I’ve become increasingly unconvinced about the benefits of LMSs – such as Blackboard and WebCT. Basically these environments seem to put unnecessary restrictions on how material is made available, and how it is accessed, without adding much benefit.

It’s interesting that these pieces of software are called ‘Learning Management Systems’. In the UK, the idea of the Virtual or Managed Learning Environment’ took off, and still there is a tendency to refer to LMSs as VLEs or MLEs. This, for me, is to miss an important distinction. Blackboard, WebCT and the like are correctly called ‘Learning Management Systems’, as they somehow try to ‘manage’ the learning material. I’m not sure this is helpful, certainly not in the context of UK Higher Education.

So, I believe we should strive to create a virtual or managed ‘learning environment’, but we don’t need an LMS to do so. This should also make it easier to integrate library resources into the material, as there are no artificial barriers to doing this, and you aren’t tied into one particular technology.

So what do we need from a VLE? At the moment our needs are pretty simple:

Web space for courses
Ideally we need to be able to restrict viewing privileges to the students on the course. However, this may not be necessary in all cases…
Discussion group/bulletin board software
Email lists for courses
Ease of publishing/uploading material

I’d like to be able to provide tools for easy content creation by academics. Weblog software would seem ideal for this purpose – but I’m not sure about supporting this (if we were to install Movable Type or something). Possibly Microsoft’s ‘Sharepoint’ software would be worth investigating. Otherwise, perhaps we just need to treat this as another area where web content management software is needed.