Rich and personal revisited: translating ambitions for an institutional personal learning environment into a reality

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Description/Abstract

Is it possible to create an institutional personal learning environment? This question has triggered considerable debate amongst those concerned with implementing learning and teaching technologies within higher education, Rapid technological change is necessarily accompanied by matched evolution of individual practice amongst users. At universities, students arrive with a mix of sophisticated and naïve approaches to using technology in everyday life which can be shaped and harnessed to support learning. To respond to the changing capabilities and demands of available technology, the University of Southampton designed and is implementing a rich holistic learning environment radically different from the VLEs which gained widespread usage since the late 1990s. In the initial scoping of the environment, explanations of the proposed system were qualified: “its more than a system, it’s a mind-set”. The suggestion is that the power and value of the institutional personal learning environment resides in the ‘technology affordances’ which enable users to customise and personalise the system in a socially useful and educationally constructive manner. There are many different ways to remove the barriers to learning, some of which are not necessarily directly ‘educational’ or ‘instructional’. This paper considers the foundations and emergence of personal learning environments and the interplay of ambitions and requirements needed to support learning in a university context. It goes on to make a case for the creation of a seemingly paradoxical embodiment – an “Institutional Personal Learning Environment (iPLE). It considers emerging understandings of the role of ‘digital literacies’ and their associated challenges to universities - the role and challenges of ‘scholarly literacies in a digital age’. Presenting a case study of implementing the Southampton Learning Environment, this paper analyses the underlying rationale of the emerging system. It evaluates the architecture of the system to explain how it provides an institutional personal learning environment. It presents and reviews the first cycle implementation (due to go live in August 2011) from a pedagogic perspective assessing the technology affordances of the system. Finally it re-evaluates the evidence to consider whether it has indeed been possible to create an institutional learning environment that is also a personal learning environment.