What is a Virtual Learning Environment

Greetings friends. As we have already witnessed, the pandemic by covid-19 has had more repercussions than a large number of infected people and closed public places; if you remember, along with restaurants and shopping malls, schools and universities were the first to close their doors, so in the educational field, millions of students had to suspend or reschedule their studies worldwide,according to statistics, at the beginning of the pandemic 1700 million students of all ages had to interrupt their education, representing almost 90% of the world total.

Virtual Learning Environments helped to prevent education from being disrupted. Image credit: pxhere.com.

But education was not going to let it be stopped, and this global context was the trigger for the accelerated growth of new teaching schemes in digital media. In my university only a few careers had virtual environments for their subjects, and they were very little used by conventional teachers, then many had to use the potential of these tools, and it is already an institutional line that at the end of this semester all subjects must have their Virtual Learning Environment.

And what is a Virtual Learning Environment?

A Virtual Learning Environment, also known as a VLE, is an Internet platform used to manage, distribute and carry out monitoring and evaluation activities of the teaching and learning process. By means of a software generally known as virtual space or virtual platform, it provides digital, distal and multi-chronic support and advice to the study options designed by the educational institutions.

So, it is a virtual environment designed exclusively to help teachers manage study materials that can be both complementary to a conventional course and to fully online courses. And given its characteristics, it offers flexibility to its users to access it from anywhere and at any time. It is also the construction of a collaborative workspace for the dissemination of knowledge based on active participation, which is promoted through multidirectional communication, teacher-student, student-teacher and students among themselves.

The main objective of this space is to provide the student with a classroom without walls, placing on the computer screen a different learning experience where it is possible to: perform scheduled tasks, exchange ideas, access digitized study materials and receive proper support, from the comfort of your home or office.

Virtual environments facilitate education at any time and place. Image credit: pixabay.com.

For the same reason, it is not a matter of condensing the content of a subject in a text that can be read on a computer monitor; it is essential that those who participate in the design of these spaces should know all the technological resources available to them, as well as their advantages and limitations in order to relate them to the content and teaching strategies. Since an integration of media such as text, images, animations and video will not make any sense without the pedagogical dimensions that only the teacher can give them.

What does a VLE bring to us?

Virtual learning environments favor the digital inclusion of students, making classes more dynamic by stimulating blended and autonomous education, which they can access anytime, anywhere. It also allows them to share data and produce knowledge collectively, broadening their educational experience and stimulating cooperation among peers.

On the other hand, for teachers it facilitates a cooperative, communication-oriented environment in which to pose projects and problems. It is not like the classroom where only one group can raise its hand to speak, it is necessary for all participants to interact.

It serves as a support for multidisciplinary pedagogical practices, by means of links it is possible to disseminate a wide variety of information to a large number of people. The system can also be used to store information, which can be updated at any time and distributed immediately.

In the current context, many are discovering the advantages of online education, considering it as a strong alternative for education, not because of the current circumstances that have forced its implementation, but because of the wide coverage and offers in different modalities that an institution can offer, in addition to strengthening the conventional education system.

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Well friends, I hope you enjoyed the reading and have become familiar with the term, another time I will present the elements that make up a VLE. Thanks for reading, see you next time.

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