AVA: Understand what a Virtual Learning Environment is.

Understanding what a VLE - Virtual Learning Environment is, is essential for you who are developing or intend to develop a project in distance education.

In this article, you will understand:

• What is VLE?
• What are the main features?

With this information, you can make the best choice of a virtual learning environment for your corporate training or online courses.

What is VLE?

As its name implies, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is the place on the web where online training or courses are developed and which retains all (or almost all) of the specific features of a face-to-face classroom.

To put it more succinctly, it's a structured environment for interaction between students, pupils and teachers, through the sharing of materials used for distance learning.

Imagine that the whole process of learning through face-to-face classes, where the student can have direct contact with the teacher and interact with students, had to be transferred to online teaching.

This is precisely the main function of a VLE - Virtual Learning Environment.

In addition, this environment is generally made up of integrated tools for creating and developing engaging learning content.

The use of video lessons is one of these possibilities for engaging students more. To do this, the LMS (Learning Management System) platform needs to be able to support this functionality.

What are the main features of a VLE?

Here we will list the main functionalities that a distance learning platform should have so that the virtual learning environment can provide both the student and the teacher with an adequate structure for the development of the training or online course.

Content structure

More and more, distance education is improving so that online training or courses engage students more and more.

As a way of making this happen, the distance education platform should allow the tutor/teacher to demonstrate the content in multi-format, i.e. allowing the use of videos, images, texts, audios, links and PDFs to further enrich the lessons.

In addition, the virtual learning environment can be used to apply assessments of the content developed.

Follow-up reports

Another important feature is an area that contains information about the course and student performance.

Students' performance is not only checked by assessment results.

The progress of the training or online course can also be monitored through the reports provided by the e-learning platform used.

Understanding how the course is developing, how many students have enrolled, how many have completed the training or online courses or at what point they dropped out is important information so that the content can be adjusted according to the information identified in the reports.

Don't limit content

Some platforms limit content, but for distance education it is essential that the insertion of content is unlimited.

How can you enrich training or online courses, engage students and provide quality education by limiting the content of training or online courses?

Student Management

Allow your students to easily enroll in training or online courses, create classes.

The manager of the training or online course needs to have full control of student information.

Communication Center

This is also one of the most important features, because it is through communication with the student that the teacher will be able to ask questions, inform of changes to content, in short, any type of communication that must be made for the training or online course to be successful.

There are some effective ways of communicating properly:

E-mails

Make it possible to communicate by e-mail, where students will be directly notified of possible changes. Personalized contact between student and teacher can also be made by e-mail.

Discussion forum

Place where discussions about the content are promoted, provide greater engagement and interaction between students through the discussion forum in your online course or training.

This is where questions are stored and can be better explained by teachers or tutors.

In addition, the student has the perception of being assisted.

Social Learning

Present in LXP (Learning Experience Platform) platforms, social learning is a trend in distance learning, as it allows students to also be protagonists by indicating complementary content.

In this way, through a social network integrated into the training or online course, there is greater engagement, absorption of content and the possibility of networking among course participants.

In short, you now have the possibility of choosing the best virtual learning environment for your training or online courses.

Understanding what a VLE - Virtual Learning Environment - is, its function and main features, will give you a better basis for identifying an ODL platform that can add value to your learning content.

To help you, Hotscool lets you get to know the platform and try it out for free.