Things I was wrong about pt2: The Death of the VLE

I smell another book from Martin Weller (this would actually be a great one to follow up 25 Years of Ed Tech). His latest blog series looks at What I Was Wrong About and the second post is all about the death of the VLE (or LMS on this side of the Atlantic).

I sympathize with Martin, although I hoped the death of the VLE was just around the corner much later (mid 2010s). What prompted my interest was not so much by PLEs or Web 2.0 exactly, but around the mid 2010s the NGDLE (Next Generation Digital Learning Environment) was a hot topic. The concept, I think, is one that continues to be exciting, but due to current paradigms, business models, and tech stacks at universities, it may never come to pass.

Martin quotes McAvinia and Risquez (2018) about the regeneration of the VLE, 

I’m not exactly convinced that it is “upgrades” that have led to the sticking power of VLEs, or that this statement is even true. For example, in higher education (in North America) there are basically four players in the LMS space, and one of the products is called Blackboard Learn Ultra. There is still some of the visual cueing of a blackboard in the iconography with that product even though they appear to (slowly) be moving away from it. One of the other major players, Moodle, just released an update for version 4.4 including new activity icons. A cursory glance shows boxes, books, and a megaphone used in the new icon set. Moodle still refers to web-conferencing as “virtual classroom”, a term that I admit is difficult to escape, but again anchored in the classroom first idea. The fourth most popular higher ed LMS (North American), Brightspace by D2L, has an icon-based nav-bar option, which includes a house/book, book (content), lockers, and more classroom-based iconography. This is a full six years after the declaration that the visual cues tying the LMS to the classroom have been “lost”.

Martin goes on to explain why he “faceplanted” on this one, the first being,

Seeing the list of tools he mentioned tied my stomach in knots. In one role I was the resident LMS expert, and a colleague of mine had this fantastic wiki resource for all elements of their work, including courses for their learner segments. One of the segments overlapped with my area, although I was not involved in that particular course. That was until the wiki went down out of nowhere and there. were. no. backups! As I recall it was down for a few days, and the moment it came back online, the clouds opened and from above a decree to move the course content into the LMS. I made it happen, and will never forget how cruddy that feeling was. I’d also made Word doc copies of all that content at the time and stored it locally just in case.

The second reason Martin offers is the inertia you see with enterprise systems. If you’ve ever been part of technology procurement, you know what he’s talking about here. I think the inertia is not only with the technology itself but the paradigm of the institution(s). Although these platforms are called “Virtual Learning Environments” or “Learning Management Systems,” what they actually are are Course Management Systems (but CMS is already taken as an acronym, I guess). Learning and development, IDs, ed techs, everyone is so captured by decades old approaches. Perceived learning need? Make a course for that. Courses are the proverbial hammer, and to quote my pal Terry Greene, “If that’s all that’s in your toolbox, you’re going to do some damage“. If it were about learning we would be striving towards the idea underpinning PLEs and the NGDLE. Consider for a moment if you wanted to change a power receptical in your home. Would you take a semester long course (or even a long weekend) or are you more inclined to look up a YouTube video? Trying to learn how to blur an image in Photoshop? Probably a how-to-guide or a video. Heck, even looking at MOOCs, one of the hypotheses for the drop-out rate is that the learner got to the thing they needed and then abandoned the rest of the course. In places that use Learning Record Stores, and other API-driven tech stacks, they can make use of resources to learn and still get reporting on what someone is learning. JR watched this video and accessed this document, and he was able to do X. Not simply, JR viewed this SCORM package to the end; he must be ok. SCORM is the other albatross on L&Ds neck that prevents us from getting away from Course only approaches. Because so many only consider a course as the answer, then the VLE is perfectly positioned to provide the service folks think they need, a series of courses, learning is an event.

I think one of the great ironies of the VLE is dead declaration is actually found not in the journals Martin points out, but in Norman’s Law (after D’Arcy Norman at Calgary). Norman’s Law of eLearning Tool Convergence states,

So the irony is that instead of the VLE being dead, it’s proliferated. Examples of this are quick to find. Tophat (polling) now basically an LMS (“dymanic courseware platform”). Articulate (old school slides to elearning tool) has an LMS as part of their 360 package. When you look at the broader (i.e. outside of higher ed) landscape of the LMS market, there are literally hundreds of products to choose from. (In part because everyone says the LMS they have “sucks” and they could make a better one. Ha.)