The VLE Landscape

[A short history of VLEs] | [VLE market share] | [What has changed] | [What really differentiates VLEs?] | [What is driving the market?]

The VLE landscape

The virtual learning environment (or VLE) has been a feature of the student learning experience for many years.

The UK has always used the term VLE in preference to learning management system, or LMS, which is the more commonly used term globally.

A short history of VLEs

The first systems that we would generally recognise as having the components of a VLE were tools such as WebCT and Lotus Learning Space in use from the mid-1990s onwards. Most of the products in common use have grown out of the higher education sector. WebCT was started at the University of British Columbia; Blackboard Learn was originally designed at Cornell University; Brightspace by D2L (Desire2Learn) was designed by a student at the University of Waterloo and Instructure was founded in 2008 by two graduate students who went on a road trip of US universities before designing Canvas.

Closer to home the University of Wolverhampton's WOLF (Wolverhampton Online Learning Environment) VLE was marketed as the commercial product Learnwise by Granada Learning.

Proprietary and open source products have coexisted as long as VLEs have been around. Bodington was developed at the University of Leeds in 1995 and later adopted elsewhere such as at the University of Oxford. Moodle was first released in 2002 and Sakai development began in 2004.

Mergers and acquisitions have been common with Blackboard in particular taking over a number of other companies including WebCT. The VLE market has also been subject to lawsuits and patent disputes. In 2006 the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Blackboard a patent for 'Internet-based education support system and methods' which gave rise to a number of legal challenges and issues until the company terminated the patent in 2010.

VLE market share

The image below published by e-Literate shows the changes in market share of various VLEs in the US and Canada and the UK situation is not dissimilar.

In the 2016 ucisa Technology Enhanced Learning survey Blackboard and Moodle had 88% of market share almost evenly split between them with Canvas by Instructure and Brightspace by D2L (Desire2Learn) emerging as relatively recent entrants.

(Click to enlarge)

What has changed?

The above heading is deliberately ambiguous. It could mean what has changed about the nature of VLEs over time or it could mean how have VLEs changed our practice? The two are interrelated. VLEs have traditionally been a home for learning content and criticism of the use of VLEs as simply an 'online ring binder', ignoring their capabilities to support communication and collaboration, goes back many years. The affordances of VLEs have developed considerably but, in the research for this Toolkit, we frequently heard colleagues bemoan the fact that their VLE was still largely used as a content repository.

We talk about how to move beyond this type of use and enhance your learning and teaching practice in the section on Delivering the benefits.

Although the rest of the world has consistently talked about a learning management system, or LMS, the UK initially tended to think about the academic and management aspects separately. For many years people worked on creating managed learning environments (MLEs). There was never an agreed definition of the term but people generally meant a joined up infrastructure of learning content, support and administration linking systems such as the VLE, library system, student record system and timetabling.

The term MLE has largely dropped out of use whilst at the same time VLE products have grown in scope and begun to encompass some primarily administrative functions such as module information, announcements, assessment administration and sometimes even attendance records.

The trend towards VLEs becoming increasingly monolithic was noted many years ago and has, for the most part, continued with Jisc's 2016 report on next generation digital learning environments (see the resources for this section) stating that 'feature creep' has long been a characteristic of the VLE market.

What really differentiates VLEs?

We talked to a range of VLE suppliers during the research for this Toolkit and there was a high level of agreement between them that VLE products were about 90% similar and each had a component of c.10% that really distinguished their product. Some went so far as to say they feel the VLE market is quite commoditised, with a very standardised set of functionality, and that clients aren't really asking for anything new.

Most of the suppliers felt that universities are increasingly interested in what the supplier is like to work with as a long-term partner. However, it was also suggested that many European universities are doing a better job of reflecting the emphasis on relationships and fit with institutional strategy in their tender documentation than those in the UK.

When we asked universities about what differentiates the different VLEs, a couple of issues came up as key.

Assessment

Supporting effective assessment and feedback practice and the associated workflows is a major factor for many institutions. High-stakes assessment is also an area where universities are notoriously risk averse. Some current UK specific requirements with regard to common practices, such as double-blind marking, are not well supported by existing systems. People are also looking to the future and seeing the need to have effective solutions for digital examinations e.g. they might look to run live exams on campus through the VLE and therefore want features such as locking down student access to browsers/file repositories, and authentication. Some universities have opted to decouple their VLE from their digital assessment systems and processes in order to reduce dependencies.

One of the institutional contributors to this Toolkit talked about suppliers being in a race to provide better assessment and feedback functionality and felt that any supplier who cracked UK requirements such as double-blind marking and anonymous grading would take a lot of market share.

Usability

All of the institutional contributors to this Toolkit have told us that usability is a crucial factor in the choice of VLE. You may however find that you are faced with something of a 'Catch-22' situation in assessing usability: the bane of same versus the pain of change. On the one hand your review might be driven by the fact that staff or student users have a poor experience with your existing VLE whilst on the other hand you find there is a close correlation between usability and familiarity. In other words users might tend to prefer a product that is quite similar to what they already have and shy away from anything that appears radically different. In the section on Requirements gathering and prioritisation we look in more detail at what you actually mean by usability and how you might go about measuring it.

Other factors that you might think about when comparing different products include:

• accessibility of the product to users with a range of disabilities;
• whether the product is fully mobile compliant on all devices;
• how well the product meets your needs in terms of undertaking learning analytics;
• whether the product supports personalisation and/or adaptive learning;
• how well the supplier's roadmap and approach fits your own strategy.

What is driving the market?

It appears that both institutions and suppliers complain that the VLE market is becoming highly commoditised with a very standardised set of functionality. It seems however that we get what we ask for.

The way universities write specifications has come in for criticism as the example below from the US shows.

Some see the procurement process itself as part of the problem. They believe that suppliers having to focus on ticking the boxes against an ever-increasing list of functional requirements prevents them from concentrating on what the real problem is that you are trying to solve. It also inhibits thinking about different ways of approaching this.

We consider this topic further in the section on Aligning with strategy.