Is your VLE enhancing the student experience? With Martin Bean CBE
Given the choice, would your students have selected your Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) on their own? Martin Bean CBE shares the importance of the VLE in enhancing the student experience, and how to decide whether yours is up to scratch.
I unashamedly and unapologetically believe that when we wake up every day running universities, tertiary education institutions, the very first thing that has to be on our mind is the quality of the student experience. Yes, we have to be worried about our research and innovation. Yes, we needed to be worried about our community engagement and relevance. But at the end of the day, well over ninety, ninety five percent of our students come to us to get a job or get ahead in life and work. We want the learning and teaching to be fantastic, and we want our students to belong. And to bring that all to life, the VLE, which sits in the middle of most of that, interoperating with other systems in the institution, but it is the place that students go first in their daily experience, and it's often the place they go last in their daily experience.
I'm often, intrigued by the fact that a lot of the conversations, particularly with leaders of institutions, we spend a lot of time talking about the quality of the physical infrastructure. But what's interesting is how little time they often spend in their meetings, in their strategy sessions, and with me talking about their digital infrastructure and the digital deficits that they run. Because in a world largely defined by technology, whether that's for innovation and goodness or disruption and challenge, it's intriguing to me that we still overweight for the physical over the digital. And the problem with digital deficits is they're not very apparent, and they can sneak up on you, and they can do you a lot of damage without you ever noticing because quite frankly, they're in a data center, they're in the cloud, but also we're blind to the fact that they're at the fingertips of all of our students and all of our staff. So when I walk into an institution that's running on a legacy VLE, I usually run into a lot of treacle in that institution.
A lot of things that just don't work the way that they should work, and as a result, they're delivering suboptimal experiences for their students, and they're delivering suboptimal experiences for their staff and stakeholders. And there's a few reasons why when we focus on VLEs. Legacy VLEs really struggle to scale efficiently, and that really limits their opportunities because unless you can scale, and I just don't mean by the number of students, I'm talking about scaling contemporary learning solutions. Can you scale an infinite number of credential types, micro, meso, macro credentials? Can you assess both formative and summative in new creative ways leveraging artificial intelligence? Can you adapt to the learning styles and personal preferences of all of your students no matter where they come from or what they do? Can you deploy learning analytics in a way to keep your students out of harm's way? Engaging well structured courses lead directly to higher student satisfaction. Clunky, disjointed education experiences, experiences that look one way in one subject and another way in another subject where the data isn't tied together, where each time I have to walk up to it, I've got to learn how the user interface operates and what I need to do to be successful that drives dissatisfaction.
And legacy VLEs are often really hamstrung in their mobile functionality. They just can't embrace fully mobile experiences, not just can I get it to run on a smartphone or run on a tablet PC, but can that be elegant? Can that be beautiful? Can that be the sort of experience that we're used to every time we pull up an application or a service on our mobile devices? And if not, it frustrates students and it reduces engagement. And whether it's the TAF evaluation here in the UK or the evaluation in Australia, I've got to tell you, students will rate us pretty harshly if they're frustrated and if they don't feel engaged. So if you can't do all of that, then you're limiting your competitiveness. And if you're limiting your competitiveness, you're obviously limiting your addressable market.
And that may bother you for impact or it may bother you for revenue, when it's probably more likely to bother you for both. So the quality of the VLE directly impacts student satisfaction, engagement, and most importantly, outcomes. Contemporary high quality VLEs enhance accessibility, flexibility, and remote collaboration, that twenty four seven connectedness to the institution. Those strong online learning experiences and service experiences and belonging experiences, they bolster the institution's reputation because that's the life our students and staff lead. So as you think about AVELE, if you're like me, concerned about the overall student experience, you'll choose a VLE that's capable of supporting that three hundred and sixty degree life of the student, not just focused on when they're a student in a classroom or online learning.
I'm often, intrigued by the fact that a lot of the conversations, particularly with leaders of institutions, we spend a lot of time talking about the quality of the physical infrastructure. But what's interesting is how little time they often spend in their meetings, in their strategy sessions, and with me talking about their digital infrastructure and the digital deficits that they run. Because in a world largely defined by technology, whether that's for innovation and goodness or disruption and challenge, it's intriguing to me that we still overweight for the physical over the digital. And the problem with digital deficits is they're not very apparent, and they can sneak up on you, and they can do you a lot of damage without you ever noticing because quite frankly, they're in a data center, they're in the cloud, but also we're blind to the fact that they're at the fingertips of all of our students and all of our staff. So when I walk into an institution that's running on a legacy VLE, I usually run into a lot of treacle in that institution.
A lot of things that just don't work the way that they should work, and as a result, they're delivering suboptimal experiences for their students, and they're delivering suboptimal experiences for their staff and stakeholders. And there's a few reasons why when we focus on VLEs. Legacy VLEs really struggle to scale efficiently, and that really limits their opportunities because unless you can scale, and I just don't mean by the number of students, I'm talking about scaling contemporary learning solutions. Can you scale an infinite number of credential types, micro, meso, macro credentials? Can you assess both formative and summative in new creative ways leveraging artificial intelligence? Can you adapt to the learning styles and personal preferences of all of your students no matter where they come from or what they do? Can you deploy learning analytics in a way to keep your students out of harm's way? Engaging well structured courses lead directly to higher student satisfaction. Clunky, disjointed education experiences, experiences that look one way in one subject and another way in another subject where the data isn't tied together, where each time I have to walk up to it, I've got to learn how the user interface operates and what I need to do to be successful that drives dissatisfaction.
And legacy VLEs are often really hamstrung in their mobile functionality. They just can't embrace fully mobile experiences, not just can I get it to run on a smartphone or run on a tablet PC, but can that be elegant? Can that be beautiful? Can that be the sort of experience that we're used to every time we pull up an application or a service on our mobile devices? And if not, it frustrates students and it reduces engagement. And whether it's the TAF evaluation here in the UK or the evaluation in Australia, I've got to tell you, students will rate us pretty harshly if they're frustrated and if they don't feel engaged. So if you can't do all of that, then you're limiting your competitiveness. And if you're limiting your competitiveness, you're obviously limiting your addressable market.
And that may bother you for impact or it may bother you for revenue, when it's probably more likely to bother you for both. So the quality of the VLE directly impacts student satisfaction, engagement, and most importantly, outcomes. Contemporary high quality VLEs enhance accessibility, flexibility, and remote collaboration, that twenty four seven connectedness to the institution. Those strong online learning experiences and service experiences and belonging experiences, they bolster the institution's reputation because that's the life our students and staff lead. So as you think about AVELE, if you're like me, concerned about the overall student experience, you'll choose a VLE that's capable of supporting that three hundred and sixty degree life of the student, not just focused on when they're a student in a classroom or online learning.
"We want the learning and teaching to be fantastic, and we want our students to belong. The VLE sits in the middle of most of that and interoperates with other systems in the institution. It is the place that students go first in their daily experience, and it's often the place they go last in their daily experience."
- Martin Bean CBE former Vice Chancellor at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, a Canvas VLE Customer
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