Why do universities struggle with VLE consistency?
Photo by Marek Piwnicki
The founders myth is a relatively prevalent idea, what lays behind it is the idea that there’s some herculean individual who through their own sheer genius has achieved feats with a startup that aren’t possible for us mere mortals. These kinds of stories are often perpetuated by the media because they probably appeal to all of us on some level or another.
One of the problems with these tales is that they focus on the individual and they fail to acknowledge the fact that success isn’t simply down to the special efforts of one individual but actually involves scores of people, without which these feats would not be possible.
To quote Atul Gawande:
“Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances well beyond our control.”
In the context of a large organisation, this dependence on others should be evident. A good organisation is arguably one where people pull together, depend upon and trust in each other and are moving in the same direction.
One of the most transparent examples of the opposite of this was the French football team of about 10 years or so ago, which was wracked with public disunity resulting in unseemly spats which ultimately led to humiliating results and huge unrealised potential.
As large organisations universities also face the big challenge of unity and pulling together, sometimes this is wonderfully exemplified, but at times you see fractiousness and disunity that is a very concerning sign for these most valuable of institutions. At times it can appear that university culture is one of some star players and some “water carriers” - that there are those that enable and provide a platform for the complete autonomy of other individuals.
Approaches and challenges of university VLE use
One of the parts of the university experience that unites everyone, insofar as almost everyone has to use it (!) is the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). These digital workhorses are a relatively unavoidable part of university life for staff and students.
Every course has its own shell, course site or area (depending on the vernacular you use), and students are added to a decent number of these throughout their university experience.
What they contain and how they might be used, how they are structured, how menu items might be labelled, what font size, font type, colours etc, etc are used is often under the control of an individual with core responsibility for the course.
If you were to analyse this there’s two ways you could look it. On the one hand you have great variety and diversity, and on the other hand there’s huge potential for inconsistency and lack of overall cohesion.
It is the latter view that a lot of universities have taken when it comes to the VLE. As a result most universities have sought to address this in one way, shape or form to varying degrees of success. One of the key drivers or justifications is student feedback which can point to all manner of frictions when experiencing this technology in their study. Sometimes their views are expressed like this:
“Several of my professors put their assignments under this left column menu, but for another course I have to remember that the assignments are named differently and located under the top row pull-down menu taking multiple clicks to access. Why do I have to remember different paths to find the basics that I need to complete this course?”
Which is taken from the article “Student Panels: Non-traditional students and consistency in course navigation” from the always excellent Phil Hill.
It’s hard to argue with a perspective like this or a problem so well articulated. But what you do about it within the culture and environment of university is another matter entirely. It's an area in which I think it's fair to say universities have struggled somewhat in drawing the line between recommendation and compulsion.
The autonomy debate: Freedom vs cohesion
For some the idea that you might compel people to say use a template as one means of addressing this, is an abhorrent curb of their freedom and individual autonomy.
As a strategy in and of itself it seems hard to imagine some university cultures allowing and actively enforcing such a move. It might appear to be striking at the heart of the sense of freedom people feel they are entitled to have to teach in a way they see fit either in a physical or digital domain.
Some of the issues around this speak to the very concept of freedom, which isn’t the immutable idea we might think it is. If we were to view freedom as the absence of all constraint, or the absence of all restraint, or as self-assertion - that is, the confident, forceful expression of oneself, one view or one’s desires.
All of which you could make a strong case for being the most dominant modern views of freedom. Then any move to add constraint or restraint, or in any way inhibit self-assertion through, if we were to put it in a very pejorative sense, greater controls on the use of the VLE are an affront.
This view of freedom is contestable and perhaps a more workable or real way of viewing freedom is that in reality freedom involves the loss of some freedoms to gain other freedoms. When you decide to work for an institution like a university one of the freedoms you lose is the ability to choose the main digital means through which your course is experienced, you lose all manner of freedoms to choose exactly how to teach, run and administer courses and programmes and much more besides. You also become part of something that’s bigger than you as an individual.
Foregoing some freedoms in how you use the VLE so that students might experience less unnecessary friction when they use it does not seem an unreasonable position to take and to adopt. Also, if you consider yourself as a part of a whole rather than an outlier, some cohesion to the digital teaching and study experience doesn’t seem an outlandish thing to want to achieve.
The challenge of creating a cohesive digital learning experience
In Leonard Houx’s excellent essay “How to Find Your Way in the World of Online Learning” he addresses the importance of well-considered orientation on digital learning platforms. He rightly explains that we need this so much more in education because we ask much more of students than the average user of a website. We want students to learn, think and progress, not simply to browse and buy in perpetual loop.
Now some of this obviously presupposes that whatever form this takes, whether it be advice, guidance, a template, a rubric etc, etc has validity and I think this as an area of discussion and potential pushback that there is wisdom in pursuing. Whatever measures taken to improve the digital study experience need to be more than simply best guesses.
There are also undoubtedly other tensions and issues related to achieving a cohesive digital study and teaching experience. One of which is the quality and development of the VLE, a technology that in its 20+ years of existence has not kept pace with the best of what web-based technology has to offer and can be a deeply frustrating technology to use.
Some of the causes of this are the near quadropoly that has existed in this space such that you have a choice between grey, beige, grey and some more grey. The centrality of the VLE to all aspects of university activity also makes it the kind of Hotel California of EdTech that you can never leave...or at least not without significant upheaval. Add to this the fact that digital technologies have tended to be the poor relation to campus-based teaching and you don’t get great conditions for dynamic, innovative products to appear.
The VLE has also suffered from where it was historically housed in universities, too far across the spectrum towards information technology and too far away from learning and teaching. This has meant that the voices and experiences of educators and students haven’t been heard as much as they should throughout the history of the VLE in university life.
The bigger picture of digital technology implementation
Perhaps most importantly though, the VLE is symptomatic of the problems of implementing digital within universities, in that there’s been shallow consideration of what that might mean for broader organisational change.
We really must learn that putting a tool in the hands of educators doesn’t magically bring a desired result, it has implications for their role, for the organisation and for their work and workload, the support needed both day to day and in terms of professional development.
The pandemic should’ve shone a huge floodlight on this and if institutions haven’t had a serious lightbulb moment of realisation that they’ve not been setup to succeed in the use of digital technologies in the teaching and study experience then we’ll be stuck on the same loop again and again and again....
What’s clear however is that the VLE isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So making the best use of what you have to support teaching and study is the key imperative. Whilst we might want to ensure there is friction or to put it another way ‘desirable difficulties’ when it comes to learning - we should really ask ourselves what the benefit is of creating frictions that just result in frustration and exasperation?
Inconsistency of use of the VLE across some areas often does just that. Is a template, a rubric, some guidelines, a mandate or another means of tackling this a gross violation of freedom? Well it really depends on what you believe about freedom.
