The structure, features and policies of most VLE implementations tend to perpetuate the traditional instructivist models of education. The primary purpose of the systems is to organise course content for transmission to enrolled students. Only some VLEs provide shared file areas and collaborative facilities like chat and discussion forums. In universities, VLEs often act as secure gateways to digital indexes and research journals. Unless students manually copy materials out of the VLE walled garden, all traces of their learning experience through the VLE are lost once they complete their studies.
Sabine Reisas on 29 Sep 11Abstract: "The influence of digital technologies as well as the World Wide Web on education rises dramatically. In former years Learning Management Systems (LMS) were introduced on educational institutes to address the needs both their institutions and their lecturers. Nowadays a shift from an institution-centred approach to a learner-centred one becomes necessary to allow individuality through the learning process and to think about learning strategies in general. In this paper a first approach of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is described. The technological concept is pointed out as well as a study about the graphical user-interface done at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). It can be concluded that PLEs are the next generation environments, which help to improve the learning and teaching behaviour."
