History of VLEs

History of VLEs: LMO Week 1 Reading
Real Learning Environment takes place when real people meet at a location and teaching and learning take place. Real people also process their registration and mark their progress through the course of learning. A Virtual Learning Environment is such where learning takes place through the intermediary of a computers over time and space.

A cursory look at the development of VLEs shows involvement many countries as if there was a race to discover it, yet these countries were all in the Western Hemisphere namely North America, Europe and Australia. China India and other 3rd world countries were absent.
This development spans the years 1990 to 1999 as observed in Wikipedia. Three development stages can be extracted form history of VLEs.

Early Beginning: 1990 -1993 From Solo Learning to Collaborative Learning

The Athena Project of MIT had assembled vendors of software to work together. Features of this project included email, printing, conferencing online consulting, online teaching assistant, security system etc Online learning systems continued to evolve until in 1993 XT10001 Renewable Energy did an experimental course that developed ‘techniques for collaborative and resource-based online learning at a distance.’

More Developments: 1994-1996 Administration and Real- Time classroom Instructions Evolve
For example SUNNY Learning Network was able to hire traditional faculty members who created online courses and had them delivered to students homes via personal computer. Besides European countries became more active like as in JANUS project delivered courses across Europe. Besides some third world countries like Africa and India are reached with courses through iEARN pioneered by Tufts University.1994 marked the first gathering of online educators in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. Pardner introduced the first interactive course over the internet and over a million hits were registered in a period of 3 months.
WebCT from University of British Columbia, Canada entered the online market and had been popular since then. WebTeach came on board with an asynchronous approach to teaching and learning, much similar to a traditional classroom.




Current Improvements: 1998 to 2000 More Universities Get Involved

Digitalbrain came on in UK. It was designed after a centrist approach that encourages user experimentation. Like I said at the subtopic, many universities came. Not be outdone by the Open University in the UK , University of Hagen Online introduced their online system that comes nearly to match the full functions of a university. WebDAV evolved a standard for uploading of documents. During this period , UCLA School of Dentistry developed an internet authoring tool that help students do simulation modules for diagnosis and treatment planning for patients.



References
Wikipedia-History of Virtual learning retrieved 07/20/2010