Distributed vs Single Product VLEs
This post has been a long time coming and is a summary of the thoughts I have had about the relative merits of two way of organising a VLE. In these days of Web2.0 tools and OSS which are increasingly freely available on the market it is important to question why schools pay large amounts of money often £5-10K a year on buying in a comercial VLE. Are there appropriate reasons to choose a comercial product over an OSS product and if so why?
Before progressing too far I should give a little background. I am Maths & ICT teacher (currently Head of Maths and not teaching any ICT) who has used a few different VLE solutions in different schools (WebCT, Uniservity, Moodle – although some of these quite a few years ago!), and I am curently exploring the VLE options for my current school. There are plenty of options on the market but I don’t intend to discuss those here – See Comparison of VLE Solutions for more info on this…
What I want to look at today is what are the key areas that make up a VLE, discuss some of the OSS/Web2.0 & comercial solutions to these areas and talk about integration between these – the idea being to explore the potential for building a complete VLE out of a collection of distributed systems some local others web-based. I then want to think about what the benefits and pitfalls of this approach might be…
For me the key elements of a VLE are:
- Communication Tools – Notices, Forums, Chat, etc.
- Submission and Marking of Assignments
- Some form of quiz system
- Ability to store files for students to download
- E-portfolios
- Integration with Email/Calendar tools
- Ability to play multimedia resources
- Ability to display SCORM resources
There are plenty of excellent tools available which provide some of these tools – Edmodo is an excellent communication tool (similar look/feel to facebook) with the addition of some basic calendaring tools and the ability to set/submit assignments. Mahara is a very good e-portfolio product. Moodle is the defacto OSS VLE which has lots of useful features. Google Apps for Education provides excellent email/calendar suite with online word/excel/powerpoint equivalents…
Each of these tools provide very significant tools in many cases more powerful tools than are available in most comercial products. So surely the best solution is to use a combination of these (or similar) products to build a VLE using the best possible tools… But sadly things are not quite this simple…
In the scenario above we have at least 4 different products, on top of that if we are wanting to offer parental reporting from our MIS we would need another product…
So what is the problem with multiple product solutions? Well potentially we now have 5+ usernames and passwords to remember (as well as having to actually login multiple times to the various tools)…
There are options which might help mitigate this problem – using AD to authenticate products with local Windows Usernames etc, but this will only work for locally hosted products… Another option is to try to use OpenID but this is not widely supported and would still require a different username/password to the one used to logon to the machine… So at present there is no perfect single username/password option.
This isn’t insurmountable but is worth being aware of…
What other problems might we encounter in a distributed VLE? Well let’s suppose a student has completed an assignment and produced an excellent piece of work that they want to include in their e-portfolio, at present there is no nice way of getting the file into the e-portfolio, short of seperatley uploading the file. Integration of this sort is coming along (supposed to be in Moodle 2.0) but is not available at present, similarly if they had done the assignment in edmodo then they would have issues…
This point however raises a much bigger issue for me which is that in a distributed VLE you often end up with multiple products which repeat features… This naturally could lead to confusion, when you set students some homework in the ‘VLE’ do they check for it in Edmodo or do they check in Moodle? Similar problems exist for all the tools which are repeated… Inreased integration enables us to see more of these tools in the same location but doesn’t change the fact that you can end up with multiple forums, multiple places to set assignments, multiple means of communication etc… This leads to confusion for both staff and students.
This confusion all points towards another problem… Multiple systems means training staff/students in multple systems. If you have a very tech savy staff this may not be a problem but in most schools this is not currently the case, and the thought of having to train staff on how to use (and move between) 4-5 systems fills me with dread!
It may be possible to mitigate some of these problems by using some form of front-end portal – maybe Drupal/Plone for OSS or SharePoint for commercial. This may help a little with pulling some of the data together into a more coherent environment (and may assist with single-sign on)… But you have to take into account this this is adding yet another product to the mix!
These problems should not exclude this is a solution, there are still plenty of reasons to consider this kind of mixture (not least of all that many of the products are free). However achieving a good level of integration will require a lot of work (much of which is likely to need adapting as each of the parts update). This means you will need good technical support, and raises the concern over what happens when that significant ‘technical support’ or lead teacher moves on… Could someone else coming in continue to efectively manage such a distributed system?
Given these concerns I think there is still a place for considering fully integrated products. At present there aren’t many of these on the market that really offer the full range of resources one might want in a VLE all in a single box. A single prouct (particularly a managed one) has several advantages. Less training as everything is in one product, there will be less time needing to be spent on reteaching navigation etc…
A single product also means less concerns over upgrades, and integration issues. Also with a single product you don’t suffer from the repeated ways of doing the same thing…
So is a single all in one product the best solution? Well sadly all is not perfect in this scenario either. Even the best of the comercial VLE products cannot even begin to live up to the quality shown in a specialist product (OSS or comercial) which is trying to do just one thing. A stand-alone Wiki product or Forum product is bound to offer more than the one that forms part of any VLE…
For me the debate continues, and at the heart of this debate is the balance between:
Ease of Use vs Quality and Range of Functions
What do other people think?
I would also recommend having a listen to @mweller’s podcast on VLE vs PLE fight club