Phase 2 now underway….

As the VLE Review Project progresses through Phase 2 of its life cycle we move into the evaluation of VLE Systems.  The VLE Review Project Board has taken an executive decision to focus this phase of the project on two current latest release VLE Systems, Blackboard and Moodle.

The VLE Review Group are about to begin work with two universities who are happy to get involved and share their knowledge and experience of their recent projects which involved a transition to a new VLE.  They are able to offer the academic, technology and IT infrastructure perspective which is vital in terms of how we evaluate Blackboard and Moodle.  Visits to the sites have been arranged but there is to be a follow up event here at Edge Hill to allow a wider audience to meet the teams and explore the key components of their VLE’s via a presentation and then question and answer session.

More information and invitations coming soon..

2 responses to “VLE Evaluation..Phase 2 begins”

  1. In my experience, Moodle is fast, straightforward and it can send email notifications when staff issue announcements, Blackboard has been a lumbering annoyance for the last 3 years, I can’t imagine how staying with it could be justified.

  2. How fast and how straightforward a VLE is, is unlikely to be determined simply by choice of system. The infrastructure and the skills and resources to use a system effectively also play a large part in the user experience. It’s possible that moodle isn’t better than Blackboard – rather that the set up and implementation you experienced was different. (A school with a dedicated development team running a small instance of moodle would present a very different experience to an Institution running moodle out to 16, 000 users.)

    With regard to notifications, the new version of Blackboard – Learn, has some much improved functionality…

    For example;
    Students can choose, on a course-by-course basis, which types of notifications they want to receive and whether they want to receive notifications by email (- delivered as a daily notifications digest, if users edit their preferences to opt-into this).

    In addition;
    Blackboard Learn Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox can provide users with notifications from courses while browsing the web

    and

    Blackboard Mobile Learn can give provide interactive access to courses and class content on the go through smart phone devices.

    These are just a couple of the features available in the version of Blackboard we are evaluating, so I don’t think it’s something to be written off just yet, not without further exploration anyway.

    You might be pleasantly surprised.
    🙂