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.
Alex McCormick 