Replacing an established VLE

[beeswax]

This is a general question, unrelated to any specific VLE or LP, which some of you may have come across already. Many of you on here will have helped set up a VLE for your school which has been, or will be superseded by a VLE from an MSP. Has there been much resistance to the introduction of a fresh VLE? Was it more difficult to get the staff taking up the new VLE? What have you done, or are planning to do, in the way of change management?

Finally, I'm sure I've seen an OFSTED paper which discusses the problems associated with introducing a replacement VLE, but I can't find the thing saved anywhere on my machine. Has anybody come across this paper themselves, or did I just dream it?

[rh91uk]

We have done that where I am at the mo. We used to use a very well known (not going to say the name here!) hosted VLE off site, but could not get started with it due to the downtime of it and the "lurr" of having an internally hosted platform so, if the internet went down and teachers/students could access resources was too great. We moved to Moodle and have really started to develop it now; Parents will be signed onto it from the summer. The way we persuaded Management was good here, our LEA has set up a network managers mailing list so we emailed that and compiled a document here. Lots of schools moved from this provider to Moodle; and with the documented experiences of theirs - we did too!

 

Hope that helps

[beeswax]

I think you have gone the opposite way, though the change management involved is probably very similar. The schools in our LEA have a variety of VLEs, Moodle, Frog, Fronter, and I think there's another one in there which I can't recall. The MSP is going to come in and sweep all those away to be replaced by a single Learning Platform. What I'm trying to find out here is how teachers have reacted to the introduction of a fresh VLE, after having spent quite some time getting their heads round the initial offering. Thanks.

[srochford]

It's a few years ago now but the College I used to work at went from Learnwise to Moodle. It did take a bit of time for people to get used to it but a key thing we did was to move as much as possible of the content across so staff didn't have to re-key or re-upload stuff.

 

It worked pretty well and Moodle proved to be very successful. I suspect that if the users had just been given Moodle (or any other VLE) with no content and told "here you are, now get started" there would have been much more resistance!

[beeswax]

I suspect that if the users had just been given Moodle (or any other VLE) with no content and told "here you are, now get started" there would have been much more resistance!

 

This is one of my main worries. With the new Learning Platform coming online in September, and all local secondary schools having to take it up by February next year (2011) there's not much time to transfer work across and figure out the best way to get staff on board.

[GrumbleDook]

There are a few quick wins to be had here ... a lot of the tools are the same between VLEs/LPs so try to identify these and do 'conversion guides' to help people make the move. Also have a small group look at what the differences are for the classroom / out-of-classroom use is going to look like so that you can again do some mapping between the two.

 

This might be creating a test unit of work perhaps ... using as many of the different tools as possible.

 

Where possible stress the similarities rather than the differences. If something is clearly missing then have a few 'alternatives' in the bank of tools.

[beeswax]

Accentuate the positive.