Looking at VLEs through students' eyes

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This blog is based on research conducted with Silvia Postu, Student Engagement Lead, and Rohit Lal, Academic Planning Manager, at Caspian School of Academics.

How do we know whether improvements to a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) are actually improving the student experience?

Engagement with a VLE is an important, but sometimes neglected, dimension of student engagement. Higher education students are typically expected to undertake a substantial proportion of their learning independently, beyond scheduled contact hours. A VLE is therefore central to supporting meaningful and effective self-directed study: students need to consult it regularly to access resources, understand expectations, prepare for taught sessions, complete assessment activity and navigate their studies.

Many of us spend considerable time reviewing VLEs from operational and technical perspectives. We think about structure, accessibility, consistency, navigation and compliance. These are all important. But they don't necessarily tell us how students experience these platforms, how they contribute to learning, or how closely they connect with what happens in the classroom.

These questions are becoming more important as students' digital learning practices change. The rapid growth of generative AI raises a further question: what distinctive value should an institutional VLE provide when students increasingly have access to powerful learning tools outside it?

Our recent work at Caspian to refresh aspects of our VLE provision – to improve consistency across programmes and make the overall student journey easier to navigate – has included a limited pilot audit which surveyed students and involved them in discussions as to their VLE use and what helps or hinders their engagement. Our engagement data itself has also offered an additional perspective on how students interact with different areas of the platform.

This exploratory research has demonstrated how, while a well-organised VLE site is valuable, effective digital learning is not simply about arranging information clearly. If a VLE site is treated merely as somewhere students go before or after a class to download material, it risks becoming a parallel system rather than an integral part of the learning experience.

Students generally described our VLE as a regular part of their studies, particularly for announcements, assessment information and learning resources. However, our conversations also highlighted areas for development. Students wanted educators to make greater use of the VLE within teaching sessions, reported some uncertainty about navigating programme-level spaces, and said they made relatively limited use of wider institutional resources such as the digital library.

Our research suggested that good technical design, while important, is only one part of creating an effective digital learning environment. The ways in which educators introduce, model and reinforce use of a VLE also matter.

This raises a broader question about the relationship between physical and digital teaching spaces. Should a VLE primarily sit alongside classroom teaching or form part of it? Virtual resources might be explored during a class, or teaching might explicitly model how students should use the digital environment for subsequent independent study. Effective VLE engagement may therefore depend as much on teaching practice as on platform design.

Our discussions also prompted wider reflection on the increasing role of generative AI within higher education. Many students described ChatGPT as part of their everyday study practices. If students can obtain explanations, summaries and study support almost instantly elsewhere, a VLE that functions mainly as a repository of documents may become progressively less compelling.

Its distinctive value may instead lie in what generic AI tools cannot readily provide: a structured pathway through a particular course, connections between classroom and independent learning, trusted and curated resources, academic expectations, assessment guidance and a sense of belonging to a learning community. Generative AI therefore does not necessarily make the VLE less relevant, but it may require us to be clearer about what the VLE is for.

Our discussions moved us beyond familiar questions as to whether students are using the VLE, towards more interesting questions about how the VLE supports learning, how teaching encourages its use and where it adds value alongside increasingly sophisticated external digital tools.

Our findings have underlined the idea that improving a VLE is not solely a technical exercise. It depends on collaboration between colleagues working in digital learning, student engagement, teaching and quality enhancement.

They've also encouraged us to ask how, rather than treating the VLE as an online space that sits alongside teaching, we might design teaching in which classroom activity, independent study and the digital environment form a more coherent whole.

That question becomes particularly important in an AI-impacted learning environment. Institutional VLEs are unlikely to compete with generative AI simply by providing more information. Their value may increasingly lie in providing the context, structure, trusted resources, academic guidance and connections to people and programmes that give learning its coherence.