VLE stands for Virtual Learning Environment. It is a rather glorified way of describing what is essentially (in most cases) an Intranet in an educational (as opposed to commercial) context. VLE is used interchangeably with Learning Network (LN or LEN) to refer to the same private web environment for students, staff and parents of a school, college or university.
A VLE is accessed remotely and requires secure credentials to access its resources. It will typically contain administrative and teaching resources that can be accessed at any time from anywhere and is now considered essential to the good functioning of any educational institution. Few VLEs achieve a truly virtual learning environment at present but this may well be a component of these platforms in the near future. For this reason, some practitioners prefer the term learning network over VLE.
Comments welcomed on what VLE means to you.
January 18th, 2012 at 22:18:54
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