What is a Virtual Learning Environment?
- a space in which network supported/enhanced teaching and learning may take place.
Some VLEs use the concepts of house or building and room, where the VLE is the house or building belonging to the institution (school, college or university) and the rooms within it are classes or groups of students. The Room Filled with Voices is our metaphor for a room in such a virtual building within which the learning and teaching goes on.
- an intranet or local network connected to the Internet.
The difference between such an intranet and the Internet is
An intranet is a network within an organization which is password protected whereas the Internet is a worldwide network to which anyone with a computer has access. It has the structure and tools for organising learning and creating interactivity and dialogue.
An intranet has access to Internet but the converse does not apply.
An intranet uses several tools which are also available freely on the Internet, like chat and email, but it has additional tools liked closed forum discussions and shared documents so that students can easily work together, and not least, it has closed storage facilities available to all those connected to it and also for the individual student.
In other words an intranet has all the advantages of the Internet in terms of accessibility to the outside world but also the advantage of being a closed system to which outsiders do not have access.
We have used a number of these systems and find some of them difficult to use and to access. They appear to have originally been developed as purely administrative systems and this hides their potential as useful pedagogical tools to enhance learning. It may take a little time and effort to reveal the interactive tools concealed “behind” the interface!
We have chosen to use the term Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) rather than the more common term Learning Management System (LMS). By using the term VLE, we hope to stress the learning opportunities rather than the organisational elements of these tools. But the current discussion tends towards the feeling that the activities that go on in the intranet online community are not virtual, but real!
Therese Ørnberg comments on this on her blog Emerging Communications , 10th October 2006.
As for the concept “virtual”, I know some people think that we should abandon it completely, since it has the connotations of denoting something which is less real. Personally, I think that we need to acknowledge that interaction in virtual environments is different and influenced by the affordances of the environment in question, but that is not say that it is less real.
The role of the VLE as a communication tool for establishing and promoting dialogue within a group.
Very similar processes take place in the conventional face-to-face classroom at any level and the network-supported classroom. The stages in the learning process do not differ basically between the two, though the stages may occur in a slightly different order or in different ways. The virtual classroom is a tool to be used as a supplement to the face to face classroom, but does not claim to replace it. The teacher using network supported language learning will find herself moving in and out of the virtual classroom even when she is in the face to face classroom.
This is the Room Filled With Voices; an area in which teachers and learners can work and communicate with each other about work in progress.
The VLE provides a good opportunity for teacher and learners to communicate with each other both in and especially outside class time, using for example chat, emails, forums, shared documents and interactive writing. It also allows for storage of documents so that they may be referred back to at any time, and for the collection of student work in portfolios.
Read more here about Network Supported Teaching
