So far this year has not been awash with UK universities looking to switch VLEs, but I expect there to be more movement next year. The coming year and the decisions that some UK universities make around new VLE implementation will be the true test of different VLE company strategies. But it would not surprise me to see Brightspace being adopted by more UK universities and continuing the momentum experienced in recent years.
Read MoreIn the UK, Instructure is best known for Canvas, their virtual learning environment (VLE) product. As I’ve reported in my annual VLE market analysis, recent years have seen Instructure build significant momentum in the UK, with a growing market share as a steady stream of UK higher education institutions (HEIs) switch to Canvas. They have been the most, if not the only, successful player in this market recently, with Canvas being implemented across small, medium, and large HEIs.
Read More"Online learning is fundamentally broken” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. While questioning the efficacy of online learning is as old as online learning itself, it’s been interesting to observe how the AI explosion has led some into discourse about the state of online learning. Online education isn’t the only thing that has experienced some “crisis framing” since that time; education itself has been framed as something that needs saving. Unsurprisingly, one reason for the uptick in crisis framing is that people want to tell you how AI can fix online learning or save education. Essentially, there’s a lot of AI-led problem-solution marketing going on.
Read MoreSince 2021, I have been providing an annual review of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) market in UK higher education, aiming to highlight trends, notable developments, and evolving market shares.
Read MoreThe vast majority of engagement and interaction with online learning experiences is asynchronous. Students engage in activities, tasks and interact not simply at a set time for a set duration, but across time when they want to or are able to do so.
Whilst there are myriad types of activities, interaction, content etc that can form part of asynchronous online learning - over the years a core menu of common activity types and associated online technologies has been established.
Read MoreAlthough many other things get much more attention - one of the notable changes in higher education in respect to edtech in recent years is the greater usage of video conferencing technology. Many HEIs had this technology in their edtech suites before the pandemic, but usage for learning and teaching was minimal and largely for online distance learning programmes with a synchronous element.
Read MoreDuring a period in which discussion of how AI is set to alter education and challenge long-standing orthodoxies, it feels somewhat antiquated to be talking about virtual learning environments (VLEs). However, these unfashionable digital technologies continue to be the mainstay of practically every UK university's digital campus.
Read MoreFor many years there have been the so-called big four" in this market - they being Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas and Brightspace. However, whilst in the US the proportion of universities using those products is more evenly spread, in the UK it’s really been a case of the big two - Moodle and Blackboard. These two VLEs are still the most widely used in UK universities and are used by over 70% of the 176 HEIs I looked at. Whilst that tells a story of two dominant players - I’m not sure that’s the true picture, because they used to be much more dominant.
Read MoreWhat’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?
Read MoreThe physical campus is being developed and heavily invested in, but that is just one part of the student and staff experience now. The other is, for the want of a better phrase, the digital campus. But, if we were to juxtapose the level of investment in the physical and digital campus, what would we see?
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