We need to talk about VLEs

The virtual learning environment (VLE) is ubiquitous in higher education, and is now so embedded in our teaching that we don’t really discuss its use anymore. We just sort of accept that it is … there. 

I attended the EdTech 2015 conference at University of Limerick a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised to see a talk about VLEs by Enda Donlon and Eamon Costello from Dublin City University.

Their presentation brought us up to speed on 'the VLE is dead' debate, started by Martin Weller of the Open University in 2007. I’ve written about my own thoughts on this before, so here I would like to focus on how and why we use VLEs.