Technology succession and open source VLEs

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Technology succession and open source VLEs

• Martin Weller

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Outline

• Technology uptake
• Current VLE usage
• Technology Succession
• Case studies
• OS as reasonable compromise
• VLE 2.0

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Technology uptake
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Technology uptake
Lead users - flexibility, richness, and a strong
theoretical underpinning
Conventional users - robustness, ease of use and
practicality
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Whats wrong with VLEs?

• They are content focused
• They have no strong pedagogy
• They are based around a teacher-classroom model
• They combine a number of average tools, but not
  the best ones
• They do not feature a particular tool
• They operate on a lowest common denominator
  approach
• They do not meet the needs of different subject
  areas
• It is difficult to exchange content between them,
  despite claims to interoperability

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Current state of play

• OECD/OBHE 2004 survey in 13 countries
• All had VLE
• 37 have institution-wide VLE
• 90 expect to have single VLE in next 5 years
• 52 use commercial system
• Rest use combination of in-house and open source
• No institution had just OS
• 31 had portal
• 6.6 had CMS

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Changing times

• Nearly all institutions had moved to an
  institution-wide system.
• Few institutions operated an in-house solution.
• The VLEs will be divided equally between
  commercial and open source solutions.
• Specialization and localization will occur
  through the use of services.

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Plant succession
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Technology succession
technological environments are not merely
passive containers of people but are active
processes that reshape people and other
technologies alike (McLuhan 1962)
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Case studies

• UKOU had lots of components, opted for Moodle
• SUNY uPortal LAMS
• Deakin many installations, WebCT
• NZ Moodle

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A flexibility continuum
SAKAI
Standards
Commercial VLE
SOA
OS
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OS as reasonable compromise

• Gain
• Functionality
• Time
• Community
• Profile
• Flexibility
• Technical consensus
• Lose
• Some flexibility
• Some control

Conventional users - sufficiently robust, not a
research tool. Lead users - flexible,
adaptable to the needs of any particular
institution, Can act as the backbone of a
service oriented solution.
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Web 2.0
Users must be treated as co-developers, The
open source dictum, release early and release
often in fact has morphed into an even more
radical position, the perpetual beta, in which
the product is developed in the open, with new
features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or
even daily basis.

• Both an approach and a set of technologies
• Web as platform
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Evolutionary development
• Lightweight programming models

This time, though, the clash isn't between a
platform and an application, but between two
platforms, each with a radically different
business model On the one side, a single
software provider, whose massive installed base
and tightly integrated operating system and APIs
give control over the programming paradigm on
the other, a system without an owner, tied
together by a set of protocols, open standards
and agreements for cooperation
users add value and the technology or site needs
to be set up so that it encourages participation
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VLE 2.0

• How would a VLE 2.0 be constructed?
• Service oriented
• Tools tested and released
• Standards based
• Unique configurations
• Incorporate external tools
• Localized configurations
• Personalised

• What does web 2.0 education feel like?
• Students as co-creators
• Reuse
• Less rigid boundaries
• Social

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Contact

• Email m.j.weller_at_open.ac.uk
• Blog http//edtechie.net
• Home page http//iet.open.ac.uk/pp/m.j.weller
• Book Virtual Learning Environments, Routledge,
  Spring 2007