Advanced Learning Environments 2016

Clive Holtham, Martin Rich and Leona Norris

Cass Business School, City University London, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ, U.K.

Keywords: Virtual Learning Environments, e-Learning Futures, Disruptive Innovation, Personalised Learning.

Abstract: In the first section we address key aspects of the future of learning environments in the context of types of

change in technology environments, in particular Christensen's distinction between sustaining and disruptive

changes. We consider the development of virtual learning environments up to 2016, which is essentially an

evolutionary or sustaining period. We also discuss a number of possible factors which will affect the

development in this period, and consider alternative perspectives which might exist within higher education

institutions.

1 INTRODUCTION

The strategic future of virtual learning environments

has been considered by van der Heijden (2012).

Starting from the flattening growth of adoption, van

der Heijden went on to carry out a SWOT

(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)

analysis using the language of business strategy.

There are starkly different views about the future

of learning environments, some of which were

accentuated in the "VLE is dead" debate at the ALT-

C conference in 2009. In general, monolithic VLE’s

such as Moodle and Blackboard are challenged on

the one hand by even generic content management

systems such as Drupal, and on the other hand by

“modular” products, most particularly massive

online open courses (MOOCs), as well as by

elearning products which make little or no claim to

be comprehensive (Pearson 2012), by innovative

cloud based educational applications, and by

strategists who envisage a wide constellation of

learning technologies and tools, with the VLE being

"merely" one type of specialist application (Millard

et al, 2011).

Most of the challenges outlined above are

essentially tactical, concerned with products

available today and meeting today's problems and

aspirations. But technology is a fast-moving area,

and a key dimension of this paper is how

technologies to enhance learning may develop over

the next decade, and the implications of this for the

virtual learning environment community today.

Academically, this paper is located in the

intersection of the discipline of business strategy,

together with the discipline of learning technology.

Its underlying perspective is from a position of

strong support for the achievements of the VLE

community to date, and positive views about the but

articulated, namely that the positive nature of short

and medium term perspectives could well create the

climate for a worrying shortfall in longer term

strategic thinking.

2 LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

TO 2016

We now go on to consider some broad alternatives

open to higher education institutions. These are

typical of the options open to institutions currently

and for the next few years in terms of the

institutional strategy. We have created three existing

options, and deliberately constructed a fourth option

which is scarcely feasible at present. Our primary

focus in this paper is VLEs by 2016.

Within the broad field of eLearning, we focus

here almost wholly on virtual learning environments

and their broad competitors. This largely excludes

the area of content, of classroom and student

personal technologies, of virtual worlds and of other

important areas. This is a relatively mature market,

dominated in the USA by Blackboard. According to

the Campus Computing Project (2011) Moodle has a

19% share of a market that appears to be becoming

increasingly competitive. The proportion of survey

589

Holtham C., Rich M. and Norris L..

Advanced Learning Environments 2016.

DOI: 10.5220/0004388005890592

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 589-592

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

participants reporting that their institution uses

various versions of Blackboard (including Angel and

WebCT) as the campus-standard learning

management system (LMS) fell to 50.6 percent in

2011, compared to 57.1 percent last year and down

from 71.0 percent in fall 2006. Concurrently,

Blackboard’s major LMS competitors –

Desire2Learn, Moodle, and Sakai - have all gained

share during this period, and new LMS providers,

including Epsilen, Instructure, and Loudcloud,

among others, are generating significant interest

Figure 1: New Registrations (moodle.org 2012).

3 PEDAGOGIC FRAMEWORKS

SHAPING VLE DECISIONS

This paper reviews a variety of VLE architectures

and develops one that could be expected to emerge

by 2020. A pedagogic architecture needs to contain

all relevant support to education, both technological

and physical, and enables the relationship and

balance of the components to be examined. It is vital

that it clarifies genuine alternatives enables the

relative costs and benefits to be evaluated. And it

needs to be remembered that there will not be one

right way, not even within a single institution.

We can divide the resources needed to

implement a VLE into two types:

• Infrastructures - the basic level, most

typically institutionally or even national;

relatively static; commodity

• Content and apps - more related to the needs

of schools, programmes and individual

faculty and groups of students; relatively

dynamic; often customised/proprietary

Today we can consider four alternative VLE

infrastructures:

1. Transmissive: the traditional VLE, reflecting

the traditional teaching approach in most

societies. Here the VLE is used principally by

lecturers as an organising tool to make

resources available to students

2. Constructivist: supporting the learner to

construct their own knowledge perhaps

implying a more flexible, lightweight

institutional learning environment (ILE) with

VLE as one of several components

3. Informal: rejects formal structures and

processes; auto-didactic and social; Personal

Learning Landscape (PLL) with the

implication that students will build their own

environment

4. Proactive: Proactive Environment for

Learning (PREL), involves the intensive use

of learning analytics, in which data collected

through the learning environment is

continuously collected and analysed,

particularly in real time to make mid-course

corrections to modules in progress

Figure 2: Alternative VLE infrastructure.

Moodle as used by most universities is a

transmissive VLE. However, Mark Stubbs (2012) at

Manchester Met University sees Moodle as a way of

"wrapping the institution around the learner". By

contrast Hugh Davis (Millard et al, 2011) at

Southampton sees Sharepoint, which is positioned

by Microsoft principally as a collaboration product

for commercial users, as its integrating technology

and Blackboard as a narrow specialist tool.

In practice much of the support for a Personal

Learning Landscape comes from those who are

hostile to formal education, for instance ELGG

(Tosh and Werdmuller, 2004). This is unlikely to be

a feasible option for the vast bulk of universities, but

VLE's and ILE's will continue to accumulate social

software functionality, such as the Open University's

Open Learn.

To provide a clearer and less technology-centric

approach, we have built on the Southampton

structure which does reference content and physical

resources. It is vital to recognise three types of

learning "process":

1. Administrative - important underpinning

2. Knowledge - important that this covers both

explicit knowledge, such as in books and

journals, as well as tacit knowledge in

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humans that is shared by interpersonal

communications

3. Pedagogic - what is needed for teaching and

learning in any given class/cohort; can and

must reflect a selected pedagogy

Linking these to the two types of resource produces

a two dimensional framework, into which we can

then allocate the various technologies.

Figure 3: Two dimensional framework.

The red in figure 4 below shows how a classic

monolithic VLE includes much functionality in itself

(red text). By contrast, figure 5 shows a lightweight

decentralised learning environment distributes

functionality (green) while possibly still retaining a

VLE (red) only for narrowly defined tasks.

Figure 4: Monolithic VLE in two dimensional framework.

Consideration of a move away from formal

education is nothing new. Over forty years ago Ivan

Illich (1971: 72) advocated “a new style of

educational relationship between man and his

environment” (Illich, 1971: 72) using four channels:

 Reference services to educational objects

 Skill exchanges

 Peer-matching

 Reference services to educators-at-large

The third and fourth of these have particularly

close resonances with contemporary approaches to

Figure 5: Lightweight decentralised VLE in two-

dimensional framework.

learning environments. Peer-to-peer learning,

enabled by peer matching, is a key element of any

constructivist learning process. Reference services to

educators-at-large facilitate the ability to locate

experts - in the Tosh and Werdmuller structure

provided by the social networking component.

Hart (2001), notes that Illich prefigured the

world-wide web. Laurillard (2012: 4) alludes to

Illich’s critique of formal education but observes

that contemporary arguments against formal learning

can “plunge us back into traditional approaches”.

Budgetary pressures have made it driven the

search for new ways to achieve (hickering and

Gamson’s (1987) seven principles of engagement:

 encourages contact between students and

faculty,

 develops reciprocity and cooperation among

students,

 encourages active learning,

 gives prompt feedback,

 emphasizes time on task,

 communicates high expectations, and

 respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Graham Gibbs (2010) has endorsed these in his

comprehensive review of how education adds value

to reciprocity and cooperation among students.

MOOCs are based around a scaled version of the

concept of implementing a constructivist approach

to education online. In recent discussions some

thinkers see them as a disruptive force within higher

education. We share the scepticism expressed by

Brady (2012) because of the lack of any clarity

applied to the business models underlying MOOCs.

One recent initiative in the field of MOOCs is

FutureLearn, supported by a range of British

universities, and this has attracted significant media

interest (Coughlan, 2012). Its partners include the

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Open University which has proved to be a valuable

addition to the higher education landscape, but it has

not superseded established universities.

One particular strand of work, building on the

concept of proactive computing (Tennenhouse,

2000), is proactive learning (Coronado and

Zampunieris 2010), which has particularly involved

developing software that is activated by actions or

inactions in Moodle.

4 FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Technologies beyond 2016 are likely to include the

educational semantic web (Anderson and Whitelock.

2004), as well as intelligent tutoring systems.

Stemming from research with small children

(Meltzoff, 2009), Koedinger and Aleven (2007)

describe an intelligent tutoring system at university

level, where cognitive tutors provide a rich problem-

solving environment with tutorial guidance and

response to individual student performance.

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