Teach Secondary Issue 14.8

Will the real VLE PLEASE STAND UP? It’s taken too long for the initial promise of VLEs to be fully realised, says Aaron Swan – but they’re now the best solution we have for cultivating the kind learning we want to see T here have been few occasions when the ball was dropped quite so hard as it was byMicrosoft in 2020. It’s a well-known story, but I still find shocking that it happened at all. It’s 2020, just before the COVID pandemic ushers in the era of ‘hybrid’ work. Right at the point when video conferencing becomes a mandatory part of daily existence. It’s at this moment that Microsoft’s then largest acquisition – at $8.5billion! – hits paydirt. We were all told to stay home. We all logged on, but it wasn’t Microsoft’s Skype teleconferencing platformwe all turned to. It was Zoom. Portals and departments Rewind to 2007. I’ve just completed my postgrad and my first school placement is at a £27mnew build with a suite of ‘virtual’ laptops at the back of every classroom, plus a full suite of ‘physical’ desktops in every corridor. It’s a sight to behold, and at the time, seems deeply impressive to me, withmy ‘pre-digital’ upbringing. It felt like the future. But evenmore notable than the obvious expenditure on computing was the school’s new online learning space – its Virtual Learning Environment. The school’s website included a student portal. The portal held departments. The departments held year groups. The year groups held modules, and the modules should have held comprehensive learning material for students to access. The future wasn’t actually to be found with those computers at all. It lay in the independence made possible by the potential of that online space. The intended outcomes of the earliest VLEs ultimately proved to be quite prescient. Students were given the opportunity, through their school’s VLE, to become independent workers motivated by the drivers of autonomy, mastery and purpose. They provided the infrastructure needed for a flipped learning environment, in which students would undertake learning that we teachers facilitated through the provision of accessible material, and where they could come to us with questions. VLEs served as platforms through which no student would be left behind, since 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 over the next 13 years, schools would have been in the perfect position to provide their learners with robust redundancy. The problem, however, was that the VLEs of 2007 were interfaces still very much in their infancy, which 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 knowwhat actually happened in 2020. VLEs were not up to scratch and departments went into overdrive to produce units of work that could be followed fromhome. Folders of PowerPoint presentations were moved 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 fromFebruary 2021 stated that ‘£400 million’ had been invested in helping over a million laptops and tablets be delivered to disadvantaged students. By 2022, that investment spend had reached £520 million. Just like Skype, 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, the true potential of VLEs still wasn’t fully realised, with the technology itself still far from ready. The ball had been dropped. The process of building a VLE 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, and ready access to countless high quality images, design suggestions, automated assessments and quizzing apps, activities scheduling, and even the ability to track and log user engagement – all of which can be hugely empowering for teachers. From‘prescriptive’ to ‘facilitative’ At this precise moment in time, VLEs 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 – 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 “As Zoomis toSkype, so social media is toVLEs” 82 teachwire.net/secondary