A managed learning environment (MLE), virtual learning environment (VLE) or Learning Management System (LMS) is a software system designed to facilitate management and student experience in e-learning.
An MLE should make it possible for a course designer to present to students, through a single, consistent, and intuitive interface, all the components required for a course of education or training. Although logically it is not a requirement, in practice MLEs always make extensive use of computers and the Internet. An MLE should implement all the following elenents:
- The syllabus for the course
- Administrative information including the location of sessions, details of pre-requisites and co-requisites, credit information, and how to get help
- A noticeboard for uptodate course information
- Student registration and tracking facilities, if necessary with payment options
- Basic teaching materials. These may be the complete content of the course, if the MLE is being used in a distance learning context, or copies of visual aids used in lectures or other classes where it is being used to support a campus-based course.
- Additional resources, including reading materials, and links to outside resources in libraries and on the Internet.
- Self-assessment quizzes which can be scored automatically
- Formal assessment procedures
- Electronic communication support including e-mail, threaded discussions and a chat room, with or without a moderator
- Differential access rights for instructors and students
- Production of documentation and statistics on the course in the format required for institutional administration and quality control
- All these facilities should be capable of being hyperlinked together
- Easy authoring tools for creating the necessary documents including the insertion of hyperlinks - though it is acceptable (arguably, preferable) for the MLE to be designed so that standard word processors or other office software can be used for authoring.
In addition, the MLE should be capable of supporting numerous courses, so that students and instructors in a given insititution (and, indeed, across institutions) experience a consistent interface when moving from one course to another.
There are a number of commercial MLE software packages available, including BlackBoard, WebCT and Lotus LearningSpace. There are also open source or other freeware solutions available. The commercial solutions provide all or nearly all the facilities above, though the user interface is not smooth in all cases for all tasks.
A major problem with solutions available at the start of 2004 is that there is often no easy way of transferring a course site from one package to another, so that the considerable investment in time required to fit a course to one MLE package is likely to be wasted if an institution changes its MLE supplier, if an instructor moves from one institution to another that uses a different MLE, or if institutions using different MLEs wish to collaborate. Some organisations have addressed this issue by defining standards for learning objects, such as the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) used by the US Department of Defense.
Despite this well-recognised problem, universities and other institutions of higher education are increasingly turning to MLEs in order to:
- economise on the time of teaching staff, especially when they are also involved in research and administration. The extent of the economy over traditional "talk-and-chalk" teaching is not yet clear, but using an MLE almost certainly absorbs less instructor time (and requires less expertise, while producing a more professional result) than creating a home-grown website for a course.
- provide a service for students who increasingly look to the internet as the natural medium for finding information and resources.
- ensure that quality control requirements are met by providing a standard vehicle for collecting the required information
- facilitate the integration of distance and campus-based learning. or of learning on different campuses.
