INTRODUCTION
The following pages offer a report on a TechDis funded study, ‘Making Critical Studies Happen in the VLE’ at York St John University. Where possible, using the web environment, the report provides various hyperlinks, archives key documents and illustrates learning materials using short video clips.
The University’s Collaborating for Creativity, Centre for Excellent in Teaching and Learning (C4C CETL), was awarded test-bed research funds from the JISC advisory service TechDis to undertake a comparative study of the experiences of staff and students using the virtual learning environment (VLE) Blackboard in the Faculty of Arts on the BA Media and BA Performance (Music) programmes. The investigation was conducted over the academic year 2007/08 and accrued data from a range of qualitative and quantitative sources.
An overview of the empirical data is presented here and a conceptual discussion raised over the term Blended Learning, which serves to help frame matters raised through both the investigation and the staff’s development of Blackboard learning materials. A key argument of the report is that our understanding of what learning is (and how learning genuinely takes places) throws up a number of variations, which make securing ‘effective’ learning a perennial difficulty. Making critical studies 'happen' in the VLE proves to be a much more elusive phenomenon than one might hope. However, there are a number of practical things – in terms of instructional delivery – that can be improved. A distinctive finding of the project is that students are extremely vocal about teaching delivery and so, whilst we should not take our eye off understanding and improving student learning, there is a lot that can be achieved to improve how students feel about the opportunities of learning they are afforded.
