Switching VLE: How can you get your developers on board?

You know, I have an incredible amount of empathy for the people that operate, support, and keep secure VLEs inside universities and tertiary institutions. It can often be a pretty thankless task. Most people have no idea what it takes to keep a mission critical system up twenty four seven to support the needs of every student and every teaching member of staff, all of whom have their sort of unique needs, aspirations, desires. It's a it's a big task. So those people that support the VLE, they're pretty passionate about what they do, which is why when somebody like me, a vice chancellor, wanders up and says, I wanna move from an on prem legacy VLE to a cloud based VLE with a different community, a different set of tools, a different set of development, capabilities, often a a whole different language and vocabulary to use in your daily life, we trigger the developer's dilemma. And the developer's dilemma is how do I personally make that migration of something that I know, that I love, that I've worked with, I've mastered, I know how every creak, every twist, every tweak has been done, and I know how to fix pretty well any issue that pops up to something that's new, different, and maybe incredibly powerful, but it's not mine.

I don't know it as well, and I've got to make the shift as we shift in the technology. How do we actually jump that divide? And I think there's a a few things that we wanna consider to help those of us that are in the developer community make that shift. The first is, how do we provide access to the cutting edge tools to really help that individual enhance their expertise and career prospects? I've I've led developers my entire career. And one thing that I know is if you wanna lose a great developer, you'll keep them landlocked in yesterday's tools. So instead of thinking of it as a negative, really bring to life for your developers the opportunity to embrace those new tool sets.

But do it in a way where you're going to give them the time and the investment to go on their own education journey to master them. And and bring to life for them how in doing so, you're giving them access to the best, most up to date tool sets, and how that then will directly relate to them having bright career prospects for your own institution or wherever they may end up working. The second is don't shy away from giving them the opportunities to go after certifications and professional development in these new tool sets. It's all part of what the developer community has been about really all the way back to the nineteen eighties. You know, certification programs, professional development programs, badges of honor, and and often by moving into communities of contemporary VLEs, you actually are entering into a community where those qualifications, those credentials have unbelievable market value.

So invest in your people to be able to get those markers of success and let them feel welcomed in those new communities. And that sort of brings us to my third point, which is embrace the idea that you want them to network and collaborate with their peers all over the world. Just like open source communities, there are these massive communities that surround these SaaS based FLEs. You want them to be part of those communities, and why? You want them to be part of those communities because they will belong and they will be motivated. You want them to be part of those communities because they're going to discover innovation in ways of plugging in third party tools and applications that your you and your institution may not have thought of.

In other words, they'll suddenly become innovators within your institution. And the third thing is you want them plugged into those communities because they're going to bring back not just technological know how, they're gonna bring back learning and teaching know how, research and innovation know how, and competitiveness know how. And the final thing that I'd recommend is you wanna help those developers make that migration is you want to sort of explain to them how and bring some life for them, but by being part of these big large scale projects, can actually dramatically enhance their resume and their career standing. Not many times in your career do you really get to be part of an institution wide migration that cuts right to the heart of what universities and tertiary institutions do, and that's teach our students. Helping them see that as a great challenge, a learning experience, and a badge of honor for their resume for the rest of their career, those are the things that will help you both motivate and successfully migrate your developers while you're migrating your systems and your technology.