VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
System Technology Institute’s virtual learning environment (VLE) is a system designed to help teachers by facilitating the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. The system can often track the learners’ progress, which can be monitored by both teachers and learners.
While frequently thought of as primarily tools for distance education, they are most often used to supplement the face-to-face classroom. Components of these systems usually include templates for content pages, discussion forums, chat, quizzes and exercises such as multiple-choice, true/false and one-word-answer.
Teachers fill in these templates and then release them for learners to use. New features in these systems include blogs, more collaborative tools such as wikis and RSS. Services generally provided include access control, provision of e-learning content, communication tools, and administration of the user groups. This makes it possible for a course designer to present to students, through a single, consistent, and intuitive interface, all the components required for a course of education or training. Although logically it is not a requirement, in practice VLEs always make extensive use of computers and the Internet.
Solutions such as Web X and Sharepoint provide server-based services and have many features expected from a moderated, virtual conferencing system by which an instructor can interface in real time with students. Paired with the use of forums, blogs, wikis and chat, it is cost-effective to deliver a course with virtually no setup logistics.
Students are frequently encouraged to read ahead on their own, an objective that can be accomplished by use of an online library and glossary. Independent study becomes interactive as students are encourage to post questions to the instructor or comment on the content. Other students then may engage in commenting on previous comments, thereby enriching the learning experience and utilizing social network capabilities to build the collective relationship that encourages learning.
This interactive experience can become even more cost-effective by the utilization of recorded live sessions of the instructor’s presentation, making the virtual presence of a subject matter expert more flexible and less dependent on the limitations of a fixed time in space wherein that individual may interface with the student body.