the defending champions from the Netherlands.

While Zurich were crushed by coming so close, many teams were thrilled with their final results. The sense of achievement from everyone in the paddock afterwards was uplifting and genuinely inspiring.

It’s not all about the race

The racing isn’t everything – Silverstone is a chance to go away and spend time with your friends – people who share a common interest in racing. The teams have a community atmosphere and everyone is excited to be at the home of British motorsport.

The best moments of the weekend come from times when we are not preparing the car. On Saturday evening, a pub dinner was called for everyone, at the White Horse in Silverstone Village. Taking a break from the pressure of the event to let our hair down, talk about unrelated subjects, and generally enjoy ourselves led to several entertaining and some very special moments:

Pub dinner!

At this point it is obligatory to shout out to everyone else in the team who has worked so hard to bring this year together. Although it wasn’t the result we expected, it was brilliant fun and these guys are a fantastic group of friends and colleagues.

We have experienced and learned a lot from the challenges this year and next year we will have our strongest team ever. Engineering is all about progress and each year builds on the last to go faster, quicker, lighter, and finish higher.

Next Year

Planning for next year has already started, the team leaders have been selected, and I am delighted to be working alongside Al as suspension group leader. We will be working hard on some new innovations to improve reliability and reduce weight, as well as getting test data off the old car and running some new simulations.

Looking forward, it should be a year where there is plenty of knowledge and experience to build on, and one where we improve the car extensively to take part in some dynamic events and go racing, which, after all, is what we are here to do.

Watch this space for updates throughout the year.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Over the last couple of days I have been working on a report on the current online learning tools provided at the University of Southampton. They are numerous: we have a ‘Sussed’ portal, which acts as a home page with links out to all of the different services, online timetabling, a Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment, a link to the Office365 logon, and a student records system. We also have two different common mobile apps. The large number of services available could in itself be an inconvenience, but more on that later.

The purpose of the report is to discover what we have available for now, the features it provides, and the quality of the interface to the students. This will clearly show areas which are not being used to their full potential at the moment, as well as areas which are not currently suitable for the task. We can move from here to investigate why services are not being used to their full potential, and also to see what services are required and work out how to provide them.

A view of the Sussed homepage

Largely, the report is based on my experiences using the system, and as such I spent most of the time to produce the report looking through my own portal, testing different links and exploring features I didn’t know existed before. Each service (Blackboard, Timetabling, etc.) is looked at individually and the advantages and shortfalls are listed, described, and explained. There is no time or desire at present to discuss how the system could be changed or improved, as there is far more data gathering to do before this becomes relevant.

Blackboard

Blackboard, the VLE, has a number of features which I had not used previously as there had been no reason to use them. It is a more powerful tool than I thought – it is not just a file storing site, because there are blogs, wikis, forums (discussions) and even a full calendar feature. However, as I also discovered, these are not very well used.

Distribution of content types found in a sample Blackboard course set

To analyse the content types found and used on Blackboard, I counted up all of the files found in my directories and looked at the different file types present. As expected, nearly half were PDF files, and it would have been much more if I had not counted videos of recorded lectures as well. The biggest surprise was to find that only 6% of the file types on Blackboard are web technologies and not files. All of these are discussion boards and quizzes – there are no blogs or wikis used in any of my courses. The distribution is seen in the chart here.

The reason Virtual Learning Environments are used over simple file storage sites is because they provide so many more functions and ways for academic staff to interact with the students. But here we see that for 94% of the content on Blackboard, a file storage site may even be optimal, because it would allow users to keep their libraries in sync with the latest version of a file, access documents in the cloud, and share files with specific groups of students or links rather than the privacy being limited to course-wide folders.

Mobile Apps

There are two mobile apps associated with the university that are widely used amongst students at Southampton. Firstly, the MySouthampton app is used for viewing timetables, finding free computers, and library search functions like DelphiS. It is the method of choice for many students for viewing their timetables because the timetabling service online is much more complex to understand. The official Blackboard app, Blackboard Learn, is also used to access files on mobile devices. This comes in to its own when viewing lecture slides on mobile devices in lectures. Students can make notes directly onto the slides using specialised apps specifically for this purpose, or they can simply follow along if the lecturer moves too quickly or too slowly.

These mobile apps are widely used and have by far the best interface of any of the online tools provided. Both provide cut-down versions of the full online alternative and this allows the design to be simpler and easier to use. App design standards are also more focussed on usability where web technologies are not forced to be easy to use, so there are several reasons that the students prefer to use mobile apps over the online alternatives.

Review Points

The report summarises the above points and more into a list of areas on which more research will be focussed. These are areas where the current system is either ineffective or used inefficiently, or where improvements can be made which would improve the service provided by the tools.

• Student engagement in blogs and wikis – they are useful features that are currently unused.
• Content organisation in Blackboard folders – files are often difficult to find wthin the folder structures on Blacboard.
• Integration of content into one dedicated system – specifically the timetables, which are currently in their own system, and would be more easily viewed if they could be exported in a format that could be read by software such as Outlook and iCal.
• Second sign-ins – half of the links available through the Sussed portal require a second input of user credentials. Bringing these services under the first login would be beneficial.
• Mobile devices – can and should more features be added to mobile apps to improve content uptake among students.

Outcomes

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: if we cannot find good reason to do away with the current system, regardless of the alternatives, then it should not be replaced. This report has established that while the current services are very capable of providing what is required from a Virtual Learning Environment, many of them are not provided efficiently or in a way that is user friendly and convenient. This means the focus of the review can be on improving user integration with the systems – which typically provide far more functionality than is actually required – than on improving the range of features that is available.

There will be further research into the VLE user groups to discover where it is possible to improve the user interaction and to identify how best to proceed with the recommendations.

First Day at the Office

VLE Review

Welcome to my blog. In June 2015 I was selected for a position on the Southampton Excel Placement Scheme, as a Virtual Learning Environment Research Assistant.

This blog was created to keep a record of the work I do on a multitude of projects, starting with research to assist the review of the Southampton University Virtual Learning Environment. Over the next few months a record will be kept of interesting pieces of information, discoveries, and pieces of work that are done to record the process of reviewing and improving the VLE.

Existing Systems

Today was the first day at the office and a lot of setting up has been done, including Portfolios, twitter accounts and blogs. Research into existing systems has thrown up interesting pieces of information and these have been saved in the developing portfolio on Pathbrite, VLE Review, along with other useful resources.

Alongside our current VLE Blackboard, three further options are available in Lore, Moodle, and Canvas, as purpose built VLEs. However, there is also an outside option in SharePoint, which is essentially a file storage system for business, but with enough additional features that using it as a VLE is possible.

Canvas prides itself on ease of use, directly competing with Blackboard. It has been implemented by Birmingham University with some success. Moodle is a free and open source tool which is scalable and therefore covers a huge range of businesses. It approaches the task from a much more social point of view, suiting the core culture of equality provided by the web.

There is much to consider and the differences between the systems are significant, so a more thorough review of all available options will be required at a later date.