Office 365 SharePoint - is this the way forward for VLE

[ebarr]

We have been using OpenHive. This was a solution by Synetrix which were taken over by Capita. As a VLE OpenHive has been very poor and promised development of this SharePoint solution has never materialised. Although we were already considering alternatives, we have recently been told at very short notice they are withdrawing the VLE service. We were already about to migrate our mail from OpenHive to Office 365 anyway and I have been exploring various Office 365 SharePoint solutions and feel this is the way forward. Why not exploit what is provided for free.

 

I would be interested in hearing anyone elses thoughts on this?

[vikpaw]

I agree. The offering is getting better too compared to the live@edu days.

I looked at sharepoint at the time but it was too slow over our internet. Now it's a lot better for us and you've got Azure, and the ability to host or mirror an AD server too makes it a decent fault tolerant option.

 

You still have to want Sharepoint - which i guess you do. I don't think we'd use it as a VLE - however just for the sharepointyness and the workflow type stuff, it's something i'm interested in looking into.

 

As you say, it's free and if you're happy with what it offers and what you have to do to keep it running, then why not. Also look at what else is out there in terms of making it work, like the resources from Microsoft Gateway, Sharepoint Learning Kit etc. Some good info and links here even if you don't need their services : SalamanderSoft Limited - SharePoint & SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK)

[Dino]

We have sort of given up on the whole VLE scenario as we have tried a few and all were not intuitive enough or just too complex for our needs, I am currently playing with our Office 365 tenancy and sharepoint (we also have the student advantage which gives all staff and students Office 2013 on up to 5 devices For Free!!!)as the replacement for a VLE type structure, VLE's used to be seen as this multimedia rich single access point for all student staff data relevant to teaching and learning, there is so much online now that pulling in free stuff together which is already there seems the way to go(especially with current budget constraints).

 

I am currently testing "Teacher dashboard" for office 365 (free for 100 teachers) for staff to submit/collect assignments to/from students with SharePoint libraries for staff and student data, links to external sites we use (youtube, Mint class, SLG, MyStudyLife). The vision is to have access to everything needed for teaching and learning from one platform so that staff and students can access it all from home or school.

 

OneDrive For Home directories

Office 2013 Online/Offline

Outlook for email

SharePoint Libraries for in house resources

Links to external subscriptions/sites

Teacher Dashboard for submitting,collecting, marking assignments

 

I couldn't tell you how long it will take me to there ebarr but I am enjoying the Journey thus far. (and so far it has all been free!)

 

It is going to be a lot of work to get it exactly how we want it

[vikpaw]

Sounds good, i've been looking at it a bit more lately.

Please keep a blog of how you get on, so we can copy your route to success later on ;P

[Markopolo]

Hi, this is a very similar journey to the one our school is thinking of undertaking. I look forward to seeing how you get on!

[MrFrostmaul]

Would recommend the teacher dashboard, been using for a few months and so far the teachers are really liking it for the submitting,collecting, marking assignments and they say it makes their life easier to get homework in etc.

 

 

[geekgirl]

We used OpenHive's reporting program i2. We were told at the start of June that Captia were closing down OpenHive so we have to find another reporting system (we have Profiles but Staff didn't like it but that seems to be the only option for Sep 2015 at the moment). I heard Captia are making quite a few people redundant. It seems the people they are making redundant are the staff that had been developing a few of the OpenHive projects originally before Synextrics or Captia took over, they were sold over to Synextrics who pretty much left them to get on with things but when Captia brought them over they started to interfere with those projects. The original project owners who are being made redundant asked if they could buy back their own projects from Captia like i2 or the VLE project but Captia said no which didn't help the whole situation.

Rumor is that SIMS in the future is either going to up date Profiles and integrate i2 into SIMS for SIMS 8.

Another rumor is they they are going to develop their own VLE that migrates straight from SIMS.

 

Makes sense when they won't allow the OpenHive staff to buy back their own projects.

 

Back to the point we are going to use Office 365 SharePoint teamed with Firefly - our SMT loved both. We are going to give all our users 365 email address with cloud storage. Prep work is starting this summer.

[Dino]

Just had a look at Firefly thanks to your info geekgirl (hadn't come across this one yet) seems a credible platform which could remove some work off my shoulders! so I will investigate further into this.

[jmak]

O365 had its advantages in terms of integration with Office, but to replace some of the VLE functionality I reckon Google Apps are a better developed product. With classroom and collaborative document sharing I find it simpler to use and manage. You can also store MS Office documents on Drive if you don't want to go down the route of using Google docs. I haven't tried since last year, but I found SharePoint clunky. I suspect it's very powerful, but it doesn't seem simple.

 

Also, neither is a true VLE...(I think it does what we need though)