learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Nabil Ben Abdallah and Françoise Poyet
objectives through a favorable activity. VLE offers a set of integrated functionalities to complete the
requirements of various learning situations. Four groups of functionalities are usually mentioned:
course management (design, maintenance, and diffusion), tracking learning, technical administration
(set-up, security, integration, maintenance) and learner interface (offering communication and
collective work tools, and a customizable space). Depending on the learning objectives, a VLE must
also propose expanded parameterization facilities to create more or less elaborate learning situations.
eLearning platforms such as Blackboard, Moodle, Claroline, and others are examples of VLE (either
proprietary or free software).
From a technical point of some view, a VLE integrates various types of software tools to support the
various functionalities mentioned in the preceding paragraph. For examples we have: a database
management server, a web server, a mail server, a file server. These servers are developed with
technologies of various origins, mostly meeting with the requirements of various standards. Among
these technologies, those of the Internet have had considerable repercussions on the design of VLEs.
In addition to the technical possibility of having applications interconnected and making use of
resources coming from different sites, collaborative or co-operative activities and as well as human
interaction seem to be favored thanks to tools enabling communication, sharing and the production of
documents.
The use of a VLE encourages written communication and, except with the synchronous
communication tools, makes the learner’s participation less improvised because he has a certain
amount of time for consideration and easy access to resources enabling him to enrich his ideas and
to pursue his thinking. In short, a learning situation built around a VLE bears little resemblance to a
conventional class where student is constantly under a "social pressure" emerging from the activity of
the other students and the requirements of the teacher. The metaphors (class, group, office, etc.)
used in the design of VLEs (Falconer 2008) should not allow us to forget that this is above all a
computer system having features which are not those of a learning device built around a
conventional class.
In order to understand these characteristics and thus expand our specific acception of VLEs beyond
the principle integrating functional and technological aspects, we quote here Dillenbourg and his
colleagues (Dillenbourg 2002) who think that VLEs can be identified through six characteristics : 1) A
virtual learning environment is a designed information space 2) A virtual learning environment is a
social space 3) The virtual space is explicitly represented 4) Students are not only active, but also
actors 5) Virtual learning environments integrate heterogeneous technologies and multiple
pedagogical approaches 6) Most virtual environments overlap with physical environments.
It is obvious that a given VLE may not verify all these characteristics, the objective here is to have a
comprehensive understanding of roles that a VLE can play in learning activities. The information
space being composed, among other things, of the courses and of all the information resources that
enrich and complement them must be sufficiently structured and organized so that it can be suitably
exploited in learning activities. Beyond this information space, a social environment which organizes
and structures the various interactions (learner to learner, learner to teacher, etc.) which are essential
to any form of learning activity, is built up. The learning environment can be based on more or less
sophisticated interfaces going from simple text interfaces to graphical user interfaces in 3D. Whatever
the interface used, it must be sufficiently explicit so that learners can achieve the proposed learning.
Although VLEs are often associated with distance learning because they are essentially Web-based
applications, they are also widely used as a support for classroom teaching. Integration within a VLE
of several software tools makes the adaptation of various approaches possible. For example,
teachers can request individual or collective work from the students and decide to intervene or not in
the various phases of the completion of this work. The package of software tools (exerciser, wiki, blog,
chat ...) offered by a VLE makes it possible to adopt one or the other approach.
All these characteristics are important to set up a learning situation with precise objectives. Beyond
the impact which these VLE can have on the learning outcome, it is the learner's statute which
changes: from a passive learner who merely memorizes some patterns or knowledges which are
passed on to him, we will end up with a learner who is not only active but who is also an actor of his
own learning. He will use and produce information, and he will continuous interaction with learning
environment. According to Dillenbourg (Dillenbourg 2002, p.7) "… the notion of a learning activity in
virtual learning environments refers to something richer than in individual courseware, closer to the
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