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Integrating digital libraries and VLEs in higher & further education

Openness of VLE platforms

There are a number of issues regarding how open the VLE platforms are and thus the degree of customisation and interoperability that can be achieved or should be attempted. There is some evidence from the Linker projects that the major VLE vendors (WebCT, Blackboard) are more open in their approach than previously, and there is now a body of experience in developing, for example, open source plug-ins (as, for example, in the Blackboard Building Blocks community). However, it is one thing to develop additional features and to customize a commercial product within an experimental setting. It is quite another to demonstrate the sustainability of this approach. Two key questions to consider are:

• How feasible is it to customise the VLE?
• How desirable is it, long-term, to do so?

Points for attention include:

• Local customisations can be affected when commercial suppliers roll out major upgrades to their products.
• The institution must be capable of supporting the extra maintenance load that local customization imposes.
• Project-based solutions may not be scalable across HE/FE especially if 'local' solutions have been adopted. For example of problems that can arise, customizations are rarely as broadly tested against different product versions as their commercial equivalents. However, it may be noted that these issues will in part be considered through JISC's introduction of a central source of open source expertise.
• One advantage of the 'home grown' VLE is that it permits better access to the VLE technical specifications than a commercial product would allow - but at the risk of costs in long-term maintenance.

Additional Resources

Forthcoming..... contributions gratefully received