A new term has entered everyday vocabulary in universities throughout the land. It’s VLE, which stands for ‘Virtual Learning Environment’. You say it vee-hell-eek! Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. A VLE is a website with basic tools for teachers to build and publish a structured learning and teaching environment. The students have easy online access to announcements, documents, courseware, libraries and communication. There are many of these strange beasts. Some have illusions of grandeur. Some have dollar signs reflected in their meagre screens. Others are humbler but optimistic. In the senior common rooms of both plastic and ivory towers, the term VLE is replaced by the brand names of the more popular types. So we say, ‘I used Blackboard™’ or ‘I went into WebCT™’ in the same way as we refer to our vacuum cleaners as ‘Hoovers’ long after the original has been replaced by a gaudy Dyson™.

There is a risk, though. If all you have is a VLE, everything looks like a browser (with apologies to Maslow, who told us that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail). While enthusiasts muse about how we ever lived without VLEs, much more exciting and powerful devices are capturing the hearts, minds and pockets of the consumers of education and training.

Imagine students downloading recordings of every lecture they attend for access and review at any moment they felt at their most receptive. We could provide such an experience by using iPods, the device many young people adore for downloading, carrying and playing music. The iPod is a portable audio player with masses of storage and is capable of deploying different music formats. The iPod is from Apple Computers but many other similar devices are entering the market.

Who might benefit from lectures delivered through their iPods? Let’s call them podcasts! The mix of pop culture, mobile information technology and relevant and interesting content may fire up students’ interest. A podcast could be designed as a text alternative, for learners who do not perform well in a standard lecture-read-test structure or who are all webbed-out by their VLEs. Most of those in full-time education also divide their time between bar (drinkies), lecture and books. How wonderful to integrate all of them! How fabulous would students’ subsequent assignments be if they fully accessed the original dulcet tones of their very own professor’s words of wisdom and search for authenticity instead of a dubious ripped-off essay for a dollar from the web! You think it will be too expensive for poor students faced with ever higher fees? Have you seen the cost of buying a mere backpack full of text books from the recommended reading list?

In addition, many people in education or training are in constant motion on the two-step shuffle of work/life balance. Exploiting audio podcasting would enable time-challenged but committed students to use their precious learning moments more productively. It is easier to carry an iPod or similar device to work than it would be to carry books or a laptop computer and engage while commuting or lunching. It’s truly in the spirit of any time, any place, don’t you think?

At the start of the autumn academic year, Duke University in North Carolina, USA (sponsored by Apple Computers), distributed 20GB Apple iPods to each of its 1,650 delighted first year students. Few other universities I know generously offer their students masses of storage space! Inevitably, the iPods came preloaded with the familiar welcome speeches from various university VIPs, study calendars and information about the campus. So perhaps the joy of Duke’s freshmen had more to do with the prospect of ‘space’ for stacks of downloadable rock music.

There were claims from competitors of ‘media stunt’, of course. The usual way of introducing new technologies into higher education courses is slowly and on a smaller scale, with projects and pilots. As always, no matter what the power of the technology in the hand, success for educational purposes is based on designing for participation and intervention by humans to promote and enable learning. The near future will tell whether a real pedagogical experience will develop, but I’ve heard there are many members of Duke’s faculty willing to have a go!

How would you use iPods and all those similar mobile devices likely to follow in their high mobile and digital footsteps? Lift your heads from your big screen vee-hell-eeks and give them a thought? And ask anyone time-poor or under 25 what they feel about the idea!

Surf it
More about Duke’s aspirations www.dukenews.duke.edu/news/ipods_0704.html
The Manufacturer’s site www.apple.com/ipod/
Much more about VLEs http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=mle_briefingpack

Dr Gilly Salmon is Professor of E-learning and Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester. Prior to this appointment, she worked at the Open University Business School for 15 years. Gilly can be contacted at http://Gilly.salmon@le.ac.uk

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