Well not at many institutions, including mine. I am presently taking an online course on preparing online courses and last week there has been robust discussion about learning environments. The main discussion was on the affordances of using discussions in VLEs and much was said about the additional tools that enable the management of discussions such as tracking, conditional release, summarising, archiving and the integration within learning and teaching. There were, also, some comments about VLE's being perceived as learning space where as other resources e.g. Facebook is seen as social space. I do think that these issues are worth of consideration but I do think that VLE vendors could do some work on interface design to make tools like discussions less clunky. The debate that was held on this course was done using a voicetool that was integrated into the discussion forum which was a new one for me and I really enjoyed using it, it was good to put a voice to a name. Although, I am aware that considerations with respect to accessibility have to be addressed and I did a whole masters course without to speaking to my fellow participants, it did help me to focus on my argument and the arguments of others.
Until we can fully integrate tools in the cloud with student management systems for large institutions I think the VLE will still remain a feature for some time. However, there are tools out there that can compliment the existing tools that are in institutional VLEs and will help to enhance the student experience, for example, we were referred to this site http://ltdufreeware.wordpress.com/ . Furthermore, institutions still have a challenge to skill-up staff using the most basic of tools in the average VLE and to get them thinking about new approaches to learning and teaching that can integrate technology, within the context of pressure to make full use of a system that has demanded a considerable amount of resources to maintain.
