and many thanks to him for doing that.

Following on from my last post, I thought it might be useful to get a sense of who was using what Virtual Learning Environment, (VLE) so I had a little play with Matt’s data, concentrating on UK Higher Education institutions only. (The full dataset does include some overseas institutions)  It seems that Blackboard is still the lead VLE in most UK Higher Education institutions. 

Apart from Blackboard and Moodle, no VLE is used by more than one institution. (The “other VLE users” in this graph use either something they developed in house, or other commercial products). Given the constant complaints about the high cost of Blackboard, something else I thought I might glean from Matt’s data was how many institutions are changing from one VLE to another (or planning to change – the spreadsheet simply comments on some individual cases, so it’s hard to see how far a change is confirmed). In effect, that means changing from Blackboard to Moodle, since as far as I can tell from the data no-one is planning to change to Blackboard from either Moodle, or one of the stand alone VLEs. Here are the figures.

I was quite surprised that relatively few institutions were planning a change, most preferring to upgrade their existing VLE. There are significantly new versions of both Blackboard and Moodle this year, so this would appear to have been a good opportunity to change, but most seem to have contented themselves with upgrading what they already have. (Also, the phrase “doing nothing” in the chart legend is a bit misleading, since many of the Blackboard users upgraded last year.) Of course, it may be that institutions are contractually tied to Blackboard, which is preventing them from changing until the contract expires. It would  be interesting to repeat this exercise over the next couple of years and see if there are any changes to this pattern.