Editorial: The #VLE Ireland project

A decade after Martin Weller’s proclamation that ‘The VLE/LMS Is Dead’ (2007) was met with widespread acclaim and debate, virtual learning environments (VLEs) remain pervasive in most higher education institutions (HEIs) including those in Ireland. Indeed, some institutions here are currently in the midst of large-scale VLE projects, evaluating existing platforms and investing heavily in their new VLE choice1. Despite the arrival of numerous social media platforms and the smartphone era, use of these centrally supported platforms to facilitate technology-enhanced learning is very much alive. For ten years, a multi-institutional group of educational developers in Ireland has collaborated to gather student and teaching staff views on the use of VLEs across Irish higher education. In this Special Issue of the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, we present findings and analysis of this work. The body of work we share with you contributes to the debate around the VLE’s state of health with a large amount of evidence and our experience at the coalface of technology-enhanced learning. We have sought an appropriate medium to communicate the body of work as a sequence, allowing freedom to present results but also to discuss analysis and identify key trends and themes. In the papers presented here, we aim to do exactly this by cross-referencing the different articles and taking full advantage of IJTEL’s open access format whereby readers can find out more about any of the related research. We are very grateful to the Editorial Committee of IJTEL for the opportunity to do this through a Special Issue. The papers presented here focus on the use of the VLE by students and teaching staff in Irish HEIs. For our purposes, VLE refers to the institutional web-based systems used to support teaching in most HEIs. These systems (sometimes called LMS or learning management systems) generally offer online access to course materials, discussion boards, and online assessment tools. In this research, a survey of students has been undertaken in 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015 using a common set of questions. The institutions which have participated thus far represent a diversity of organizational histories and VLE systems, and results to date include the responses of more than 23,000 students. More recently, a staff version of the survey has been developed and piloted in some of the participating institutions.