VLEs – does scalability increase the risk of structural rigidity?

I have an aversion to centrally-planned systems. My experience of the OU system is that there are some parts that work really well (the forum pages, the calendar, the assessment-submission system) and other parts that are ‘clunky’ (the blogs, the wikis, the quiz page).

In our tutor group, none of us have adopted the OU blog format, we have all instead chosen Wordpress or Blogger and linked these to the OU site.

Some tech-savvy tutors are guiding their learners to using Web 2.0 tools – this makes a lot of sense to me. But Sclater argues that this approach is unsustainable and impractical if elearning is to be delivered at scale.

There is a big issue here – effective learning requires empowerment at the learner level, and systems that learners can adapt for themselves. Yet organizational scalability requires a degree of homogenization and rigidity. There is a fundamental contradiction here.

[I think we will read in subsequent articles that Sclater suggests that the VLE becomes more of a background system, providing a minimum standard of structure but accepting data from elsewhere].


[H800 week 21 activity 2]