It was interesting to hear at a recent meeting that learners were requesting that more resources were available on the VLE. It was apparent that they appreciated that their teachers were placing the resources on the VLE, making them available at a time and place to suit the learner.

This doesn’t surprise me, the lack of activities and resources on an institutional VLE is one area that often comes up in learner feedback. I remember a (fair) few years ago talking to the e-learning people at a large university and they said that 80% of their support calls were from students unable to find their course or resources on the VLE; the reason they couldn’t find them was that they didn’t exist, their lecturer either didn’t have a course on the VLE or hadn’t uploaded any resources.

It’s a simple thing to have a course on the VLE and upload all the resources you use to it, it also supports learners to add extra resources, links to ebooks for example, links to useful websites, RSS feeds from relevant news sites. You could embed YouTube videos, presentations from Slideshare, Prezis and so on.

It’s also an opportunity to add further resources, to inspire learners, stretch them, add challenges, embed maths and English

Of course there is a “danger” that if you only upload resources to the VLE that it becomes just a repository of files, and the inevitable scroll of death. I do think that you should think of this “stage of VLE development” as the initial stage, the first stage, the start of the journey that will end with a VLE course that is engaging, interactive and a really useful tool for learning.