The Auricle

The recent CETIS article Blackboard, OUNL deal widens Learning Design access (29 April) commenting on the Blackboard/Open University of the Netherlands alliance to enable the latter's Learning Design 'player' to work transparently in a BB environment perhaps rings the changes to the thinking of mainstream VLE vendors.
It may only be me, but I've noticed a subtle change of emphasis in how erstwhile VLE vendors seem to be redefining themselves. I attended a conference where one vendor's presentation emphasized that they were not actually in the VLE business at all, but were, instead, in the learning management business. The nasty complex business of designing a multiplicity of structures and processes necessary to support a panoply of pedagogical models can therefore be delegated to web application extensions or plugins. Don't get me wrong I'm not necessarily grumbling about this, just highlighting the nascent transformation of virtual learning environments as we currently know them. We are beginning to enter a period where portals, personalization, services, components and learning object repositories (centralized and distributed) will inevitably undermine the concept of the VLE as we currently know it. The VLE vendors need to adapt to this change if they are to survive. Of course they need to maintain their income streams whilst they are doing so; but if there's as much going on outside as there is inside the MLE/VLE and a variety of different ways of achieving the same objective, then they have a significant challenge ahead of them.