VLEs need to evolve

Mainstream VLEs offer competing sets of proprietary features, but because of the continuous need to innovate and experiment, they must have an architecture that supports a rich facility for extension plus extensions. This is the sign of an emerging architectural trend toward defining the VLE as limited set of core capabilities that can integrate tools together from many sources.

“I certainly don’t see the VLE or LMS continuing in the form that they currently are, where are you have a monolithic application with lots and lots of different tools presented to teachers and students. You very quickly come to the limits of any tool that you use. The answer is to abandon the tool you have been using and to swap in another tool. [...] I can see a situation where the VLE or LMS actually shrinks to a container into which you plug these learning tools.”

Dr. Andrew Booth of Leeds University

—–

This text has been extracted from Charles Severance’s “The coming Functionality Mashup in Personal Learning Environments” article.

 

Why do we need a PLE ?

Some institutions have realized of the benefits of applications with which students, beyond the boundaries of the VLEs, have the ability to collect, develop, publish and share resources, taking more responsibility in their learning. The idea behind these applications 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 services, and providing interoperability with other applications such as VLEs.

A PLE fits perfectly in described application the profile. However, its implementation is not straightforward, as different strategies may be feasible for its development. 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.

 

About LMS & PLE co-existence

LMS systems have afforded teachers the capacity to create their own web courses with minimal programming expertise or even instructional design support. Thus, they have become essential and very popular tools for early and late majority users.

Similarly, PLEs are nowhere near as easy to use to facilitate and support many of the educational functions that are trivial in modern LMS systems. I eagerly await the day when both formal and informal connected learning opportunities are a natural and spontaneous outgrowth of our personal computing environment – but I don’t think it is time to throw away the LMS just yet.

Nonetheless, the PLE future seems to be more secure than that of any monolithic LMS. I suspect the LMS systems that survive will do so by opening themselves to standards based enhancements, service requests and the strong evolutionary move towards real learner centric educational applications.

Posted in Virtual Canuck on 2006/01/09

—–

It is one of the invariant laws of technology that any new system must co-exist with the previous systems; in the case of education, while the VLE pattern should lose its status as the dominant design, the technology will be arround us for a long time. So, how will the PLE and the VLE co-exist?

• Parallel lives, with the PLE becoming the dominant design on informal learning and with the VLE remaining the key technology of formal educational systems.

• Period of connection, whereby VLE products start to open their services for use within the PLE.

• Co-opting, whereby the characteristics of the PLE are incorporated into the VLE.

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”

 

What is a Personal Learning Environment ?

I do not know what a PLE is beyond a collection of flowchart diagrams with connected bubbles of web 2.0 logos. [...] But in researching it, beyond papers, presentations, and digrams, I could not really find something I could say, “This is a PLE” — not discounting successful deployments of learning environments using a network of blogs +/- wikis, but is every instance of using a suite of web tools a PLE? In that case, my definition of a PLE is the Internet. And what does that get us?

Posted in CogDogBlog on 2007/04/11

I understand Alan Levine’s point of view about PLEs. Nowadays, a PLE 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.

But we must take into account that a lot of learners are not used to ICT and feel very confused about web tools. Furthermore, even for advanced users, the direct usage of a set of web tools turns into tedious task if there’s not a middleware for managing:

• the single-sign-on access to learning services
• the academic/social data-flow between learning services
• the discovery of learning contexts
• the setup of tools within learning contexts
• the search of learning feeds
• the markup of learning resources

A PLE is a bridge between learners and web tools that hides the complexity of the Internet and improves the interaction with web tools. I’m thinking on a sophisticated form of an aggregator that would implement general-purpose funcionality mashups for learning. For learners not used to ICT, a PLE 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, a PLE must be focused 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. This idea of aggregator is what I call Personal Learning Environment.

—–

Edited on 2007/13/04:

Many teacher’s aren’t likely to be happy with the downside of the small-pieces approach, which is cobbling together a whole range of tools. So my design is for what is primarily a piece of glueware for doing the cobbling together, while retaining most of the flexibility that the small-pieces syndication world promises. It complements the availability of blog hosting services, wikis and other online tools, provided that they offer standard APIs for aggregation and publishing.

Posted in Scott Wilson’s Worklog on 2005/08/31

The PLE is a unique interface into the owners digital environment. It integrates their personal and professional interests, connecting these via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds. The PLE is also a portfolio system allowing the user to maintain their repository of content and selectively share that content as needed. It is also a profiled system, exposing the users interests in a variety of ways allowing automated, but selective search of the individual and their digital contributions. Of course, the PLE is a social as well as an information environment, connecting the user to individuals and collaborative activities and events.

Posted in Virtual Canuck on 2006/01/09

 

VLE compared to PLE

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.

 

—–

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“

 

PLEs and challenges in education

We are going to start looking at the changes on education and their relationship with Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).

 

LIFELONG AND LIFEWIDE LEARNING

Driven by a shorter product life cycle, people’s geographical mobility and the increasing speed of adoption and implementation of new technologies in the workplace, it is reasoned that workers would need continous learning throughout their worklife in a wide variety of contexts to update their occupational skills and learn new occupational competences. Whislt previously continuing vocational training had been the responsability of employers, it is now often argued that individuals are responsible for mantaining their own learning.

The idea of PLE recognises that learning is continuing and seeks to provide tools to support that learning. It also recognises the rool of the individual in organasing their own learning their own learning. Moreover, PLE is based on the idea that learning will take place in different contexts and situations, and will not be provided by a single learning provider. Linked to this appears the recognition of the importance of informal learning.

 

INFORMAL LEARNING

Most of our learning does not come form formal educational programmes. According to the Institute for Research on Learning, at most, formal training only accounts for 20% of how people learn their jobs. Workers learn their jobs from observing others, asking questions, trial and error, calling help desk and other unscheduled and independent activities (Cross, 2006).

Besides, it is clear that in the near future there will not be enough universities to meet the demands of learning using the current institution-centric education patterns. So, the only way to scale education to meet those needs is to increasingly involve individual learner in managing his own education (Severance et all, 2006).

In terms of educational technology, there has been little attention paid to informal learning: in european countries, most effort has been expended on trying to assess and certify informal learning. Educational technology have only been made available to those enrolled on educational programmes administered by an institution.

The promise of PLEs could be to extend access to educational technology to everyone who wishes to organise their own learning. Furthermore, the idea of the PLE purports to include and bring together both formal and informal learning.

 

STYLES OF LEARNING

We use different learning styles and intelligences in different subjects in response to different learning aims and goals. In this respect, all educational software enhances or restrains certain pedagogic approaches to learning, that is, there is no pedagogically neutral software.

A PLE could allow a learner to configure and develop a learning environment to suit an enable their own style of learning.

 

RECOGNITION OF LEARNING

An important development in education has been the translation of qualifications into competences. This means the separation of the outcomes which form a qualification from the learning process which develops competence for such outcomes. Therefore, learners are no longer necessarily locked into a particular course in order to gain a qualification, but are able to present their learning to prove they possess such competence.

It is also important to note that formal qualifications are increasingly only seen as one aspect of competence, at least for employment purposes. Employers also incresingly wish to see evidence of the ability to apply skills and knowledge in a particular context.

PLEs could facilitate tools for presentation and qualification purposes, for example, in an extended form of an e-Portfolio.

 

—–

This text has been extracted from Grahan Attwell’s “Personal Learning Environments – the future of eLearning?” article (eLearning Papers – Vol 2, Nº 1 – January 2007 – ISSN 1887-152)