I think Jie Shen's post is both interesting and contradictory. Dr. Shen says
that the approach to evaluation of VLEs put forward in our JTAP-041 report
is
1. Outdated. and 2. Of little practical use.
Dr. Shen goes on to say that it would be preferable to see, instead, a
comparative table of which VLEs are appropriate for which pedagogical
contexts.
I would like to counter both of these criticisms as I think they demonstrate
some misunderstandings. First, although we provided details of some example
VLEs that were around when the report was written. These were only to
illustrate using the models. We deliberately didn't attempt to do a
comparative evaluation, because we were acutely aware of how quickly it
would be outdated. What we did instead, was to propose two approaches to
evaluation based on established theoretical foundations (which we made
explicit), so that people could develop their own evaluation criteria
tailored to their own context. I would argue that, although it does
admittedly take more time and effort to construct an evaluation than to scan
a comparative table, it is unfortunately what you have to do if you are
serious about evaluating what VLE (if any) would work in your pedagogical
context.
Our view is that there is a desperate need for an informed and theoretically
sound body of work on pedagogical issues with VLEs and the report mentioned
was a first attempt to get things kick-started. Many current systems, IMO,
still fall short of the pedagogic needs of Higher and Further Education. As
a constructivist, I would argue that what we need to improve them is more
discussion, not more tickboxes :-)
Sandy Britain
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