One of the useful aspects of the Gloucestershire College VLE is the ability to store a series of bookmarked web links on a course.
These links can be accessed from any computer which is something that Internet Explorer fails to do as it is restricted to one computer.
Also these links can be accessed by your students at a time and place convenient to them (whether that be at home, in college, or at work). Rather than type them out they can click and there the page is there for them either within the campus or in a new window.
You could always use a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us, but one of the advantages of using the VLE is that it can track who has clicked the links.
On Friday the 29th of June Gloucestershire College will be moving its Learning Gateway (library) from their old 1930’s Brunswick campus to their new state of the art new campus on the Gloucester docks.
Moving seventeen thousand odd books, fifty computers and lots of other stuff, makes you realise how moving from one VLE to another though complicated and complex, can be relatively simple to physically moving a learning environment.
The move won’t impact on the VLE as the VLE runs on servers on our Cheltenham campus, however it does mean that I personally will be quite busy and therefore won’t be online as much as I am now.
I sometimes get asked what materials can I upload to a VLE, are there any materials I can’t upload due to copyright.
Basically what I advise is do not upload any copyrighted material unless you have the rights, a licence or permission from the copyright holder to do so.
Sometimes you will need to check multiple permissions for a single resource as the text, images and diagrams may have different rights holders.
Staffordshire University have a (obviously HE centric) guide on copyright and VLEs which gives a more detailed explanation of the issue.
There is also the JISC Collections activity which I wrote for them which also covers some VLE issues amongst others.
Copyright is a complex issue and there are a lot of myths about copyright and education. If you are not sure about something, check don’t assume it will be okay.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
