Concurrently it also seems that every HE institution in the country is either about to start, in the middle of, or has just completed a review of its learning environment provision. So despite many calls of its death, it does seem that the VLE is going to be around (in some shape or form) for a while yet.

Last week in Birmingham we held an event to launch our DLE briefing paper. The event also coincided with the Distributed Virtual Learning Environments call announcement from JISC. During the day we had presentations demoing a number of the models featured in the briefing paper as well as an overview from Peter Hartley of the ALT LER (learning environment review) SIG. Heather Williamson from JISC was also able to give an overview of the DVLE call.

Over all there was a lot of interest from participants in exploring further ways to easily extend functionality of learning environments for users (staff and students) – particularly the development of widgets. Over the next year we are planning to run a number of events where we can bring developers and users together, so watch this space, and if you have any suggestions please let me know.

Presentations from the day are now available on the CETIS wiki. You can also view the twitter stream from the day.

The briefing paper came about directly as a result of our work over the past year into widgets, in our widget working group, and from the sessions Wilbert Kraan and I ran at the CETIS09 conference on “Composing you learning environments”.

We’ll be discussing the models in more detail at the Distributed Learning Environments meeting next week (4th March) and there will be some demos of a number of the models. There are still a few places left for the event (which is free to attend). More information, including a link to register is available from our event webpage.