Do we need a VLE

[interele]

Some years ago I vaguely remember that the 'here today

and gone tomorrow' politician of the day decreed that all

schools should have a VLE. Ignoring the fact that they can

be quite useful, do we actually have to have one ?

 

Ta

 

M

[synaesthesia]

No. A few schools I know round here certainly never ever had one, even when the LA provided LPPlus.

They are becoming less specific now and "VLE" is very much becoming a term like "Cloud"; you may already be using services that together serve a similar purpose. Even if you look at some of the bigger VLE providers including LP+, their offerings now appear to be vastly broader and indeed better than just 6 or 7 years ago back when they were expected to be used in schools.

Probably a good question for @GrumbleDook

[localzuk]

Nope. Not any more. The official word went from "must" to "should" and then, I believe, disappeared.

 

If you have a need for such a tool, go for it, but otherwise I'd say don't bother.

 

If you have a need for a subset of the tools (eg. putting homework online, or pupil blogging), it can be easier to just sort those bits out alone.

 

Also, its probably a good idea to avoid the term "VLE" when selling such a thing to teachers - my experience has taught me that many teachers have become sick of the term, and will dislike such a project based solely on its name.

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

I have seen many schools jump on the VLE wagon and not really fully workout how they will use and what for. This then leads to it not being used and being a very expensive outlay for the school.

I have noticed a lot of schools in recent years starting to use tools such as Show My Homework.

 

VLE systems are great but ideally you need to have someone who can maintain it and keep promoting it. VLE systems that work often have an in-house developer who's main job is to maintain it and develop it.

[bossman]

Whatever they are called nowadays it is still a given fact that most Teachers don't want to embrace the technology as it shows their teaching practice for what it is and this can be seen by SLT, yes there are some good working models and some good Teachers utilising this but as a whole it is not revered by the Teaching fraternity I feel,

 

We have Moodle but for 2 pins I would do away with it as the Staff have been so reluctant to take it onboard.

 

My advice is if you don't have to then don't have one simple!

[unixman_again]

We wouldn't be without ours. Teachers load resources to it and students submit work via it.

 

I do wish teachers would enter their resources into Moodle, rather than uploading M$ Word or PP files. If they did, students could display the content directly in the browser, rather than having to download stuff. With tablets becoming ubiquitous, I can see the day SMT will have to force the issue.

[jamin100]

Just turned our old sharepoint installation off (finally)

 

It wasn't being used, spoke to SLT who agreed, gave staff 3 months to get their stuff off then turned it off yesterday

 

[twin--turbo]

2008 I belive was the deadline set for all schools to have a VLE.

 

What that generated was a bunch of companies peadling half cocked systems that did not work.

 

At my old place management barreled into a decission for a system despite massive reservations from our team, we were told in what was supposed to be a review of the idea "We are buying it, make it work" 2 years later the vendor folded and at that point it was not even workable. The haistly aquired replacement lasted 18 months and the replacement for that for which we also had no input was just as bad! £50-£70K of money wasted, technical time wasted, management time waste, teacher time wasted...

 

At this point the whole idea was more than just a joke and trying to get staff on board with anything else was going to be a battle.

 

The government should have invested heavily in developing moodle as a common platform, paying 50 developers 30K a year would have been better spent than thousands of schools wasiting 10-15k a year on failied solutions.

 

TT

[3s-gtech]

Having used Moodle for nearly ten years now, I see a VLE as another handy tool that your staff can use if it suits. Ours enables us to share a great deal of SCORM content with students wherever they are, as well as submitting work and accessing SoW etc. Certainly doesn't suit all subjects, and we don't force it. Handy though.

 

I do despair at the way Hwb+ (and LP+ product) is going though, as it's being heavily pushed to teachers who don't want to use any VLE. Some schools seem to like it, the Sharepoint base leaves me cold.

[FragglePete]

I heard rumors that a lot of scaremongering was done by makers of VLE's that you must 'have' a VLE by a certain date (after all, they had to get a return on their investment - I remember going to BETT and it was more like a VLE show one year!). And I know we fell into that trap by purchasing Frog. It later emerged that the advice (this came from our IT contact at the LEA) that the requirement was to be able to communicate electronically with parents as a basic requirement..... ie. e-mail !

 

As mentioned here, a VLE will only be successful if you've got someone looking after it and developing it. We introduced it and teachers really liked it but no one had the time to develop it; we held workshops, training, etc to get faculties nominate someone to look after content and work on things, but they're teaching and it was just taking too long. We certainly didn't have the time, teachers as I said are busy teaching and planning and with no budget available for another bod to look after it, it turned into an area where files (Word Docs, Excel Files, PDFs, etc) got put so students could at least grab them from home. Well, we can do that for free in Office365 in Sharepoint and that is what we set up, ditched Frog and so far, so good. One less box onsite to worry about.

 

Various faculties are signed up for things like MyMaths and iamlearning (which is now owned by Frog) - and these are proving popular for content, etc.

 

Pete

[GrumbleDook]

I think I have covered this one before.

 

The *must* was for real-time online reporting and was down to a mistake in a speech ... it was then change to online-reporting and suggested that this is was delivered / tied in with your VLE/LP (as this is where the funding stream was coming from).

 

This changed to 'all the best schools do it this way and so you should follow their example' down to 'follow good practice of schools that get outstanding and the top results'.

In reality, schools that plan well, share resources and collaborate ... they tend to also get good results and do well in Ofsted. It is hard to exact causation studies, rather than rely on correlation, but Prof Don Passey (Lancaster uni) has covered a chunk of this on Learning Platforms

(Declarations of interest - I work for a large Learning Platform provider and have been involved in some of that research when working at a school / LA)