Virtual learning environments – Are we making full use of them?
It’s taken too long for the initial promise of VLEs to be fully realised, but they’re now the best solution we have for cultivating the kind of learning we want to see…
- by Aaron Swan
- English teacher since 2007 and writer
The intended outcomes of the earliest virtual learning environments proved to be quite prescient. School VLEs gave students the opportunity to become independent workers motivated by the drivers of autonomy, mastery and purpose.
They provided the infrastructure needed for a flipped learning environment. This was one where students would undertake learning that we teachers facilitated through the provision of accessible material, and where they could come to us with questions.
Virtual learning environments served as platforms through which no student would be left behind. All the required teaching and learning materials would be freely available, at any time.
If those VLEs had continued to see maintained investment and development by departments, schools would have been in the perfect position to provide learners with what they needed during lockdown.
The problem, however, was that the VLEs of 2007 were interfaces still very much in their infancy. They required significant staff upskilling and near-coding levels of computing knowledge to use properly.
The typical VLE page often resembled a child’s holiday montage of images cut and pasted into a visual catastrophe. Use of clipart as a design crutch was commonplace.
Dropping the ball
Of course, we know what actually happened in 2020. VLEs were not up to scratch. Departments went into overdrive to produce units of work that students could follow at home.
Schools moved folders of PowerPoint presentations from teacher servers to student servers. Some of us teachers went to great lengths to pre-record learning material that our students could access in their own time.
A government press release dating from February 2021 stated that it had invested ‘£400 million’ in delivering over a million laptops and tablets to disadvantaged students. By 2022, that investment spend had reached £520 million.
The VLE long predated the opportunity it was designed for. The intention of the VLE was validated by COVID in the same way that COVID validated the intention of video conferencing.
And yet, after a decade of potential development, we still hadn’t fully realised the true potential of VLEs. The technology itself was still far from ready. The ball had been dropped.
The process of building a virtual learning environment is no longer anything like the barrier it once was.
Web design tools and online services, such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint, feature incredibly user-friendly ‘drag and drop’ interfaces. There’s ready access to countless high-quality images, design suggestions, automated assessments and quizzing apps. There’s activities scheduling and even the ability to track and log user engagement.
All of this can be hugely empowering for teachers.
From ‘prescriptive’ to ‘facilitative’
At this precise moment in time, virtual learning environments have fewer barriers to entry than ever before, while promising the greatest reward.
I find it hard to conceive of any school department existing without at least one member IT-fluent enough to build one.
But then, do they really want one?
The transition from classroom-based learning to today’s ‘blended learning’ environments partly requires an ideological adjustment. This is from a prescriptive view that teachers alone are holders of knowledge which they impart to students in a controlled manner, to a more facilitative view of education.
Facilitated teaching permits autonomy through open access resourcing. Under a facilitative model, ‘practitioners’ reduce barriers to learning while increasing access to knowledge as much as possible.
They facilitate the learning experience by setting the material and helping students to access it. And being facilitators, they’re less concerned with delivering the material themselves.
Third-party providers
With schools continuing to show reluctance in moving from a prescriptive teacher-learner definition of education to a facilitative view, learners are opting to look for that facilitated, autonomous experience themselves. This is bringing students into the orbit of competitive, profit-orientated third-party providers.
Many students now regularly turn not to resources provided by their teachers, but to resources propagated by YouTubers and TikTokkers.
Social media ultimately facilitates student learning much more efficiently than schools do – though we shouldn’t confuse that efficiency with efficacy.
It still remains to be seen whether education delivered through social media is qualitatively ‘better’ than the education delivered through school.
The cost of schooling
Note, however, that these shifts aren’t just occurring in students’ homes. Schools themselves are increasingly turning to online education providers that have built online learning structures, delivering on the original promises of the first virtual learning environments, many years ago.
Third-party providers use a wide range of automation methods to track progress. They provide dynamic content that students can complete at home or in the classroom. This means that no child needs to be left behind.
They offer significant opportunities for struggling departments.
And yet, that leaves us with an interesting question to consider – to whom should the education of our children be given?
Students turning to online influencers and high-profile channels are of a generation raised to value capital and tolerate advertising.
Schools are passing on their budgets into the hands of third-party education providers in ways that involve sums to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds per year, per school.
Taken together, there does seem to be a significant flow of capital away from educational institutions and into the hands of private companies. This hints at the privatisation of education taking place inside our state-owned infrastructure and also via social media.
At what point does the cost of schooling represent a middle-man expense, between private companies and learners?
And if these third parties can ultimately deliver successful forms of education, then at what point do we allow education to be facilitated by them alone, in response to the prompts of learners at home?
Why not cut out the middle man of the school entirely?
Operation without oversight
Actually, we mustn’t ever allow this. As a teacher who has spent years analysing the impact of such programmes, I’m rarely convinced they fully meet those promotional promises that first encourage our initial buy-in.
They operate without oversight from an external body, such as Ofsted. Their success rate is entirely self-reported.
That said, I don’t doubt that there have been some successes in this space. I still support a small-scale uptake of external providers to support teaching and learning.
As we enter a period with headlines regarding attendance, costs to parents and bad behaviour, perhaps we should be reinvigorating school virtual learning environments again as a potential solution to our multiple barriers to learning.
After all, countless office workers have benefited from blended work. So why have we not yet demanded that schools use the tools they already have to provide their students with robust blended learning?
Maybe, if we’re to protect the future of schooling, we must.
Aaron Swan is an English teacher and has been a head of department.
