The Future of Education

Virtual Learning Environments such as Blackboard, Moodle and others have become ubiquitous in higher education and are increasingly common in secondary schools. Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to course design in the VLE. As a result of criticisms that VLEs tend to be used as content repositories, much of the work has focussed on the importance of student activity in the VLE since student activity is clearly a driver of student learning.  Yet content remains important, and there is something of a lacuna in the analysis of what content is chosen for a VLE and, importantly how that content is organised and presented to students.

In this, the analysis of VLE content has something in common with that of reading lists which somewhat surprisingly, given the historical prevalence of the reading list in higher education is a rather under-analysed topic. Research into reading lists has shown that students tend to ignore those works not marked as “essential”, suggesting that they may take a similar approach to VLE content.

This paper reports on a potential conceptual framework derived from a study of every VLE site used in a medium sized UK university during the academic year 2013-14, which identified three distinct approaches to managing content, mirroring the syllabus temporally, attempting to organise disciplinary knowledge and facilitating course administration. The paper also maps out a strategy for developing research into how both students and teachers conceptualise a virtual learning environment.