Can you rely on your VLE? With Martin Bean CBE

You know, one of the things that often doesn't get looked at enough when evaluating a VLE is what we might think of as uptime and reliability. And, wow, I tell you, when I was running RMIT University, so a university of ninety thousand students based in Melbourne, Australia, but also with campuses in Singapore and Vietnam and significant partnerships in China. I gotta tell you when that pandemic hits and all of a sudden in literally a seventy two hour period, we had to decamp fifty five thousand students and nearly ten thousand staff from RMIT and our Melbourne campuses and move everybody into their homes for what ended up being over two hundred days of lockdown, uptime and reliability suddenly became very, very real to us. And the fact that we were running on a VLE that was capable of supporting us through all of those transitions in the blink of an eye because it was a cloud based product that didn't really care where we were or what system we were plugged into, it was able to just support us through all of those transitions without a hiccup left me both, excited and a little battle scarred for never taking for granted how important uptime and reliability is when you make your choice around a VLE. And as I look back on it, I am just so glad that we were cloud based through all of that. So I guess at a meta level, if I was giving you advice about VLE selection, the very first thing I would say is get off premise, get into the cloud, and get into an environment that isn't going to let you down when you need it the most.

But if we then jump in behind what I mean by uptime and reliability, so it's really about uninterrupted learning, especially in digital and remote settings, but there is no such thing any longer as purely face to face learning. It's all omnichannel. The very best institutions are really thinking about using the tools of the day. Some are physical in classroom settings like I'm in right now, but increasingly they're hybrid. They're the combination of digital and physical.

And of course, sometimes they're fully online and sometimes there is no digital in the moment, but the minute our students walk out the door, everything they'll do after a physical environment largely is defined by digital. And so that uninterrupted learning is not something off to the side or only something we think about when we're talking e learning. It actually is the lifeblood. It's the air we breathe now is the digital backbone of the learning experience. So it becomes even more important to factor that in your decision making of a VLE, as well as obviously its capabilities for learning, teaching, assessment, etcetera.

Uptime is important because most of the students interacting with your institutions won't be constrained to neat little nine to five, eight to four, twelve to five brackets of time. In fact, when you look at the usage patterns of virtual learning environments, some of the peak times are actually between five PM and eleven PM at night. There is no such thing as five days a week. It's twenty four seven. But also what I want you to pause and think about is accessibility for all, including those people that have requirements, that might be defined by, physical or learning disabilities or some other learning needs that need to be catered for that can't be without access to the appropriate technology.

So uptime becomes even more important if the ethos of our institutions is about allowing everybody to be successful, Something that has fueled my time in education from the very beginning. It's why I've always focused on technology in education, partially because it allows us to scale, but for me, more importantly, it's about creating access for all. And the final thing, and I'd like you to factor it in as part of your decision making, is trust. Reliability builds trust. If you want people to embrace technology in an education setting, they have to be able to rely upon it to be there when they have to use it.

And that sort of brings me back to what often gets described as software as a service or cloud based learning. There's no doubt that when you base or you bet your institution on cloud based over on premise, you are actually betting on a much more superior platform and a platform that is going to outperform uptime no matter what you've got to spend in supporting your own on premise solution. It's just the way technology is. You know, I've taken two very large universities now on a journey of moving from predominantly on premise self supported technologies into the cloud. And it comes with some challenges to get there, but oh my goodness, the benefits are just extraordinary.

You know, as much as you may have in your local technology budget, no matter how good your people are to support it, no matter how robust your on premise data center provider might be, you are never going to be able to deploy the people, the money, the talent, or the infrastructure to keep pace with the world's leading cloud based hosting providers. And I'm talking about companies here like Amazon Web Services. Just through the sheer scale and economics of the way that they run their business, they can drive robustness. They can drive innovation. They can drive, interoperability.

They can drive twenty four seven support in ways that we just can't on our own as individual institutions. So it becomes a pretty easy choice from my perspective when you're deciding on a VLE. Do you wanna take care of all of that, both from a cost burden, a talent burden, but also an opportunity cost perspective? Because every pound, dollar, yen you're spending on supporting all of that that could be done by a third party provider is time, money, and brainware that isn't being spent on the most valuable things that we do, learning, teaching, research, innovation, and community.