Thank-you, Emmanuel in Argentina, for your post about VLEs. Let me try to answer your questions by sharing my experiences with VLEs, explaining what I think the advantages are and suggesting how I would go about getting started.

 

My first experience with a VLE came when I enrolled on a training course with theconsultants-e, which was delivered through Blackboard. Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly provided 4 weeks' of training in online collaborative tasks and project work. The crucial first week of the training involved getting to know the platform and the other course participants. We did this through creating profiles with photos, reading each other's and asking each other questions using the mail function. As we grew in confidence, we read articles and discussed our responses in forums, or collaborated on documents using the wiki tool. Once a week we would share ideas and develop skills in the chatroom. (On a course I attended a few years later, using Moodle in a similar way, we used Skype to talk to each other.)

 

This gradual development of skills and the corresponding group formation is crucial to success. Also crucial is technical support for students who have problems, whether external or otherwise. When I first set up a course with a school where I worked, we found that the group in Mongolia, who had technical issues and therefore hadn't had the opportunity to form a strong group, never really got going and eventually fizzled out. Have a look at this clear 5-step visual, courtesy of Gilly Salmon, which explains how an ideal course will develop.

 

The course with Gavin and Nicky went on to look at how to search effectively and select appropriate websites in order to construct a webquest. I think Webquests merit a posting to themselves. In the future, I'll provide a description of webquests, of the underlying constructivist beliefs on which they are built, and of their benefits. But for now, here's the webquest which I created! It's quite old now and I imagine the links are dead. As I say, I'll come back to webquests and see if I can find some links to some good examples. (NB I see a number of activities which claim to be webquests, but which are actually web searches and don't encourage the same type of learning that webquests do.)

 

VLEs are commonplace in teacher training these days, but still relatively rare in ELT with students, in my experience. With Bell school, we ran a blended teacher training course, using moodle. Teachers on the course had access to documents online before face-to-face classes and were able to meet each other virtually before the course. The trainer can gradually allow access to sections of the course as the weeks go by and this helps to keep eveyone on track.

 

If you want to see a VLE in action, why not come along to the IATEFL Learning Technologies Pre-Pre-Conference event, which is live as I write, and hosted in Ning.

 

I've simply written about my personal experiences here. I hope they've been useful. If you have experiences to share or if you have done research into VLEs, then please let us know your thoughts.

 

James