designing a VLE template for quality, regulation and student success. – David Hopkins / Education & Leadership

When we started developing a new Blackboard module template, the obvious direction was to consider consistency, usability and the student experience.

Where should students expect to find their assessment information? How should learning materials be organised? What should appear at the start of every module? How do we encourage staff to use and comply with the template? How much consistency should there be between modules, courses and subject areas, and how much flexibility should academics retain to structure learning in ways appropriate to their discipline?

These are important questions, but there was another question we did not always articulate explicitly: what responsibility does an institution have for the digital environments in which its students are expected to learn?

This becomes particularly interesting when considered against the Office for Students (OfS) conditions of registration for quality and standards:

None of these conditions says that a university MUST have a VLE template, but that does not mean the VLE, or the decisions we make about its design, are separate from them.

One of the principles was that students should not have to learn how to navigate every module before they can start learning the subject. There will always be differences between disciplines, levels of study and teaching approaches, as there should be, but there are also things students should reasonably expect to find in predictable places:

• The welcome message is in the same place in each module they study, and that there IS a welcome message.
• Weekly captured content and/or recorded seminars are located in the relevant week’s folder.
• A consistent naming convention for uploaded documents, with materials stored in the folder for the week in which they are needed.
• Want to find the assessment brief and submission point? Every module, the same place, without fail. The assessment brief is also uniformly applied; the students can find information about the word count, deadlines, mitigating circumstances process, referencing, etc.

The intention was not to standardise teaching. It was to reduce unnecessary inconsistency around teaching. That distinction becomes more important as the template develops and evolves, making sure the associated Module Checklist is kept up to date with changes too. Too little structure leaves students navigating potentially very different digital experiences across their course, whereas too much structure risks imposing a model of teaching that may not suit the subject, academic or learner.

The answer, for me, was somewhere in the idea of thoughtful defaults: establish an institutional expectation for the things that benefit from consistency, but leave sufficient space for academics to design the learning experience their students and subjects need.

Looking at this through the lens of the different OfS ‘B’ conditions, the template starts to become more than a question of usability and consistency. If an institution is expected to provide a coherent and effectively delivered academic experience, then the digital environment through which a significant proportion of that experience is organised and delivered also has a part to play.

A template cannot make a course coherent. It cannot ensure educational challenge or determine whether the curriculum is current. What it can do is provide an environment that supports those things rather than creating unnecessary barriers around them.

The relationship with B2 is perhaps even clearer; B2 defines the use of resources explicitly, including digital learning resources and their effective deployment to meet the needs of students. Its definition of support also includes helping students make effective use of digital learning.

Depending on how your use of the VLE is already set up, this could change the way you might think about the VLE itself. It is not meant to be somewhere academics simply upload content and then leave until the next time. It forms part of the ecosystem through which students access resources and support their learning.

This was something I’ve encountered before; at LearningMate, working across large-scale online postgraduate provision, conversations about the digital learning experience frequently went beyond the quality of an individual piece of content. We had to think about the wider ecosystem in which students encountered that content, the consistency of their experience across modules and programmes, and how different technologies and services worked together. At scale, good individual learning design is not enough if the surrounding environment makes learning unnecessarily difficult.

The module template should never be considered a one-off exercise. Following implementation, stakeholders need to be asked about their experience of using it, and the responses have the power to tell you where consistency helps, but also where the design or implementation needs more attention. Among the issues identified during this process were the need for clearer weekly expectations, stronger assessment signposting, better consideration of students joining or engaging at different points, the placement of captured content, and opportunities to simplify navigation further. Feedback mattered because there is a significant difference between designing something we believe works for students and establishing whether it actually does.

Condition B2 specifically includes opportunities for students to contribute to the development of their academic experience. Seen in that context, student evaluation of the template was not simply a satisfaction survey or usability exercise; it was part of an ongoing process of understanding whether the digital environment supported students and changing it where the evidence suggested it could do better.

Condition B3, however, requires a little more caution. It would be easy to claim that a better VLE template can influence continuation, completion or progression. I don’t think we can make that connection: students leave courses, struggle or achieve poorer outcomes for complex reasons. Changing the structure of their online content cannot solve those problems, and we should be wary of presenting technology as though it can.

What we can ask is whether the digital environment introduces avoidable barriers to learning. If students regularly struggle to find assessment information, cannot work out what they are supposed to do during a particular week, encounter significantly different structures between modules, or cannot easily locate the resources they need, those are points of friction we have some ability to remove. A VLE template cannot deliver positive student outcomes. It can, however, help ensure the digital environment is not unnecessarily working against them. That is an important distinction.

The same applies to condition B4. The module template cannot make an assessment valid or reliable. Those decisions sit within curriculum design, academic judgement, assessment strategy and institutional quality processes. But once an assessment has been designed, students still need to understand what is expected of them, find the relevant information and guidance, locate the submission point and subsequently access feedback.

The digital environment sits between the design of assessment and the student’s experience of it. A well-designed VLE cannot make a poorly designed assessment ‘good’, but a poorly designed VLE can make a good assessment unnecessarily difficult for students to find or understand.

Decisions around the technology and its implementation increasingly sit within a much wider institutional context than learning technology alone. Decisions about templates, platforms, integrations, accessibility, assessment workflows, learning resources and even navigation can overlap with responsibilities for quality, student outcomes, inclusion, data, regulation and institutional risk.

The OfS itself considers student experience and outcomes data as part of the regulatory intelligence it uses when considering potential concerns about quality. Its quality assessments consider compliance with B1, B2 and B4, while B3 is considered through the separate student outcomes regime.

The template itself is relatively simple. The thinking behind it shouldn’t be.

Photo by Ana Petrenko on Unsplash

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