>A significant factor in deciding whether to go along with the idea (for
>a given subject) would definitely be who was behind it. If it was just
>some company underpinning the VLE, there would be worries about the
>long-term lifetime. But (for example) if both JISC and the British
>Psychological Society were involved in running a UK-wide VLE for all
>undergrad courses with BPS accreditation, that would feel much more like
>a dependable entity.
One way to give some assurance would be for the VLE to be 'owned' by a
learned society although hosted and managed by a professional team. I.e. the
learned society would own the right to transfer all the files and databases
to another service provider if necessary.
Round the clock academic support might be helped by an international
approach since recruitment of on-line postgraduate demonstrators might cover
all time zones. Learned societies generally have that international
dimension so they might help in recruitment of Australian, Indian and
American contributors. The environment might juice up the market for
individual distance taught course modules, especially at postgraduate level.
>Another issue would be integration within the university's information
>environment. Clicking through to the "foreign" VLE for a given course
>should be as transparent as clicking through to the "home" VLE, for
>example, and it should be possible for test results etc to be fed back
>to the "home" student information system.
The biggest part of this would be to avoid another log-in and that should be
possible with current technology. Getting the test results back to the
"home" student information system would be another big step forward - it
would certainly be helped by a good authentication/authorisation system to
ensure that data is not fabricated.
>
>Best
>Dan Stowell
>
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