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Does VLE=Vertical Learning Environment?

A Technology Guardian article a week or so ago had an interesting article ("Joined-up experiences") on horizontal vs. vertical integration in consumer entertainment technology.

A couple of things in particular resonated with some of the muddled thoughts I've been having about personal learning environments (PLEs).

For example: "vertical integration of online store, PC and portable player" got me thinking about monolithic VLEs (vertical learning environments?), all-in-one managed solutions for taking the choice away from students in the tools they use/environments they are provided with - or at least, encouraged to use under threat of no technical support otherwise, by their educational institution.

The alternative is so-called horizontal integration. For example, in Microsoft's rival Plays For Sure music system, users have a wide choice of MP3 players from different manufacturers, and a wide choice of online music stores, with Microsoft's PC-based Windows Media Player in between. Devices and music services are supposed to be interchangeable, but all must support Microsoft's digital rights management (DRM) if they want to copy-protect songs. However, this is openly licensed: anyone can play.

Hmm - so that's like a PLE as ad hoc learning environment, then, where users can use whatever tools they like as long as they conform to standard protocols and file formats (email, RSS/web feeds, word processor document formats, and so on).

Many of us have seen it all before. Data processing was like this from the start and the ultimate master of vertical integration was IBM. It did the research, designed and built the hardware, software and networking, told you what you needed, trained your staff and did the maintenance.
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These integrated systems suited customers who did not know much about computing. However, they soon discovered the catch: once you had bought a system, it was hard or perhaps impossible to switch to a different supplier.
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Soon, most of the big vertically integrated computer suppliers disappeared, to be replaced by big parts suppliers ... . Competition removed much of the vendor lock-in and brought prices crashing down.
Unfortunately, it also meant that if system suppliers were no longer doing the vertical integration, customers had to do it themselves. In effect, they had to assemble their own systems from parts that might never have been tested together. No wonder the result often resembled Frankenstein's monster.

So what's the trend in education?

In the horizontal approach, it is likely that the students will be largely responsible for personalising their own learning environment at quite a fundametal level (i.e. the technologicial level that underpins - or mediates - their online interactions). However, the perceived need to offer student technical support (or maybe the fear of losing control...?) means that Your University Academic Computing Service are likely to favour the VLE approach:

Vertical integration may now be making a comeback because consumers are facing the problems businesses faced before: integrating a wide array of products that they barely understand.

There is another reason why 'verticalisation' may be coming back into favour in the consumer technology sector. Towards the end of thre Guardian article, technology consultant Geoffrey Moore is quoted as saying:

"In the old vertical model, the goal was to maximise wallet share of customer by building everything yourself to a proprietary standard. However, if any part of your value chain misfired, you could not ship the system. This happened more and more as markets began to grow at very fast rates. By shifting to the horizontal model, customers could fulfil their demand via many more swappable elements, which in turn led to better overall systems availability. Today that ride is largely over and 'verticalisation' is coming back into vogue, but for a different reason. We are now in a consumer model where the razor/razor-blade effect dominates. If you do not design the razor, you do not get to sell your blade. Additionally, end-to-end design accountability creates better consumer experiences (witness Apple with iPod, iTunes, Apple stores, proprietary Macintoshes), and these - not price/performance advances - are becoming the determining factor in buying decisions."

I don't think this has a correlate (yet?) in education. However, if educational instiutions start to make a strong play for lifetime relationships with their students, and move towards lifelong learning products , it may do so.

For example, imagine an institution that provided students with 'after-care' services (course updates, keeping current/current awareness top-ups), lifelong up-selling of courses (you did XYZ 101, now how about 202, 303, ..., 808, or XYZ101R, etc.), or cross-selling of courses ('people who studied this also studied that'), there are opportuinities for locking students in to another sort of vertical market - that of lifelong professional development/educational updating.

PS Juliette White was thinking about personalisation too, last week, and appears not to be altogether convinced:

The thing that I find that is all to often forgotten is that personalisation is generally a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It can sometimes be a very powerful means of course and sometimes the end can of course be personalised too, but generally in education what we're generally trying to do is help people learn things that enhance their life or other people's lives in some way (and I know it's not very idealistic to admit it, but maybe we're sometimes also trying to do this in a reasonably cost-effective way).

That post actually follows on from a couple of related, earlier posts. One reconsidering the benefits of Small pieces, loosely joined, which looks at the very real, practical difficulties involved with gluing small pieces together when you want to provide anything like an integrated experience at the tools level ("Nobody has yet really managed to make a generic way of making tools work in pretty much any VLE"), as opposed to content syndication level ("I guess you can do the "small pieces loosely joined" thing if all you are doing is accessing data that's publicly available (RSS is great as are thing like the Google APIs), or if you're happy for things really not to be joined at all.") And an much earlier post (that I have yet to pick up on....) thinking around the topic of Where should your students blog?.

With OpenLearn going live any day now, it will be interesting to see what sort of community devleops around it, and whether networks establish themselves around the content using third party tools, or whether they opt to take up the community support provided within the OpenLearn environment itself.

Posted by ajh59 at October 21, 2006 11:10 PM