In this post we are going to review and compare the characteristics of VLEs (the dominant design) with those of PLEs (the alternative design).

Abernathy an Utterback introduced the concept of dominant design to describe the emergence of a broadly accepted core design principle from a number of competing incompatible alternatives. Common examples are the QWERTY keyboard, the VHS video and the IBM PC.

Within the field of education technology, Internet gave rise to the virtual classroom. Institutions sought to control Internet based learning through Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). The VLE pattern includes a particular category of software that has reached near saturation within the spanish educational system, so we might justify describing the VLE pattern the dominant design.

The main characteristic of a dominan design is that, once it emerges, innovative activity is directed to improving the process by which it is delivered rather than exploring other alternatives which represent a better technical solution.

Talking about education technology, the focus in recent years has been on the improvement of VLEs, for example: the merger of WebCT and Blackboard, investments made in open-source Moodle and Sakai, etc. But learners are discovering in the new web technologies (blogs, wikis, file sharing, social networking) the ability to search, create and publish contents, to share ideas, to join groups, etc. Yet until very recently, these technologies had been unsupported, and even in some cases banned, within educational institutions, despite slowly we are coming to realise that we can not simply reproduce classroom learning embodied in software (Attwell, 2007) and the conviction that they represent something closer to lifelong and personalized learning.

The critical design flaws inherent in today’s learning systems can be addressed through adopting a new design pattern that shift emphasis away from the isolated experience of the VLE. We characterize this new pattern a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). The discourse of the PLE began to emerge from conversations amongst educational technologists in early 2005, and began to build when a conceptual model was published. PLEs aims to bridge the worlds of formal and informal learning, and to achive the goals of lifelong learning, based on the new forms of social software and the new paradigms of the web as platform.

 

Characteristics of VLEs (dominant design)

  • Focus on integration of tools and data within a course context. The VLE follows a pattern of modularization of courses and the isolation of learning into discrete units.

  • Asymmetric relationships. Within current VLEs, the capabilities of teachers tools are richer than those from the students. This asymmetry sends a contradictory message to users: on the one hand, they are exhorted to be creative, participate and take control of their learning; on the other hand, they are restricted to a passive role.

  • Homogenous context. All the learners have the same experience of the system: same content, organized in the same fashion, with the same tools. The VLE replicates the general pattern of education, which emphasizes the common experience of learners within a context, opposite to the desire for an individualized experience expressed in lifelong learning.

  • Use of open e-learning standards. A set of specifications have been adopted by VLEs in order to integrate into managements systems (e.g. IMS Enterprise Services) and to incorporate packaged learning materials (e.g. SCORM, IMS Content Packaging) and assessments (e.g. IMS Question & Test Interoperability). However, other specifications, with widespread adoption outside education have not impacted VLEs.

  • Access control and rights management. The VLE typically restricts access to content to the cohort engaging in a unit, and through arrangements with publishers to safeguard licensed content. This restriction acts against lifelong learning, which seeks to unify cross-context learning experiences: most content within a VLE is not available to the outside world, and even is also often unavailable when the course finishes.

  • Organizational scope. The scope of operation of a VLE is typically the organization that installs and manages software. This makes difficult to engage external organizations and individual learners who are not register in some way with the organization. Again, this is in opposition to the lifelong learning where there is an important role for cross-organizational learning and informal learning.

 

Characteristics of PLEs (alternative design)

  • Focus on coordinating connections between user and services. Rather than interacting with the tools offered within the context supplied by a single provider, the PLE is concerned with enabling a wide range of contexts to be coordinated to support a wide range of services offered by diverse organizations and individuals. This is more consistent with a competence-oriented approach to learning, and explicitly recognizes the need to integrate experiences in various environments.

  • Symmetric relationships. Any user should be able to both consume and publish resources using a service.

  • Individualized context. Users can re-organize the information within the context as they see it in any fashion and choose tools to situate within it.

  • Open Internet standards and lightweight proprietary APIs. Because the scope of the system has expanded beyond the institutions, the range of standards and protocols used to interact with services increases, and it is no longer possible to focus solely on standards developed to suit the needs of the education sector. Instead, systems will need to interact with services offering their own proprietary APIs (e.g., OpenSocial) and with services offering interfaces that support more general web standards (e.g., IETF Atom).

  • Open content and remix culture. Unlike the VLE, the PLE is concerned with sharing resources for collaborative knowledge construction, and emphasized the use of Creative Commons licences. Rather than pre-packaged learning objects, the resources collected and accessed using the PLE are more typically blog postings, reviews, comments and other communication artifacts.

  • Personal and global scope. Whereas the VLE operates within an organizational scope, the PLE operates at a personal level in that it coordinates information and services related directly to the user. However, the PLE can also be considered global in scope as the range of services it can potentially coordinate is not bounded within any particular organization.

 

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This text has been extracted from Wilson, S.; Liber, O.; Johnson, M.; Beauvoir, P.; Sharples, P. and Milligan C. – “Personal Learning Environments: challenging the dominant design of educational systems“