From Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)
The last five years have seen a major uptake of VLEs by colleges and universities. VLEs are large institutional systems, predominantly course based, which provide support for content distribution, discussion and assessment, mainly through proprietary tools that can not be shared across other VLEs.
Although the large amount of tools within a VLE, the limits of any tool are quickly reached. The answer is to abandon the tool being used and switch to another tool. But that is not easy due to the monolithic and proprietary design of VLEs: they must evolve to an open architecture into which learning tools are easily plugged on-demand.
An alternative approach would locate a large amount of VLE functionality on the client side as a desktop or webtop application. The idea is to provide a customizable framework based on a loosely-coupled design -open standards and open APIs-, allowing users to plug-in their own favourite tools and web services.
A PLE fits perfectly the described framework profile. It is composed of a set of customized applications on the client side, some of them will operate in a standalone way, while others will exchange information with server side applications. Institutions would still provide content via repositories and undertake assessment via VLEs, but learners would interact with these using their PLEs.
The PLE is a unique learning environment over the owners learning contexts:
- It is an information environment that integrates personal and professional interests via syndicated feeds.
- It is a portfolio environment that allows the user to maintain a log of the learning process and a repository of the learning contents.
- It is a social environment that connects the user to collaborative activities and events.
PLE design and implementation is not straightforward. While the general need for PLEs is quite clear, we are only beginning to see examples of technology which may show us a practical technical path forward.
Control over the learning context
There is much work to do in terms of giving ultimate flexibility of control to teachers and learners over the assembly and configuration of the functionality they choose to adopt.
Nowadays, PLEs can be seen as a collection of web tools under the learner control. That leads us to a particular idea of PLE: the common learning environment is the Internet, which is personalized by selecting the services that satisfy learner needs. Many of us have all created our own PLE by using a variety of web tools (RSS Reader, Bookmark utilities, Blogs, Wikis, Social Networks, Search Engines, To-Do Lists, …).
But we must take into account that a lot of learners are not used to ICT and feel very confused about web tools. Even for advanced users, the direct usage of a set of web tools turns into tedious task if there is no middleware for managing single sign-on access to learning services, discovery of learning contexts, setup of tools within those learning contexts, search of learning feeds and data-flow between learning services.
The PLE is a brigde between learners and web tools that hides the complexity of the Internet and improves the interaction with web tools. A PLE can be thought as a sophisticated form of an aggregator that would implement general purpose funcionality mashups for learning.
- For learners not used to ICT, it must be a guided environment where they can notice news, interact with peers and use tools for developing their learning process in a safe way.
- For advanced users, it must focus on openness and value-added user experience, allowing learners to plug-in and customize their favourite tools, and improving the usability of those tools within the learning environment.
Interoperability with current learning systems
Despite the benefits of PLEs, it is not the time to throw away VLEs just yet. VLEs will continue in learning scene by opening themselves to standard based enhancements, service oriented architecture and the strong evolutionary move towards real learner centric educational applications.
As learners move between institutions with their PLEs, they may need to access the interfaces to different VLEs. It is necessary to elaborate the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage (for some users this means incorporating course feeds and widgets into their learning environments). This idea opens a potential path forward in flexible VLE system design, one that can naturally evolve into PLE systems.
Social-network construction support
The most successful social services (delicious, Flickr and YouTube) are not initially thought as social networks, but as specific services for small groups of users. For example, the main motivation for joining Flickr is not that it is the best way to build a social network of photos, but because it is the best way to save and share photos with friends. However, after making use of basic core capabilities, users discover the value-added features of Flickr that help to meet other people with the same interests.
Thus, the key element for effective social network construction is to provide a set of contents, tools and services that perfectly suits user needs and tastes. This is the reason for considering the PLE as an excellent start point in order to build a social network.
A PLE is composed of a set of customized applications on the client side. Some of them will operate in a standalone way, while others will exchange information with server side applications. Thus, if a PLE becomes essential for the daily work of a user, the data flow between client and server side applications will allow the automatic feed of the social networks to which the users belongs to.
